Gaudi-inspired chocolate Easter eggs featured in Barcelona's iconic Park Guell

Visitors to Spain’s iconic Park Guell are delighted by colourful and giant chocolate Easter eggs, each inspired by renowned architect Antoni Gaudi’s distinctive designs.

“I like chocolate, I like Gaudi, I like the sun in Barcelona. It's a very nice place here,” said Anita Zunk, 71, a retired teacher from Berlin, who was visiting the park on Saturday (March 28).

Park Guell is hosting the “Gaudi in Chocolate” exhibition from March 17 to April 9 as it marks its centennial, having first open its gates as a public park in 1926. The ten gourmet chocolate eggs, nestled between pillars featuring Gaudi’s ubiquitous mosaics, are competing for visitors’ votes to earn a spot at Barcelona’s Chocolate Museum.

The rest will participate in the symbolic breaking of the Easter egg, carried out by students from local schools, and will be eaten afterwards.

The chocolate pieces, made by top Barcelona pastry chefs, reflect the park’s characteristic shapes, symbolism and colours, reinterpreted through the Catalan Easter festival of Mona de Pasqua. The traditions include godparents gifting their godchildren a brioche, or ‘mona’, with hard-boiled eggs on Easter Sunday or Monday and the number of eggs symbolises the child’s age, explained a park visitor.

In modern tradition, these have evolved into elaborate chocolate creations often featuring cartoon characters, football players, and other designs.

The Gaudi-inspired 'monas' on display include a chocolate sculpture of the Park Guell salamander, sitting on top of a 64-centimeter-tall egg. Other works featured the park’s fairytale-like gatehouse, and Gaudi himself, holding one of the eggs covered in a multicolour mosaic featuring the architect’s famous buildings.

-Production: Amy McConaghy, Anita Kobylińska, Travis Teo/Reuters