There are spaces in Barcelona that seem to have been relegated exclusively to tourists. Emblematic spaces of the city such as La Boqueria market, the Sagrada Familia or La Rambla. However, it is precisely these spaces that have been working for years to improve their relationship with the environment and residents and thus change this perception. With the aim that, as the Casa Batlló audio guide bids farewell —confirming to its visitors that this building will be "from now on and forever their home"— Barcelona residents make these places their own.
In fact, in just 20 years —since the building first opened to the general public in 2002— this space has been improving and renovating its experience to appeal not only to an increasingly international audience, but also seeking to seduce locals. Thus, wanting to present itself as a place to visit not only to admire its facade on special dates such as Sant Jordi, but also for Barcelona residents to dare to discover its beautiful, and functional, interior, which has come to be considered the Sistine Chapel of modernism.
The building on Passeig de Gràcia, originally built by Emili Sala i Cortés in 1877, was acquired in 1903 by Josep Batlló i Casanovas, a businessman and owner of several textile industries. It was then, and until 1906, when Antoni Gaudí carried out a comprehensive renovation of the house, almost completely renewing it, but managing to save it from demolition. Thus, the architect gave the facade its current shape, with the texture that alludes to the dragon's skin and crowning it with the representative multicolored back of this animal.
The house ceased to belong to the Batlló family in the 1950s and, subsequently, passed through different owners, from companies to individuals, until it fell into the hands of the Bernat family in the early 90s. Enric Bernat, creator of the famous lollipop brand Chupa Chups, acquired the building in 1993. It has been in the hands of this family, currently under the direction of Gary Gautier, that the house has progressively opened up to the city of Barcelona. In 2002, coinciding with the International Year of Gaudí, the building received external visits for the first time. The idea, however, was that these visits "would be exceptional and for a limited time," clarifies Ana Maria Acosta, head of cultural visits for the building. However, the public response and the interest of the neighbors was such that the visits came to stay.
Since then, the building has been renovating and expanding the experience it offers to tourists and locals, incorporating more and more technology, and consolidating itself as one of the most visited buildings in the entire Catalan capital. In 2023, for example, Casa Batlló received 1.5 million visitors, 57% more than in the previous year. With ticket prices ranging from €35 to €45, it achieved a record turnover of 50 million euros.
However, this annual increase in the number of tourists is not accidental, but rather responds to a strategy and a commitment by the Bernat family to expand the museum experience. In fact, since 2017, its owners have invested 30 million euros both in renovating and preserving the building's heritage, and in improving the tour. As the building has never closed ---except during the pandemic--- for renovations, visitors have become spectators and witnesses to the heritage reforms the house has undergone, achieving, in recent years, milestones such as the recovery of the original cladding and skin of the house's walls, revealing the gold leaf of some of its elements and, recently, the recovery of the dark and surprising original colors of the rear facade.
With this millionaire investment, the visitor experience has also been completely renewed, with a new tour, available since 2021, which has added 2,000 square meters, in addition to immersive experiences that seek to awaken emotions in visitors so that, through them, they will forever remember this modernist jewel.
With this new tour, the visit begins on the ground floor, where the visitor enters the first immersive room that offers an experience, to say the least, curious. A moving walkway transports the visitor through a dome of more than a thousand screens that reproduce images and sounds that try to immerse the viewer in the inner world and dreams of Gaudí, who is asleep in the middle of this room. The visitor, perhaps somewhat confused by this endless stream of images, does manage to capture the creative and constant effervescence of the architect's mind, even having fallen asleep surrounded by plans and sketches.
But the technological deployment does not end here: an audio guide and a tablet that incorporates augmented reality will accompany us throughout the tour. The objective is that augmented reality serves to understand what the human eye, at first glance, cannot capture. Thus, in these devices, and throughout the visit, we see turtles and other marine animals such as seahorses or fish, animals that served as inspiration for Gaudí, for example, in the skylights, which reproduce the shell of turtles, and through which we also discover the architect's obsession for natural light to penetrate the house.
Thanks to the audio guide, the visitor also understands how the architect not only cared about these natural references, which also appear on the facade —where everything from a bat to bone columns appears—, but also his obsession for the house to be functional: taking care of details such as light or ventilation. The tour ends, again, in an immersive room, a LED cube that transforms, through artificial intelligence, motifs that inspired Gaudí, documents and even plans, into images that pass at high speed. Again, as at the beginning of the visit, an explosion of lights and music makes the visitor once again understand the restless mind of the architect, always inspired by his surroundings and nature.
However, and according to its managers, these technologies do not aim to trivialize or camouflage the historical heritage of Casa Batlló, but rather to "democratize it and make it accessible to all audiences," emphasizes Amilcar Vargas, Head of World Heritage at Casa Batlló. "Casa Batlló contains a quantity of aesthetic, technical, and functional details that we can only make easily understandable through these technologies and effects," adds Vargas.
But not everything in the house is digital; visitors can also enter the private rooms of the Batlló family, which have been reproduced with period furniture, and even with family photographs, showing what these rooms were like more than a century ago. The rooftop, with unparalleled views of Passeig de Gràcia and other corners of the city, also leaves visitors speechless without the need for augmented reality or grandiloquent sounds.
Since the launch of this new tour and immersive experiences, the building has received a total of five million visitors, with only 8% being local visitors. A figure that Casa Batlló seeks to increase. "We must not forget that we are in Barcelona and that we owe ourselves to this city," remarks Acosta. For this reason, on the one hand, they seek to proactively engage with their direct environment, working to improve the cleanliness, safety, and mobility of its streets, and incorporating artisan and zero-kilometer products, produced in Catalonia, into their souvenir shop.
And, on the other hand, they also want to offer unique experiences specifically designed to interact with the local public. Through special celebrations such as the Diada de Sant Jordi, a crucial legend for the house —Gaudí himself represented it on its facade—, and which since 2016 they celebrate by decorating the facade with roses for the occasion. Since then, there is no self-respecting Barcelonian who, even while complaining about the crowds, doesn't want to show off a photo of this beautifully adorned facade. The videomapping on the facade in collaboration with the great audiovisual fair, the Integrated Systems of Europe (ISE), which is held annually in the Catalan capital, has also become a tradition. This year, in fact, Sofia Crespo's projection Structures of Being, which reproduced Gaudí's creative universe through technology, managed to attract a total of 95,000 attendees.
But Casa Batlló wants to go a step further and ensure that Barcelonians not only interact with or admire its emblematic facade, but also dare to discover the universe that its four walls enclose. For this reason, they organize thematic visits designed primarily for the local public, such as Una nit d'Hivern or the Magic Nights, which end with a concert on the building's rooftop, in addition to offering half-price tickets for residents.
This challenge of increasing the percentage of local public is carried out by a team, led by Gary Gautier, made up of about fifty employees, ranging from software developers to improve the technologies used in visits, to heritage experts or restorers specialized in glazed ceramics. "This team responds to Gaudí's legacy and his very multidisciplinary way of working," emphasizes Vargas.
To this team must be added a hundred more people who attend in the room and accompany us during the visit. These hundred people come from the Specialisterne association, which works for the integration of people with neurodivergence into work environments. In 2021, Casa Batlló became the first cultural entity to fully commit to neurodiversity, incorporating, at that time, a dozen neurodivergent people. Workers with autism, ADHD or dyslexia who have already reached more than one hundred people, among those distributed throughout the different rooms and the souvenir shop.
The purpose of this entire large and multidisciplinary team is for "the content to be entertaining, pleasant, but also emotional, because only through these emotions will the visitor be able to connect and remember forever what they have experienced inside the house," Acosta summarizes. And this is the objective that the audio guide also emphasizes at the end of the tour: that Casa Batlló rests forever in our memory. "I would like you to remember me with affection, like a beautiful (and old) friend," proclaims the voice that has accompanied us throughout the visit, with the aim that, increasingly, Barcelonians are infected by its magic and the percentage of local public that can consider this modernist jewel as a beautiful friend grows.