The history of the Gralla house dates back to 1306, when Pere Desplà acquired the site, and until the 19th century he chained more lineages: Gralla, Aitona, Cardona and Medinaceli. The prince of Viana stayed in it.
She had always been admired for the subtle blend of settled gothic and pointed renaissance. The sculptural ornamentation attributed to Damià Forment, the most prominent artist of the period, was an unfounded oral tradition.
Being the owner of the Duke of Medinaceli, its decline hurt, not so much because it was turned into a school, but because it was so ruined. He then revealed the clumsy interpretation of the words engraved on the bases of the two columns of the main door, asymmetrical above: publicae venustati and privatae utilitati. The vulgar interpreted the Latin venustati as the announcement of a brothel: venustas. The truth was that the inscription referred to public adornment and private utility.
The much-loved Gralla house had its days numbered. The campaign launched by the Diario de Barcelona to save it was useless. It was condemned to demolition (1856) due to an urban operation to build a facade of desperate vulgarity, house a bazaar and open Delicias Street, later Nueva del Duque de la Victoria.
The most embarrassing thing was what happened immediately afterwards.
A large part of everything dismantled or fragmented was deposited by order of the tycoon Josep Xifré in front of the Tallers bastion, the whole moved later to the Sant Martí de Provençals park, remains acquired by the Marquis of Casa Brusi destined for the tower of Sant Gervasi.
Another deposit was the cloister of Santa Anna; this explains the appearance of the abandoned sculptural lintel on the site of the future Plaza Catalunya. The collector Francesc Santacana kept it safe in his museum in Martorell. And the fate of a traveling patio luckily ended up at the Prosegur headquarters in Hospitalet.
The architect Puig i Cadafalch, so sensitive to the historical gaze, paid homage to the Gralla house when he was designing the Serra house; and when evoking that exquisite main door, he also gave it an original asymmetry, just as he had already been doing in the Amatller house and the Quadras palace.
