Cau Ferrat Museum

The house is built partly out of a castle. When Sitges demolished its old fortress to make room for a new town hall, Santiago Rusiñol had the large Gothic windows salvaged and set straight into the façade of his new studio — and then timed the building’s grand opening to the exact day two El Greco paintings he had bought in Paris arrived in town.

A studio assembled from a demolished castle

Rusiñol (1861–1931) arrived in Sitges in late 1891 and decided to build a home and workshop on the seafront. The architect Francesc Rogent designed it around salvaged material: the wide Gothic windows in the façade came from the town’s old castle, torn down shortly before to clear the site for the new town hall. The name Cau Ferrat — roughly “iron den” — was carried over from the Barcelona studio Rusiñol had shared with the sculptor Enric Clarasó. Within months he realised the building was too small, bought the house next door in May 1894, and merged the two into the structure visitors walk through today.

The opening staged around two El Grecos

In September 1894 Rusiñol moved his wrought-iron collection down from Barcelona. Then, on 4 November, during the third of the Festes Modernistes he had been staging in the town since 1892, he held a second and far grander inauguration — deliberately scheduled to coincide with the arrival of two paintings by El Greco he had acquired in Paris earlier that year. Four years later he unveiled a public monument to El Greco in Sitges. The sequence was not modesty: Rusiñol treated art as something close to a religion, and he was building Sitges into the centre of Catalan Modernisme with himself at its altar.

Why the ironwork matters more than it looks

Rusiñol was known as an iron collector before he was known as a painter or a playwright. At the time, forged iron was filed under craft rather than art. He and a small circle of fellow collectors argued otherwise, and the reappraisal that followed fed directly into the metalwork of Modernista architecture — the balconies, gates and lamps of Gaudí, Puig i Cadafalch and Lluís Domènech i Montaner. Hanging that ironwork on the same walls as El Greco was the argument made physical. The collection also holds glass, ceramics, archaeology and furniture, alongside paintings by Rusiñol himself, Ramon Casas, Zuloaga, Picasso and Ramon Pichot.

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