Barcelona

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Antic Hospital de la Santa Creu & La Capella

C/Carme 47-C/Hospital 56

There was a hospital on this site as early as 1024, but in the 15th century it expanded to centralise all the city’s hospitals and sanatoriums. By the 1920s it was hopelessly overstretched and its medical facilities moved uptown to the Hospital Sant Pau. One of the last patients was Gaudí, who died here in 1926; it was also here that Picasso painted one of his first important pictures, Dead Woman (1903).

The buildings combine a 15th-century Gothic core with baroque and classical additions. They’re now given over to cultural institutions, among them Catalonia’s main library. Highlights include a neo-classical lecture theatre complete with revolving marble dissection table, and the entrance hall of the Casa de Convalescència, tiled with lovely baroque ceramic murals telling the story of Sant Pau (St Paul); one features an artery-squirting decapitation scene. La Capella, the hospital chapel, was rescued from a sad fate as a warehouse and sensitively converted to an exhibition space for contemporary art. The beautifully shady colonnaded courtyard is a popular spot for reading or eating lunch.

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