Qualla: Cau Ferrat Museum

Cau Ferrat Museum: Introduction

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Santiago Rusiñol i Prats, CC BY-SA 3.0. Santiago Rusiñol was supposed to make cotton. Born in 1861 into a prosperous Catalan textile family, he was expected by his grandfather and godfather to carry on the mills. Instead he picked up a brush, and in doing so helped invent an entire chapter of Catalan culture. On a stretch of Sitges seafront, above the sand of Sant Sebastià beach, he built the house that became the reliquary of that life: the Cau Ferrat, the iron den, a home and studio so crammed with paintings, wrought iron, glass and ceramics that visitors still struggle to take it all in.

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Image: Santiago Rusiñol i Prats | CC BY-SA 3.0

Cau Ferrat Museum: The Mecca of Modernisme

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User: (WT-shared) Whatsinaname at wts wikivoyage, Public domain. Rusiñol first came to Sitges in the autumn of 1891 and never really left it. To him, art was not a trade but a calling close to religion, a doctrine he called Total Art. He set out to turn a small fishing town into its temple. Between 1892 and 1899 he staged the Festes Moderniste...

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Image: User: (WT-shared) Whatsinaname at wts wikivoyage | Public domain

Cau Ferrat Museum: A House Bought from God

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mtorrite, CC BY-SA 3.0. The house itself came with an odd history. Its previous owner, dead for decades, had willed it to Our Lord God, intending the rent to pay for masses for her soul, so the sale in 1893 required special authorization from the church court of the Barcelona diocese. Rusiñol paid a tho...

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Image: Mtorrite | CC BY-SA 3.0

Cau Ferrat Museum: The Iron Den

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mtorrite, CC BY-SA 3.0. The name gives the place away. Cau Ferrat means the iron den, and Rusiñol's reputation as a collector of wrought iron ran ahead of his fame as a painter. Working with a small circle of fellow obsessives, he helped rescue ironwork from being dismissed as a minor craft and made it ...

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Image: Mtorrite | CC BY-SA 3.0

Cau Ferrat Museum: The Bohemians and the Bequest

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mtorrite, CC BY-SA 3.0. For a decade the Cau Ferrat was the favourite haunt of the century's end, and the list of guests reads like a roll call of the era. The poet Joan Maragall came, and the novelists Emilia Pardo Bazán and Benito Pérez Galdós; so did the composers Enrique Granados and Manuel de Falla...

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Image: Mtorrite | CC BY-SA 3.0