Museu Cau Ferrat

Cau Ferrat ("Iron Cave") was the seaside studio-house of the Catalan modernista painter and playwright Santiago Rusiñol (1861-1931). Rusiñol bought two fishermen's cottages on the Sitges seafront in 1892, joined them into a single studio, and filled the walls floor-to-ceiling with wrought-iron work (his other collecting passion), El Greco paintings (his most famous purchases), and a rotating cast of visiting Catalan modernista artists. The house's significance to Barcelona and Sitges queer history rests on the intellectual circle it centred. Rusiñol's partner in Cau Ferrat's early decades was the painter Ramon Casas (1866-1932); the two men's decades-long personal and artistic partnership was open enough that the Cau Ferrat visiting circle — Miquel Utrillo, Ignacio Zuloaga, later Federico García Lorca and Salvador Dalí — treated it as constitutive rather than incidental to the space. The five-day 1892-3 Sitges "Festa Modernista" that Rusiñol and Casas ran from Cau Ferrat is one of the founding moments of Catalan modernism. Rusiñol donated the house and its collection to the town of Sitges in 1931, months before his death. It has operated as a public museum since 1933 and reopened in 2014 after a major renovation. The interior is preserved essentially as Rusiñol arranged it — a working artist's studio with El Greco's *Christ Bearing the Cross* (bought by Rusiñol in 1894) as the room's central piece. Open Tuesday-Sunday 10:00-17:00 (extended to 20:00 in summer). Adult admission €10 (combined ticket with the Museu Maricel next door). The building sits directly on the Sitges seafront promenade — an easy stop on any Sitges heritage day, and a natural anchor for understanding how the town became what it did.