In 1883, Eusebi Guell commissioned Antoni Gaudí to build the sorrounding walls, entrance gate and annexed pavilions of his estate along Barcelona’s present-day Avinguda Pedralbes, at a site which was then int the village of Barri Les Corts.
One pavilion was coach-house and horse stable, while the other was the gatekeeper’s lodge. Gaudí used brick as his basic building material here and, for the first time in his career, he employed the broken ceramic tile mosaic called “trencadís” as an exterior cladding, a technique which he would use afterwards in many of his structures.
These pavilions are perhaps the best evocation of medieval hispano-arabic architecture in all of Gaudí’s work. The gate between the buildings, which are adorned with abstract motifs of brick and glazed ceramics, is a unique creation of wrought iron measuring five metres in width. It features the “guardian of the garden”, an enormous wrought-iron dragon which represents Ladon, the mythical beast which guarded the garden of the Hesperides. This gate was declared a Cultural Asset of National Interest in 1969.
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