Nel 1890, l'industriale catalano Eusebi Güell prese una decisione radicale anche per gli standard di una città già illuminata dal modernismo: abbandonò i soffocanti distretti industriali di Barcellona e trasferì il suo stabilimento tessile — insieme a tutta la sua forza lavoro — su una collina coperta di pini a Santa Coloma de Cervelló, a soli 20 chilometri a sud-ovest della città. Ciò che costruì lì non fu semplicemente un complesso industriale, ma un vero esperimento sociale: un villaggio autonomo per operai con abitazioni, scuole, un teatro, un negozio cooperativo e una chiesa che sarebbe diventata uno degli edifici strutturalmente più audaci del XX secolo. Quella chiesa fu affidata ad Antoni Gaudí — e ciò che Gaudí progettò nella cripta tra il 1908 e il 1914 fu nulla meno che il laboratorio strutturale per la Sagrada Família. Colonia Güell è il luogo dove il sogno fu messo alla prova. Attira una frazione delle folle che fanno la coda fuori dal Park Güell o dalla Sagrada Família, ma è senza dubbio il sito gaudiano più affascinante dal punto di vista intellettuale di tutta la Catalogna.
The Visionary Patron and the Workers' Utopia That Defied Industrial Barcelona
Eusebi Güell i Bacigalupi was Barcelona's most consequential patron of the arts, but he was also a genuinely progressive industrialist — a rare and contradictory combination in Restoration-era Spain. In 1890, frustrated by urban overcrowding, labour unrest, and the catastrophic conditions of Barcelona's working-class Raval district, Güell transferred his cotton-weaving business, the Vapor Vell de Sants, to a purpose-built settlement in Santa Coloma de Cervelló. The relocation was not altruistic theatre: Güell believed that a healthy, housed, and educated workforce would be a more productive one. He was influenced by the paternalistic industrial towns of England — Owen's New Lanark, Lever's Port Sunlight — but he wanted to give his version a distinctly Catalan soul.
Construction of the colony began in earnest in the mid-1890s. By the early 1900s, Colonia Güell comprised around 400 workers and their families — nearly 2,000 people — living in terraced houses designed by the architect Francesc Berenguer, Gaudí's closest collaborator and lifelong friend. Berenguer, who never obtained his official architect's title, designed the majority of the colony's buildings: the workers' quarters, the casino-theatre, the school (inaugurated in 1895), and the cooperative shop where residents could buy goods at below-market rates. The colony even had its own brass band and a lending library — revolutionary amenities for industrial workers of that era.
Güell's relationship with Gaudí was one of the defining creative partnerships of European modernisme. He had already commissioned Gaudí for the Palau Güell on Carrer Nou de la Rambla (built 1886–1890) and Park Güell (begun 1900). For his model colony, he wanted Gaudí to design its crown jewel: a church that would serve the spiritual life of the community. On the Gaudí Unexpected Private Tour, guides bring this patron-architect relationship vividly to life, connecting Colonia Güell with the lesser-known Casa Vicens to trace the full arc of Gaudí's genius.
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