La Pedrera
Gaudí’s apartment block on Passeig de Gràcia, built 1906 to 1912, with 28 sculpted chimneys on a rolling stone roof
Visit details
Overview
La Pedrera, officially Casa Milà, is the apartment block Antoni Gaudí built at Passeig de Gràcia 92 in Barcelona between 1906 and 1912. You go for the roof, where twenty-eight chimneys stand about in helmets and hoods on a terrace that climbs and drops in short flights of steps instead of sitting flat.
The nickname arrived as an insult and outlasted the real name. Barcelona watched the rough limestone front go up on the corner of Carrer de Provença and started calling the thing “la pedrera”, the quarry. Nothing on the façade runs straight. The stone rolls in horizontal waves across two street frontages, and the wrought iron balconies knot up in front of the windows like something dragged out of the sea.
The building is a corner site rather than a single block, and Gaudí worked it as two independent apartment houses arranged around open courtyards that pull daylight down to ground level. Each floor covers 1,323 square metres on a plot of 1,620. Under the roof runs the attic, a low hall of 270 parabolic brick vaults that once held the laundries and storerooms for the flats below and now holds the Gaudí exhibition. The arches get taller towards the middle of the building, which is why the roof above them rises and falls the way it does. The shape of the terrace is a by-product of the ceiling underneath it.
UNESCO listed it in 1984 as part of the serial site “Works of Antoni Gaudí”, under criteria i, ii and iv. If you are working through the Gaudí list, Casa Batlló is a short walk down the same avenue, Park Güell is up the hill behind Gràcia, and the Sagrada Família is twenty minutes east. La Pedrera is the domestic one: no altar, no park, just a very strange block of flats.
The Fundació Catalunya La Pedrera has run the building since 2013 and puts on temporary exhibitions alongside the daily visits. Over a million people pay to come through in a year, which is the single most useful thing to know before you plan your morning.
History
Pere Milà and Roser Segimon, a widow who had inherited a fortune from her first husband, bought the corner plot and hired Gaudí to replace the house standing on it. He presented the project to the city on 2 February 1906. The plan was ordinary enough for the Eixample: the owners would take the main floor and let the rest as apartments. What went up was not ordinary, and the city noticed.
Building work was halted in December 1907 because a pillar of the façade stood out over the public pavement. Worse followed on 17 August 1908, when inspectors found the building had overrun both its permitted height and its permitted boundary by some 4,000 square metres. The council gave the Milàs a choice: pay a fine of 100,000 pesetas or demolish the attic and roof. The argument ran for over a year and closed on 28 December 1909, when the building was accepted as a monument and released from the rules that had trapped it. The attic and roof you walk on today are the parts the city wanted knocked down.
Gaudí had intended a large religious group on the roof, statues of the Virgin and two archangels. After the anticlerical riots of the Setmana Tràgica in 1909, Milà decided against them. The building was habitable by December 1910, the owners were authorised to occupy the main floor in October 1911, and the final certificate was issued on 31 October 1912.
The relationship between architect and client did not survive the build. Gaudí and Segimon fell out over his fee and ended up in court, where he won in 1916 and was awarded 105,000 pesetas. He gave the money away.
Segimon outlived her husband by a long way. Pere Milà died in 1940 and she stayed in the building until her death in 1964. During the Civil War, with the owners away from Barcelona, part of the building was collectivised by the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia. The main floor spent later decades as offices rather than a home, housing an insurance company, the firms Cementos Molins and Inoxcrom, and at one point a bingo hall. The Gaudí furniture designed for the flat did not stay either. Segimon had much of it covered over in Louis XVI style after his death, and surviving pieces, including a long oak curtain and a one-off chair, ended up in the Museum of Catalan Modernism.
Segimon sold the building in 1946 for 18 million pesetas to Josep Ballvé i Pellisé. The new owners subdivided flats, turned the attic laundries into small apartments and let the outside go. By 1971 stones were working loose from the façade. Legal protection had already arrived on 24 July 1969, when it was declared a historic and artistic monument, but protection is not money.
Money arrived in December 1986, when Caixa Catalunya bought the building for 900 million pesetas and began an urgent restoration. The main floor opened to the public in 1990, two years before the Olympic Games, as Barcelona set about repairing the monuments it planned to show off.
The restoration reversed a century of accretion. The attic flats put in during the 1950s came out, returning the vaulted hall to something close to Gaudí’s plan. The roof had gathered television aerials and later additions, and was stripped back to its intended profile, down to the champagne-bottle glass that tops one of the chimneys. The façade, painted a dull brown for years, went back to its original colouring.
Visiting
The standard ticket is La Pedrera Essential at €29, which runs from 09:00 to 17:30 with last entry at 17:15 and takes about an hour and a half. A free videoguide comes with it in eleven languages: Catalan, Spanish, English, Chinese, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Japanese and Korean.
Doors open at 09:00 every day. From 6 March to 1 November 2026 the building closes at 20:30; from 2 November 2026 to 25 February 2027 it closes at 18:30. Over Christmas, 26 December to 3 January, the later summer schedule returns, with a delayed 11:00 start on 1 January.
The route starts at the bottom, in the two courtyards. They are named for what covers them, the Flower Courtyard and the Butterfly Courtyard, and they are the best place in the building to understand how it works: nine floors of balconies spiralling up around a light well, painted rather than tiled, with the stair rails wandering off the vertical.
From there you go up to the apartment, a tenant’s flat furnished as a well-off Barcelona family would have had it in 1911. This is the part people skim and shouldn’t. It is the only place on the visit where the building is shown doing its actual job, with a service kitchen, a maid’s room and doorways that curve because the wall behind them curves.
The flat is laid out as a circuit through the rooms rather than a single display space, so the objects sit where the household would have used them. The floors are the original hydraulic tiles and the ceilings carry the moulded plasterwork that Gaudí used instead of cornices, running in ripples from the light fittings out to the walls. Nothing in the flat is square: not the windows, not the door frames, not the junction between wall and ceiling. Spend fifteen minutes here and the rooftop stops looking like a folly and starts looking like the logical end of the same argument.
The attic comes next, the 270-arch hall now given over to the Gaudí exhibition, with models, drawings and hanging chain diagrams explaining how he arrived at the shapes. You emerge from it onto the roof, which is the reason most people bought the ticket: a broken landscape of stairs, ramps and sculpted vents, with 360 degree views over the Eixample. Allow longer up here than you think. The chimneys read differently from every angle, and the crowd thins in waves as groups are moved on.
Evening options run after the building shuts. The Night Experience is a guided visit in four languages with a projection show and a glass of cava, from €39.50, in sessions between 20:40 and 22:20 in summer. Sunrise, also from €39.50, is guided in English and Chinese and gets you in from 08:00, before the doors open to everyone else.
The address is Passeig de Gràcia 92, in the Eixample. Metro lines 3 and 5 stop at Diagonal, FGC trains stop at Provença La Pedrera directly underneath, and Renfe stops at Passeig de Gràcia.
Tips
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Book online and pick the right ticket before you pay. Essential is €29 for daytime, Sunset is €25 from 17:30, and Open Date is €45 if you want to turn up on a day you have not fixed yet.
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Concessions are worth checking before you buy at full price. Children up to 11 go free, 12 to 17 pay €12.50, and students, over 65s and visitors with 33 to 64 percent disability pay €19. Visitors with 65 percent disability or more go free and their companion pays €12.50. Bring the document that proves it.
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Combined tickets cut the price if you are seeing more than one Modernisme site: €42 with Sant Pau, €42 with the Palau de la Música Catalana, €44.50 with the Dalí Theatre-Museum.
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Last entry on the daytime ticket is 17:15, not 17:30. Arriving at 17:20 means buying the Sunset ticket instead, which is cheaper but a different slot.
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The videoguide covers eleven languages but the guided tours do not. Night runs in four languages, Sunrise in English and Chinese only, and the €120 Premium tour is English only with a maximum of six people, starting at 15:30.
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Wheelchair users should book ahead and check the width. Lifts and ramps connect the floors, the courtyards, the apartment and the attic are all navigable, but the maximum wheelchair width is 63 cm and the roof is too uneven to cross, so it is seen from a viewing platform.
Other access provision
A wheelchair can be borrowed free of charge but has to be reserved in advance. The videoguide carries subtitles and sign language interpretation in Catalan and Spanish. For blind and partially sighted visitors there are tactile models of the building and three dimensional floor plans marked in Braille, and hearing loops are installed for hearing aid users. Ticket holders who need it get priority entry without queuing.
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Come at opening or leave it late. The building takes over a million paying visitors a year through one staircase and one roof, and the middle of the day is when that is most obvious.
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Budget the full 90 minutes the official route allows. People give the roof twenty minutes and the apartment five, then find they have run out of time in the attic.
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Get there by rail rather than road. FGC to Provença La Pedrera puts you at the door, metro 3 or 5 to Diagonal is a two minute walk, and a dozen bus routes stop nearby, including the V15, V17, H8, H10, 6, 7, 22, 24, 33 and 34.
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Take the roof in two laps. Walk it once for the view over the Eixample grid, then again looking only at the chimneys, which change shape completely depending on which side of them you stand.
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If the queue at the door looks bad and you have no ticket, the phone line is 93 214 25 83 and the ticket page is lapedrera.com, both faster than the pavement.
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