47. Metropolis and Catalan Art Nouveau
In the early 20th century, Barcelona was a modern, cosmopolitan, industrial metropolis of more than half a million people. With the city walls demolished half a century earlier and Cerdà’s Eixample plan implemented, the city was growing rapidly, sprawling out into its industrial suburbs.
The surge of Catalan Art Nouveau coincided with a booming city, socially troubled, artistically extremely vibrant and the capital of a resurgent Catalonia, which discovered in this new artistic language for urban representation a symbol of its identity which still survives today. Park Güell was the expression of this Catalan cultural revival and for many years the stage for social events for the city’s people.