Eusebi Guell

Eusebi Guell was the industrialist who paid for most of Antoni Gaudi's career and let him build without interference, which is why several of the results exist. He was the son of a Catalan who had made a fortune in Cuba, ran textile mills, a cement works and a bank, sat in the Spanish senate and was made a count by Alfonso XIII. He met Gaudi around 1878 after seeing a display case the young architect had designed for a glove maker at the Paris exposition, and the relationship lasted forty years. He commissioned the Palau Guell off the Ramblas, a town house with a parabolic entrance and a roof of tiled chimneys that cost far more than planned and which he refused to complain about; the pavilions and gates at Pedralbes; the crypt of the workers' colony at Santa Coloma de Cervello, which is where Gaudi worked out by hanging-chain models the structural system he later used at the Sagrada Familia; and Park Guell, intended as a garden city of sixty houses for wealthy buyers. That last was a commercial failure - two plots sold in fifteen years, one of them to Gaudi - and the city bought the site in 1922 and opened it as a public park, which is what it remains and what four of the buildings are now World Heritage sites as. Guell also funded scientific and Catalan cultural institutions and promoted the language at a time when doing so was politically pointed. The judgement that he was the best patron of his era rests on his having understood that Gaudi should be given a budget and left alone. He had married into the Comillas family, whose fortune was also colonial. Gaudi was run over by a tram in 1926 and taken for a beggar. Park Guell receives several million visitors a year and has had to be ticketed.

• Lived: 1846 CE – 1918 CE
• Nationality: Spanish
• Roles: other