Joan Güell Ferrer, patriarch of the lineage, bought the estate and its Can Custó farmhouse in Les Corts in 1859. He followed the example of the Girona banker: establishing a second residence in a quiet, healthy area, outside the wall, but not too far from the city. Other bourgeois imitated them.
Eusebi Güell, his son who will be ennobled with the title of count, decided in 1882 to expand that estate by buying two attached wine estates: Can Feliu and Can Cuyàs.
And straight away he commissioned Gaudí to project the limits of those 30 hectares with a wall and their respective doors, the entrance pavilions, plus some fountains and a shade house. The architect maintained the neo-Mudéjar inspiration, having used it with satisfactory results in the Vicens house and El Capricho (Comillas). In this case and due to its rural character, it is also true that the exposed brick was the most appropriate. And he exhibited the astonishing visual expressiveness that he was capable of printing through such a humble material, when combined with the white and green tile cladding.
The main entrance to the estate allowed him to apply himself to enhance it with an example of his eccentric imagination. She created a ferocious beast, chained and aggressive to intimidate or even ready to attack: jaws gaping, claws movable, and wings outstretched. Asymmetry accentuates mobility. He lost a polychromy that, having been left without a trace, did not recommend its restoration: the gold and blue of the scales, the red bottom of the mouth, the gold of the forked tongue and the glass eyes ..
This dragon, suitable according to the Gaudinist Josep F. Ràfols to intimidate unscrupulous passers-by, was a tribute to the poet Verdaguer who in his L’Atlàntida” had elevated the Greek myth about Heracles and the Garden of the Hesperides to the category of metaphor.
The expressive sculpture, forged in Vallet i Piqué’s accredited workshop, appears embedded in two pillars that enhance the asymmetry, it was not for nothing that Gaudí maintained that symmetry was typical of fools. The one on the left is much lower and also wider in order to house the pedestrian entrance. The one on the right appears tall and slender, in the form of a tower decorated with bas-reliefs of orange trees and topped by the graceful sculpture of a sweet orange tree modeled in antimony. A huge initial alluding to the owner’s surname stands out, “G”, surrounded by delicate wild roses, the “englantina” with which it is awarded at the Jocs Florals and which Verdaguer deserved.
The building that was erected on the left is the one destined for the goal, made up of three volumes and crowned by fans in which the avant-garde genius of the architect has already displayed geometry and polychromy that he will expand with greater prominence on the roofs of the Güell palace and the Mila house.
The other building that was erected on the right has a much larger dimension, as its mission is to house the stables and the riding school under catenary vaults. On the horizontality of the volume, a dome decorated with polychromy can be seen that contains a lantern that enriches the interior by capturing a good flow of natural light.
It is inconceivable and reprehensible that a complex with a high protected heritage level, above Gaudí, in its own city and under public visitation, should be in such a state. It is not about a deterioration suffered by an accident, but because of a shameful continued abandonment that comes from afar. Its restoration is imperative and urgent.
