Saint Paul Hospital

The six primitive hospitals of Barcelona are joined in one building.

The cloister was carried out by Guillèn Abiell. The cross of the courtyard is considered to be a beautiful sculpture from the XVIII Century. It has a Plateresque façade from the XVI Century. The spacious Gothic naves should be highlighted. At the end of the XIX Century, the city had considerably grown and medicine advances demanded more modern installations. As a result of this fact, it was considered to build a new building that could be financed by means of the donation made by the banker Pau Gil.

The Hospital de Sant Pau, with its main building and numerous pavilions, is the biggest group of the Catalonian Modernist Architecture. It suffers changes through several centuries, that is why it maintains Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque elements, among them the dominant one is the Gothic cloister and the naves, also in Gothic style.

Nowadays, this building houses several cultural institutions of the city, such as the National Library of Catalonia, the Escuela Massana, Institute for Catalan Studies and the Public Libraries of Santa Pau and Santa Creu.