Palau de la Música Catalana and Hospital de Sant Pau, Barcelona
Province of Barcelona, Autonomous Community of Catalonia
These are two of the finest contributions to Barcelona's architecture by the Catalan art nouveau architect Lluís Domènech i Montaner. The Palau de la Música Catalana is an exuberant steel-framed structure full of light and space, and decorated by many of the leading designers of the day. The Hospital de Sant Pau is equally bold in its design and decoration, while at the same time perfectly adapted to the needs of the sick.
Pyrénées - Mont Perdu
France: Midi-Pyrénées Region, Hautes-Pyrénées Déparetment; 1999 Extension: Commune of Gèdre
Spain:Autonomous Community of Aragón, Province of Huesca, Communes of Torla, Fanlo, Tella-Sin, Puértolas, Bielsa, and Broto
This outstanding mountain landscape, which spans the contemporary national borders of France and Spain, is centred around the peak of Mount Perdu, a calcareous massif that rises to 3,352 m. The site, with a total area of 30,639 ha, includes two of Europe's largest and deepest canyons on the Spanish side and three major cirque walls on the more abrupt northern slopes with France, classic presentations of these geological landforms. The site is also a pastoral landscape reflecting an agricultural way of life that was once widespread in the upland regions of Europe but now survives only in this part of the Pyrénées. Thus it provides exceptional insights into past European society through its landscape of villages, farms, fields, upland pastures and mountain roads.
San Millán Yuso and Suso Monasteries
San Millán de la Cogolla, Province and Autonomous Community of La Rioja
The monastic community founded by St Millán in the mid-6th century became a place of pilgrimage. A fine Romanesque church built in honour of the holy man still stands at the site of Suso. It was here that the first literature was produced in Castilian, from which one of the most widely spoken languages in the world today is derived. In the early 16th century the community was housed in the fine new monastery of Yuso, below the older complex; it is still a thriving community today.
University and Historic Precinct of Alcalá de Henares
Province and Autonomous Community of Madrid
Founded by Cardinal Jiménez de Cisneros in the early 16th century, Alcalá de Henares was the world's first planned university city. It was the original model for the Civitas Dei (City of God), the ideal urban community which Spanish missionaries brought to the Americas. It also served as a model for universities in Europe and elsewhere.
San Cristóbal de La Laguna
Province of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Canary Islands
San Cristóbal de La Laguna, in the Canary Islands, has two nuclei: the original, unplanned Upper Town; and the Lower Town, the first ideal 'city-territory' laid out according to philosophical principles. Its wide streets and open spaces have a number of fine churches and public and private buildings dating from the 16th to the 18th century.
Aranjuez Cultural Landscape
Province and Autonomous Community of Madrid
The Aranjuez cultural landscape is an entity of complex relationships: between nature and human activity, between sinuous watercourses and geometric landscape design, between the rural and the urban, between forest landscape and the delicately modulated architecture of its palatial buildings. Three hundred years of royal attention to the development and care of this landscape have seen it express an evolution of concepts from humanism and political centralization, to characteristics such as those found in its 18th century French-style Baroque garden, to the urban lifestyle which developed alongside the sciences of plant acclimatization and stock-breeding during the Age of Enlightenment.
Vizcaya Bridge
Basque Country, Province of Bizjaia
Vizcaya Bridge straddles the mouth of the Ibaizabal estuary west of Bilbao. It was designed by the Basque architect, Alberto de Palacio and completed in 1893. The 45-metre-high bridge with its span of 160 m, merges 19th-century iron–working traditions with the then new lightweight technology of twisted steel ropes. It was the first bridge in the world to carry people and traffic on a high suspended gondola and was used as a model for many similar bridges in Europe, Africa and the Americas but only a few of which survive. With its innovative use of lightweight, twisted steel cables, it is regarded as one of the outstanding architectural iron constructions of the Industrial Revolution.
