The site is located in the La Salut neighborhood on the southern side of a hill known as the Turó del Carmel, part of the Collserola mountain range.

In the midst of Barcelona's late 19th and early 20th century urban expansion, the Catalan industrialist and art patron Eusebi Güell sought to commission a new park.

Güell commissioned the design of the park to the renowned architect Antoni Gaudí, widely regarded as a central figure of the aesthetic movement of Catalan modernism.

In 1984, UNESCO declared the park a World Heritage Site, recognizing it as part of the "Works of Antoni Gaudí" architectural series.

Rooted in the Baroque, his works are characterized by a structural richness of forms and volumes, free of the rational rigidity of classical conventions.

Gaudí would further elaborate on this characteristic style in the creation of the enormous Sagrada Família (Basilica and Expiatory Church of the Holy Family).

[4] Güell and Gaudí originally conceived of the space not as a public park, but as a private community of luxurious homes equipped with all the latest modern amenities to fulfill the needs of its residents both artistically and physically.

They envisioned a community strongly influenced by symbolism and Park Güell's common spaces (stairways, plazas, terraces, gardens) are designed to express physically the political and religious ideals of both patron and architect.

In addition to Gaudí's reinterpretation of classical architectural elements such as columns, colonnades, and porticos, Park Güell also contains numerous references to Greek Mythology.

Although much of this is without scholarly basis, the sense of mystery surrounding Park Güell's symbolism is not entirely unfounded, given the penchant of Gaudí and other artists of his generation for enigmas, puzzles, and cryptic references.

[10] Another prominent feature found throughout the park are the series of elevated pathways, originally intended to service the houses, designed by Gaudí to jut out from the steep hillside or rest on viaducts.

Similar to his previous work on the Church of Colònia Güell, Gaudí used curved vaulting and the alignment of sloping columns to form inverted catenary arch shapes, which function as ideal compression structures.

Park Güell supports a wide variety of wildlife, notably several of Barcelona's non-native parrots in addition to sightings of the short-toed eagle.