EssentialSeville

One hundred years ago today, Antoni Gaudí walked out of his workshop at the Sagrada Família for the last time.

It was June 7, 1926, around 6 PM. The 73-year-old architect was heading to the church of Sant Felip Neri, as he did every single day for confession and prayer. He was wearing worn-out clothes and carrying no identification. He had been living like a monk for years, sleeping in his workshop, eating almost nothing, giving his money away.

At the corner of Gran Via and Bailén Street, he stepped back to avoid one tram. He didn't hear the second one coming from the other direction. Police records say it happened at 6:05 PM exactly.

He fell. He hit his head. People gathered around him.

Nobody recognized him. They saw a thin old man in ragged clothes and assumed he was a beggar. Taxi drivers refused to take him to the hospital. A doctor examined him at the scene and walked away. A police officer eventually carried him to the Hospital de la Santa Creu, where he received the basic care given to the poor.

It was only the next day that the chaplain from the Sagrada Família came looking for him and recognized the man in the charity ward as the most famous architect in Spain.

By then, it was too late. Gaudí died on June 10, 1926. Less than two weeks before his 74th birthday.

30,000 people lined the streets of Barcelona for his funeral procession. Shop owners closed their doors. Black ribbons hung from balconies across the city. The cortège went down La Rambla, past the Barcelona Cathedral, and all the way to the Sagrada Família, where he was buried beneath the church he never got to finish.

El parque con juegos de agua gratuitos que estrena temporada en este pueblo al lado de Sevilla: cuándo visitarlo. https://bit.ly/4dRwj0o

Con cine de verano en el agua y capacidad para 1.250 personas: la gigantesca piscina natural de Amurjo abre este viernes En las estribaciones de la Sierra de Segura, esta piscina natural es una de las más grandes de Europa y se antoja un edén para este verano.

Este antiguo patio estrena su temporada estival con una gran terraza y ambigú y películas al aire libre. https://bit.ly/4ubaRrQ

Pedraza de la Sierra in Segovia province is a perfectly preserved medieval village of extraordinary quality, with its complete circuit of walls still intact, a single gate as the only entrance, and streets of medieval stone houses that have barely changed since the 15th century.

Fernando the Catholic was held prisoner here as a child. The village is freely walkable.

Those who visit on a weekday in October when the extraordinary poplar trees in the surrounding valleys are at peak gold colour and the village is quiet describe it as the most atmospherically perfect and most completely intact medieval walled village available anywhere in the mountains north of Madrid.