Gaudí's home town: Reus and its modernista streets: a self-guided walk
By Alleytale
Gaudí's baptism church, the Gaudí Centre and the modernista core of Reus
Reus has no building designed by Gaudí. What it has is a museum about him and the modernista houses of his colleagues Domènech i Montaner and Pere Caselles, built for merchants, mill owners, a notary and a schoolteacher, and a dispensary by his disciple Joan Rubió.
The stops
Gaudí was baptised in this church on 26 June 1852, the day after his birth. The record of the baptism survives and is not disputed, unlike his exact birthplace, which sources place in either Reus or nearby Riudoms. The late Gothic church, begun in 1512 and opened to the public for good in 1569, has a 62-metre hexagonal bell tower, and a chapel inside keeps the heart of the Reus-born painter Marià Fortuny.
Photo: Pitxiquin — CC BY-SA 4.0 Lluís Domènech i Montaner designed this house on Plaça del Mercadal, built between 1901 and 1908 for the textile merchant Joaquim Navàs, who according to Catalan Wikipedia had been a childhood playmate of Gaudí. It held his shop and his home, and it keeps its decoration and furniture much as they were made, including furniture designed by Gaspar Homar. A bomb that fell on the neighbouring house on 26 March 1938, during the Civil War, destroyed its corner tower and the stepped gable of the main façade.
Photo: Pitxiquin — CC BY-SA 4.0 This biographical museum and interpretation centre opened in 2007 on Plaça del Mercadal, in a renovated former bank building. Its first floor, called Gaudí and Reus, shows his drafts and documents and information about his birthplace, and the third floor has an audiovisual show and models of his best-known works. Wikipedia's article on Reus notes that no building in the city was designed by Gaudí, and that its modernista buildings are by colleagues of his such as Lluís Domènech i Montaner and Pere Caselles.
Photo: Enfo — CC BY-SA 3.0 This house on Carrer de Monterols is a single bay wide, yet Pere Caselles gave it exposed brick, a glazed ceramic plinth and trencadís, the broken-tile mosaic that Gaudí used on the façade of the Casa Batlló. Of all his works it is the one where ceramics stand out most, and the plans in Reus's historical archive are dated 1904, for the schoolteacher Sixto Laguna. Two blue trencadís buttons beside the first-floor balcony door frame the owner's initials with big flowers in relief, and four pinnacles hold helical plates that serve as the roof-terrace railing.
Photo: Enfo — CC BY-SA 3.0 Reus's central square has carried the name of the Reus-born general Joan Prim since 1882. Before that it was called Plaça de les Monges, after a Carmelite convent that covered much of it until the nuns were finally expelled in 1868 and the building was pulled down. The bronze equestrian statue of Prim by Lluís Puiggener took its place early in 1893 after years of political and artistic rows, and its official inauguration never took place.
Photo: Zarateman — CC BY-SA 3.0 This theatre opened on 16 November 1882, built so that Reus, then the second city of Catalonia, had a theatre to match those of other large cities, and it is named for the Reus-born painter Marià Fortuny. For the opening night the curtain reproduced Fortuny's painting La papallona, and the evening's opera was Faust. The rooms of the society El Círcol in the same building keep modernist decoration largely designed by Lluís Domènech i Montaner.
Photo: Santi Gomà — CC BY-SA 3.0 Josep de Bofarull, a merchant who grew rich and was ennobled by Charles III in 1760, had this palace built in the 1770s, designed by his brother, the architect Francesc Bofarull. The late Baroque doorway has two atlas figures holding up capitals, two lions and the family's coat of arms, and inside, the great hall carries paintings of 1788 by Pere Pau Montaña with allegories of Charles III and Charles IV. The palace is also known as L'Olimpo and as Els Ploms, names that come from clubs that had their seat here.
Photo: Pitxiquin — CC BY-SA 4.0 Finished in 1902 for the Iglesias Òdena brothers, owners of the cotton mill popularly known as the Vapor Vell, this neo-Gothic house is attributed to the architect Pere Caselles, though the plans are signed by Pau Monguió. Look up at the corbels of the third floor, where the faces include a Christian king, an Arab and a Chinese man, and at the grotesque faces on the first-floor drip mouldings. Locals call it cal Punyed after the pharmacy that Artur Punyed opened on the ground floor in 1908.
Photo: Zarateman — CC0 Pere Caselles built this corner house in 1891 and 1892 for Joan Tarrats, who with his brother owned the textile mill La Fabril Algodonera, known as the Vapor Nou. Both façades are in a medieval style, with stucco imitating blocks of stone and window drip mouldings resting on corbels carved with animals, and a big shield at the corner carries Tarrats's initials, J.T. An inscription in the entrance hall, dated 1892, names the architect, the master builder, the carpenter, the locksmith and the painter who made the house.
Photo: Santi Gomà — CC BY-SA 3.0 Joan Rubió i Bellver, a Reus-born architect who was a keen disciple of Gaudí and worked with him until 1905 on works including the Casa Batlló and Park Güell, designed this tuberculosis dispensary. Work began in 1927 and it opened in 1928 to treat patients from the surrounding comarca, and it closed for good in 1992. The stone gateway in the garden fence is the only surviving piece of the Carmelite convent that once stood over part of Plaça de Prim, and an inscription on it names its benefactors Gaspar Huguet and his wife, with the year 1693.
Photo: Enfo — CC BY-SA 3.0 Lluís Domènech i Montaner designed this house in 1900 for the Reus notary Pere Rull i Trilla, and the window niche at the top shows his initials, P.R., on either side of a quill, a nod to his profession. It was left to the city council in 1925 as a cultural venue and for many years held the first municipal museum and the historical archive. Domènech built the adjoining Casa Gasull about ten years later, which makes this a good place to see how his style changed.
Photo: Enfo — CC BY-SA 3.0 Lluís Domènech i Montaner designed this house with his son Pere Domènech i Roura in the early 1910s for Feliu Gasull Roig, an oil merchant whose business was founded in 1835. After the carved floral decoration of Casa Rull, built about ten years earlier by the same architect, here he stressed plain cubic volumes and smooth surfaces and dropped the sculpture. In the basement are more than thirty big vats lined with glazed ceramic, made for storing oil.
Photo: Santi Gomà — CC BY-SA 3.0 The architect Antoni Sardà i Moltó designed this market in a rationalist style with strong horizontal lines, and Catalan Wikipedia calls it the most important work of the modern movement in Reus. It was among the projects that most interested the left-wing republican city government; work began in 1934, stopped in 1936 and resumed in 1944, and the market was finished in 1949 and inaugurated on Saint Peter's Day, which coincided with the Festa Major. When it opened, the trading held in Plaça del Mercadal, Plaça del Castell and the streets around moved here, and today it has 127 stalls selling meat, fruit, vegetables and fish.
Photo: Zarateman — CC0 Pere Caselles designed this church in the Gothic style although it was begun in 1912, and he knew the Gothic from Viollet-le-Duc's books and his architecture studies. Its arches and ribs were cast in reinforced concrete, a construction novelty, while the infill and carved ornament are traditional stone. Construction stopped several times for lack of money and the church was never finished, so the façade and the last two bays are missing; it was burned in 1936 and rebuilt from the 1940s.
Photo: Pitxiquin — CC BY-SA 4.0 Pere Caselles, the city architect, drew up the plans in 1908 to take advantage of a call for state grants, and the school did not open until June 1917, after the education directorate complained about the delay in 1913. The coat of arms of Spain held by two lions on the main façade reflects the state funding. The decoration is blue-on-white ceramic panels, among them four large ones by Francesc Labarta showing scenes from the New Testament, and the roofs are laid with green and yellow glazed tiles.
Photo: Zarateman — CC0
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