Wait time and crowds at Casa Batlló

No, quite the opposite. It's actually a very efficient system, which is why more and more major tourist attractions across Europe are adopting it.

In the past, you had to queue to buy your ticket, and then sometimes queue again to get inside. Nowadays, many attractions no longer sell tickets at the entrance at all. The Sagrada Família, for example, requires you to book online for a specific date and time.

You normally have a certain window of time to show up, often around 15 to 30 minutes depending on the attraction. Be careful with this, because if you arrive too late, you may lose your ticket.

So when you arrive, the people queuing are generally those who have tickets for roughly the same time slot. Instead of hundreds of people all trying to get in, you're dealing with much smaller groups, and the queue usually moves quite quickly. Once inside, you can generally explore at your own pace.

There is one thing worth mentioning, though. Some attractions, and Casa Batlló may be one of them, work a little like IKEA. You follow a fairly natural route from one room to the next, and the whole layout gently pushes you forward. You can spend as much time as you like in a particular room, but going backwards isn't always easy because other visitors are coming up behind you. So the natural progression is one room, then the next, then the next. Personally, I find this much more efficient.

As for the chaos you may have read about, particularly the fact that people don't always form a perfectly straight, single-file queue, well, no, they don't necessarily do that. But that's also something worth understanding when travelling to different countries. Queuing habits aren't universal. In Japan, for example, people tend to stand neatly in a straight line. Elsewhere, a queue can be a little more informal: I know you're ahead of me, the person behind knows I'm ahead of them, and nobody really needs to stand in a perfectly straight line for the system to work.

So I wouldn't confuse a less rigid way of queuing with chaos. They're not necessarily the same thing.

We did our Batlló tour as part of the "golden nights" rooftop flamenco show. We sprung for the "gold ticket" so we were the first 25ish people into an empty place. It gradually filled up as more people were let in.

I went to Casa Batllo and many other Gaudi-related sites in 2016. It wasn't chaotic, but it was extremely crowded. There was someone at the door who seemed only to be letting X people enter after X people departed. I wondered what a fire marshal would think.

Casa Mila/La Pedrera was a tiny bit less crowded that Casa Batllo (but that was 10 years ago). My visits were in the daytime. I wouldn't be surprised if night entry periods are somewhat less crowded.