Sant Pau Art Nouveau and the Spirit of Building Bridges

When leaders gather to address the most complex challenges in international healthcare—cross-border care, medically complex patients, financial coordination, and trust between systems—the setting matters.

For Building Bridges: Hospitals & Private Medical Insurance, the choice of venue was not aesthetic alone. It was intentional.

The conference will take place at the Sant Pau Art Nouveau Site, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the most significant healthcare-related architectural achievements in Europe. More than a beautiful backdrop, Sant Pau embodies the very principles this conference exists to advance.

A Place Built for Healing and Collaboration

Completed in 1930, Sant Pau operated as a working hospital for nearly 80 years. Designed by architect Lluís Domènech i Montaner, the site represented a radical idea for its time: that healing outcomes improve when medicine, environment, and human dignity are treated as inseparable.

Light, gardens, airflow, and interconnected pavilions were not decorative choices—they were clinical ones. Sant Pau was designed to support collaboration across disciplines and to treat patients as whole people, not cases.

That philosophy remains deeply relevant today.

A Living Metaphor for Modern Healthcare Challenges

At its core, Building Bridges is about alignment:

• Between hospitals and insurers

• Between clinical excellence and financial sustainability

• Between national systems and global patient needs

Sant Pau was built on the same premise. Its architecture physically connects spaces that would otherwise operate in isolation—mirroring the coordination required to care for medically complex international patients today.

Hosting this conference here reinforces a simple but powerful idea:

Progress in healthcare happens when systems are designed to work together.

From Historic Hospital to Global Meeting Place

Today, Sant Pau is no longer a hospital—but it remains a place where healthcare conversations belong.

Its transformation from clinical campus to global convening space reflects the evolution of healthcare itself: from siloed institutions to interconnected networks focused on outcomes, experience, and accountability.

Bringing hospital executives, insurers, policymakers, and innovators together within these walls underscores the conference’s mission—to move beyond transactional relationships and toward durable, trust-based collaboration.

A Venue with Experience & Prestige

Many conferences are held in impressive spaces. Few are held in places that understand the work.

Sant Pau has witnessed generations of medical decision-making, innovation, and care delivery. It has adapted across centuries while maintaining its core purpose: improving lives through thoughtful design and shared responsibility.

That legacy makes it more than a venue. It makes it a silent participant in the conversation.

Setting the Tone for Meaningful Dialogue

Building Bridges is not about surface-level discussion. It is about addressing real friction points in international healthcare—and doing so with honesty, rigor, and respect for complexity.

Sant Pau sets the tone for that work.

It reminds us that healthcare progress has always required courage, coordination, and a willingness to rethink established systems. And it challenges today’s leaders to design the next era of care with the same intentionality that shaped this place nearly a century ago.

Some venues are impressive. This one is experienced.

Join us at Building Bridges: Hospitals & International Private Medical Insurance on 11-13 March 2026 in Barcelona.