‘The people of the Camp de Tarragona perceive beauty better, more clearly, than the people of Barcelona,’ Jujol told Ràfols, to encourage him in his classes at the school of architecture. To understand Jujol’s architecture, you need to go to the source, where the environment and architecture become one, where Camp de Tarragona and Jujol’s architecture are a single entity.
If you wander randomly through Camp de Tarragona and don’t find any of Jujol’s work, you might try to understand it, but as you are from outside Camp de Tarragona, you will find it harder to appreciate its beauty. if you walk through the Camp and find a work by Jujol, observe it and understand it minimally, you will see that it gives you the keys to looking at the Camp with a new perspective: Jujol’s work makes you understand the beauty of the territory where it was conceived. This should come as no surprise: we do not know Manhattan except through Scorsese or Woody Allen; we do not know Dublin except through the Dubliners described by Joyce; we would not know Mont Sainte-Victoire without Cézanne, nor the beauty of the Camp de Tarragona without Jujol!
When we arrive at Vistabella, if we have not yet noticed the Camp that surrounds us, the church reveals it to us. Inside, the celestial world is represented alongside the Eucharistic species carved in stone—wheat and grapes, bread and wine—mediated by figures between heaven and earth that could be drones or an angel.
In Can Bofarull, our attention is drawn to the abundance of small animals scattered everywhere, until we notice the chillies sprouting from the ground. In Creixell, seen from the motorway, the weather vane crowning the church leads us to seek the allegory of the lion pursued by the cross in the Camp. At the fountain-spout of the Loreto chapel, we encounter a work anchored firmly to the earth: a snake emerges from the ground while a silver, winged creature descends from the sky, perches above it and releases water from its mouth back into the earth.
Jujol makes us attentive to what happens both on earth and in heaven. He teaches us to observe the Camp.
Take the route. Take the car —or better yet, take your bike, or better still, put on your walking boots. Call ahead to have the places opened, discover the interventions he made inside the churches and seek out the small works scattered throughout the territory. Look at the Camp through the lenses that Jujol has given you. In doing so, you will discover Jujol’s territory.
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