Barcelona

Antoni Gaudí was a shy, deeply religious architect who dressed like a beggar and ate little, yet he reshaped a whole city. He rarely drew ordinary plans; instead he hung little weighted strings upside down to find the shapes stone could hold, and copied the curves of bones, shells and trees. The wealthy industrialist Eusebi Güell bankrolled his wildest ideas — the mosaic-covered park and palace that still carry Güell's name. In 1926, aged 73, Gaudí was knocked down by a tram on his way to church. Dressed so shabbily that taxi drivers refused him, he was taken for a pauper and died days later; crowds filled the streets for his funeral.

He had given his last years to a single building, the Sagrada Família, a church begun in 1882 and paid for entirely by donations. Gaudí knew he would never see it finished and said his client — God — was in no hurry. Nearly a century and a half later the cranes are still there; when its towers are complete it will be the tallest church on Earth. Its stone façades read like a picture Bible for people who could not read, telling the Christmas and Easter stories in carved figures.

All of this belongs to Catalonia, a proud region with its own language, Catalan, which was banned under the dictator Francisco Franco and sung openly again after his death in 1975. The city long turned its back on the water, hiding the shore behind factories and rail yards. For the 1992 Olympic Games it tore them down and built beaches from imported sand, so that today a medieval cathedral and a stretch of Mediterranean sand sit a short walk apart.