This
wonderful garden was landscaped in a setting of great beauty on
top of a cliff with breath-taking views over the sea, and it is a fine
specimen of the spirit that animated the Noucentista movement in
Catalonia - an early twentieth-century movement for intellectual and
aesthetic renewal that found a distinguished spokesman in the writer
Eugeni d'Ors.
The Santa Clotilde gardens were designed in the manner of the
dainty yet austere gardens of the Italian Renaissance by Nicolau Rubió
i Tuduri at the age of twenty-eight, when he was still brimming over
with admiration for his master in the art of landscape gardening,
Forestier.
In these gardens, Rubió ignored Forestier's teachings with their
Spanish-Arabic slant mixed up with images of the French garden, as he
had seen when working with Forestier on the Montjuïc gardens, and
instead sought to recover the spirit of the Italian Renaissance as the
essence of modernity. A new bourgeoisie was then emerging, looking back
nostalgically on the prestige enjoyed by patrons of the arts during the
Renaissance.