We had booked a car so collected our tiny Ford Fiesta at the airport and made our way tentatively (at night, driving on wrong side of road, lots of roadworks) into Girona. We found our hotel quite easily (it seemed every hotel in Girona was signposted) and checked in, then went out for some food - even though it was almost midnight by this time, plenty of places were still open. The following morning we got up just in time for breakfast (which ended at the very decent time of 10.30am) and then headed out to see the major Girona attraction, the Cathedral. From a bridge on the river with the cathedral in the background -
And up close -
From there we went to the Museu d’Art and then some lunch. A Girona street -
After that was the Museu del Cinema before heading back to the hotel for a siesta. About 5 hours later we woke up to discover it was after 8pm which actually made it the perfect time to find dinner in Spain. Any earlier and you eat alone – so we headed out for some drinks and dinner. We happily headed back to the hotel after that to watch a movie and more sleep.
Next day we had breakfast then checked out of our hotel. Once in the car we took a punt and headed right and fortunately found ourselves heading in the right direction towards the coast. Our first stop en route was the Castel Gala Dali in Pubol, the house Salvador Gali bought for his wife and muse, Gala. One of the elephant water features in the garden -
After stopping at Pals -
then Begur for lunch -
we found our next hotel, the Parador d’Aiguablava, right on the coast overlooking a sheer cliff face into the Mediterranean Sea.
The Parador was walking a fine line – the décor was either contemporary kitsch 70s glamour or shamefully outdated original 70s beach resort…we will give them the benefit of the doubt and say the former. The lounge looking out to the water -
We spent the afternoon relaxing and then had dinner in the hotel during a spectacular thunderstorm.
On Thursday we woke to a beautiful day and decided to drive about 50kms north to Figueres to visit the Teatre-Museu Dali, a museum dedicated to a lot of Dali’s work including many surreal and bizarre sculpture/exhibits. Possibly the most interesting was the one set up as a living room which becomes a face at a certain angle. Not the most subtle execution, but Dali wasn’t really one for subtlety. After wandering around the museum for a while, we headed back to the Parador via a small supermarket in Begur to pick up some supplies for dinner to eat on our balcony, overlooking the water as the sun went down. Lovely.
The next day we got up, had breakfast, checked out and then made our way to Barcelona, about 80kms south. We took mainly the scenic route along the coast and arrived in Barcelona early afternoon. It looked very quiet – we thought everyone must have been taking siesta, but soon found out it was a public holiday. This made finding our hotel quite challenging as the street was blocked off at one end with a street festival and Barcelona is a confusing maze of one way streets, no left turns and roadworks so we did circles for a while until we found the right streets to take. Finally we found our hotel, checked in and then headed off immediately to take advantage of the great weather and visit Parc Guell, the famous park of Antoni Gaudi. Barcelona has a few massive hills just outside the city center – and Parc Guell was on one of them. Fortunately Barcelona has managed to install outdoor escalators up most of them which is awesome, but a very strange sensation to be on a escalator outside. The park was absolutely packed with both tourists and locals -
- but we made our way around some of it (it’s more than 15 hectares!) as well as touring Gaudi’s house on-site.
The view from a path walking through the park ('Why call it tourist season if we can't shoot them?') -
Both of us were exhausted after a big day of walking so got dinner at a little place right near our hotel.
The following day we first checked out L’illa, the huge shopping center adjoining our hotel – nothing very special really except for a great food hall. From there we took the Metro to the Sagrada Familia, Gaudi’s famous, still unfinished, cathedral.
We went inside and while Nick waited in the line for the lift to the top of the towers, I looked around inside.
The whole thing really is quite staggering – in sheer size, magnitude and grandeur. As it noted in something we read, the time scale – building began in 1882 and it is set for completion in 2020 – is on on par with some of the great medieval cathedrals. Over 100 years to build an enormous cathedral would not have been unusual. From the top of a tower -
After the Sagrada Familia, we took the Metro to Las Ramblas, the very famous main street of Barcelona’s city center. First we went to Mercat de la Boqueria (market) -
- which has some renowned stalls for tapas but we were a bit late and they had already closed, so we found a small tapas bar just of the main street which served in the traditional style – plates full of tapas secured with toothpicks on the bar which you simply took as desired and kept the toothpicks which they counted up at the end to calculate your bill. Genius.
On Sunday we switched hotels – from the NH Constanza which was more in the commercial district of Barcelona to Hotel 1898, right on Las Ramblas. For various reasons it worked out better this way and we figured it would give us two different perspectives of the city as well. Hotel 1898 might be my favourite hotel we have ever stayed in – I’m considering moving there! Not only a great location, fantastic room and great atmosphere, but a rooftop swimming pool and bar where they serve the best Caipirinhas ever. (In case you’re interested, other contenders for favourite hotel include the Malmaison in Birmingham, parts of the Merchant House in Tallinn and Tanjung Rhu Resort in Langkawi. I'm also quite fond of La Banasterie in Avignon and Hotel Davanzati in Florence). Once we checked in, we took a walk around and got some breakfast but being Sunday not much was going on so we headed back to the hotel so Nick could have a siesta and I took my book up to the rooftop. After some late afternoon drinks, we headed towards the harbour for dinner and had some fantastic seafood.
On Monday we got some breakfast and then Nick headed off to do some record shopping and I went firstly to the Museu d’Art Contemporani and then to find the famous Gaudi houses - Casa Mila and Casa Batllo. Casa Mila is still used as an office building and while you could line up to see the foyer and common areas of the building, the line was really long so I gave that a miss.
From there I went to Casa Batllo which is now an attraction that you can tour with an audio guide (at a very steep price of 16.50 Euro!) While there are substantial parts of the building open, there are still maybe 3 floors which are private apartments (possibly the reason the entrance fee is so high...) Outside -
The living room windows overlooking Passeig de Gracia -
The amazing tiled internal light shaft -
Stairs -
The following day was our last day in Spain. Las Ramblas -
We walked over to the Mercat de Santa Caterina to find the best and cheapest coffee we'd had so far in Spain (always seems to be the case with the markets!) and from there went to the Picasso Museum, which was an extensive look at his entire career (shamefully, I have to admit the Picasso exhibition we saw in Berlin last year, which was more of a 'greatest hits' show, was much better). After that, we headed back to the market for lunch before going back to the hotel to collect our bags and car. Before leaving Barcelona we drove to Parc de Montjuic, where a lot of the Olymipic events had taken place in 1992, to see the Fundacio Joan Miro. After a quick look around and a detour into a side exhibition of the very cool Aya Takano, we got back in the car and went north to Girona, for the first time seeing rain! And then our holiday was over...
