Or to translate from Catalan, Saint Paul Modernista Site. This World Heritage site includes displays describing the history of the hospital entity known in its entirety as Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau, or Hospital of the Holy Cross and Saint Paul. Holy Cross in Spanish is Santa Cruz, so I felt a connection before I even got there. The original was established as a working hospital in 1401, and continues today as a modern hospital in a different location nearby. This modernist site, designed by the architect Montaner in the late 1880s, was the location of the working hospital from 1930 through 2009, when it moved to its current location, so this site now serves as a museum, event space, and cultural landmark.

Which is to say, BCN has a continually operating hospital 625 years old.

The site includes a number of buildings surrounding a courtyard with gardens. Five of the buildings were open for visitors. The main entrance building is very grand and beautifully ornamented with statues, freezes, reliefs, mosaics, and murals. The middle picture is the center of that building, and the shots flanking it are its courtyard side plus one closeup of its decorative elements.

The next set shows a little more of the courtyard garden, a roof I like, and a nondescript water fountain. In all my wanderings, this is the third modern water fountain I have seen, so I did not resist documenting its existence as well as taking a sip.

The second building was one of several ward buildings repurposed as museums, and its main space was filled with a curious style of display, reminding me of ship sails or fish scales, arranged in a hydrodynamic sort of manner, and including both writing and pictures, as you can see below, together with a close view of one set; I hope you can see the writing on it.

The next building, of a similar size, was my favorite because it included many old medical instruments. The large instrument in one picture is an Xray machine, and on the table in the foreground of another, those of you with medical knowledge may be able to identify a spectroscope, a manual centrifuge, a hand microtome, and a compound microscope. The back portion of the space was set up as an actual ward so you could see what it would’ve been like for the patients of the time. I wondered whether the radiator heating system between the beds was still in use in 2009 but it’s possible, since we have something similar in our apartment. I’ve also included a picture of the exterior of the building.

Another building documented the story of a leper colony established in the mountains in the early 1920s, which was run by the administrators of the hospital. It was still in use pretty late in that century, perhaps the 1960s, and later became a sanatorium. To some extent the progression from leprosy to insanity is a story of that century; I believe the Invalides in Paris made the same transition. Today, diseases still have trends.

Why did we go? This is one of several outings we took with friends from Chicago, who visited us before continuing to Nice and Alsace. Regular readers may recognize the first building; we saw a projected holiday display on its exterior from the top of our Christmas bus last December, and the blog post included a video sample. This year I am hoping to get tickets to view the garden decorations as well, on foot.

When we don’t have guests, we don’t do much touring, really, especially this week, which has had a lot of rain. We had been sleeping with the windows open–it’s wonderfully cool now, high 60s to low 70s–until one morning I found myself sharing the bathroom with an enormous cucaracha. What a shock! I haven’t seen one of those since I lived in Houston, and while you might reasonably conclude a Houstonian would be tolerant of cockroaches, you would be very wrong in my case, as my dear husband, whom I dragged out of bed to dispatch it, well knows. He prevailed; he is my Prince.