Casa Milà - La Pedrera Ticket in Barcelona

Casa Milà is the last private residence Gaudí designed, and Barcelona nicknamed it La Pedrera — the stone quarry — because of the undulating rock face it presents to Passeig de Gràcia. The ticket takes you inside one of the most unusual buildings in the city.

Gaudí built the house around light. Two courtyards open through the middle of it, and the apartments are arranged so that daylight reaches rooms which in any conventional block would be dark. The period apartment is furnished as a family of the time would have lived in it, which makes the strangeness of the architecture legible in an ordinary way.

The attic is a run of parabolic brick arches, and it now holds the exhibition on Gaudí’s working method — the hanging chain models, the geometry taken from bone and branch, the way he arrived at shapes by testing rather than by drawing.

Then the roof. Chimneys and ventilation shafts sculpted into standing figures, on a terrace that rises and falls rather than lying flat. Barcelona opens out around it, and the Sagrada Família is visible from up there.

Allow an hour and a half. There are stairs and level changes, and the roof terrace is uneven underfoot — flat shoes. The roof is the best part and is the part most affected by weather, so a clear day is worth choosing if your plans allow it.