Unraveling Colònia Güell: Barcelona’s Forgotten Modernist Village
Journey through the utopian textile colony that Eusebi Güell built for his workers
The R5 commuter train rattled out of Plaça d’Espanya, bound for destinations most travellers know only from the flip side of a metro map. Montserrat pilgrims pressed against the opposite windows, but I stepped off early—at Santa Coloma de Cervelló—onto a quiet platform that hummed with pine resin and late-morning heat. One narrow lane curled downhill, and with every crunch of gravel underfoot I felt the noise of Barcelona fall away as though someone had turned down the volume knob of the world.
I had come to Colònia Güell before, but like nearly everyone else, I had been drawn straight to Gaudí’s crypt. That day had been a revelation in stone and colour, yet something in the village itself had tugged at me—brick façades glimpsed between lime trees, a rusting water tower that looked like a crown half-buried in the earth. I ignored the path to the famous church and wandered instead into the living warp and weft of the old textile colony.
The first building to greet me was squat and practical: the former cellars of the cooperative, finished in 1920, once cool enough to protect wine, coal, and pork fat from the blunt Spanish sun. Inside, brick pillars still rose like pale trunks, their arches stitched together with Catalan vaults, and the air smelled faintly of damp cork even though the barrels had been gone for half a century. From a cracked doorway, a caretaker waved, eager to rehearse the village’s best lore: on crisp October evenings, he said, people swear they can catch a whiff of fermenting grape where no grapes have fermented in decades.
Across the narrow street stood the consumption cooperative, dated 1900. The façade carried the lightness of Modernisme—arches lifted by stone pilasters, ironwork scrolled like vines—and yet its heart had always been stubbornly egalitarian. In its heyday, seven hundred and fifty card-carrying members bought rice, soap, and bright Valencian tomatoes here at cost, paying only after the factory whistle announced Friday wages. A black-and-white photograph inside the foyer showed women clutching paper scrip printed with a tiny industrious ant, the cooperative’s emblem, proof that the colony had minted its own economy in cardboard and uncomplicated trust.
I followed a lane that opened onto Plaça Anselm Clavé and halted beneath a balcony guarded by a wrought-iron bat. Emblem of the Güell family, the bat looked ready to unfold its wings at dusk. This had been the secretary’s house, later the village infirmary, and townsfolk still called it the courthouse because every grievance—from late rents to bicycle scuffles—once climbed its steps for judgment. The archivist’s register, I learned, catalogued a single jail cell: a stone storeroom with one barred slit and a wood-wormed bench. The crime rate had never justified enlarging it. Life in a company town, for all its paternal strictures, left little room for mischief.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to TravelEssayist.com to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.