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From 1900 to 1914 Gaudi worked for Don Eusebio Guell (patron of his Palau Guell, off the Ramblas) on the Parc Guell (daily: May-Aug 10am-9pm; Sept & April 10am-8pm; Oct & March 10am-7pm; Nov-Feb 10am-6pm; free), on the outskirts of Gracia. This was Gaudi's most ambitious project after the Sagrada Familia - on which he was engaged at the same time - commissioned as a private housing estate of sixty dwellings and furnished with paths, recreational areas and decorative monuments. In the end, only two houses were actually built, and the park was opened to the public instead in 1922 - in 1984 it was designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Laid out on a hill which provides fabulous views back across the city, the park is an almost hallucinatory expression of the imagination. Pavilions of contorted stone, giant decorative lizards, a vast Hall of Columns (intended to be the estate's market), the meanderings of a huge ceramic bench - all combine in one manic swirl of ideas and excesses. The immediate and obvious comparison is with an amusement park, something not lost on a variety of literary visitors. The Hall of Columns was described by Sacheverell Sitwell (in Spain ) as "at once a fun fair, a petrified forest, and the great temple of Amun at Karnak, itself drunk, and reeling in an eccentric earthquake"; less rarefied is the American crime writer Barbara Wilson's view of the park as "a cross between a surreal Disneyland and a Max Ernst painting". Drink in the atmosphere and the views from the bar set up in one of the caverns adjoining the main terrace. The ceramic mosaics and decorations found throughout the park were mostly executed by J.M. Jujol, who assisted on several of Gaudi's projects, while one of Gaudi's other collaborators, Francesc Berenguer, designed and built a house in the park in 1904, in which Gaudi was persuaded to live until he left to camp out at the Sagrada Familia for good. The house is now the Casa Museu Gaudi (daily: March, April & Oct 10am-6pm; May-Sept 10am-8pm; Nov-Feb 10am-6pm; ?2.40), a diverting collection of some of the furniture he designed for other projects - a typical mixture of wild originality and brilliant engineering - as well as plans and objects related to the park and to Gaudi's life. To get to the park, take bus #24 from Placa de Catalunya, which runs to the side gate by the car park, or the metro to Vallcarca, from where you walk down Avinguda de l'Hospital until you see the mechanical escalators on your left, then follow them and the path right to the park entrance. Be warned, how ever, that the escalators are often not working and the climb up on foot is a particularly stiff one. Walking from Gracia , head straight up the main c/Gran de Gracia and you'll pass Metro Lesseps, where you should turn right onto Travessera de Dalt, from there keep walking for another five minutes and then turn left down c/Larrard which leads straight to the main entrance of the park. The bus turistic (red circuit) also approaches the park, stopping outside the tennis club on c/la Mare de Deu de la Salut, from where it's a steep uphill walk for ten minutes to the park (there are usually a couple of taxis waiting where the bus stops).
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