Museu Cau Ferrat

Santiago Rusiñol's studio — the founding building of Catalan Modernisme

The Museu Cau Ferrat is the heart of Modernista Sitges — the studio, residence, and bohemian meeting place that the painter Santiago Rusiñol assembled at the end of the 19th century. The blue-painted interior is hung wall-to-wall with his own paintings, alongside the El Greco canvases he bought in Paris in 1894, works by Ramon Casas, Picasso ceramics, and a vast collection of medieval and renaissance wrought ironwork.

The museum reopened in 2014 after a long restoration, with a glass-roofed extension linking it to the neighbouring Maricel Museum. A single ticket covers both buildings, and the two together make up the best small museum complex on the Catalan coast outside Barcelona.

things to do sight museum art
A story
In 1893 the Catalan painter Santiago Rusiñol bought two fishermen's cottages next to the Sant Bartomeu church, knocked them through, and turned them into the studio he called Cau Ferrat — the "iron lair", after his collection of forged wrought-iron. He filled the rooms with his own paintings, two El Grecos he had personally carried home from a pilgrimage to Paris, ceramics by Picasso, and the bohemian crowd that turned Sitges into the unofficial capital of Catalan Modernisme.