Barcelona, Spain, Monday 1st September

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Unfortunately the internet that we had expected with this apartment did not eventuate, so Keith could not take advantage of his early rising habit to check our emails and publish some of the blog pages that were ready to go.

After breakfast we set out with Rohan and Joel to see Sagrada Familia, the famous unfinished temple designed by Antoni Gaudi. It was not so far from where we were staying and the walk gave us a good chance to orient ourselves and see the different styles of buildings. Barcelona is famous for being a city where art and design is valued and over our days there we were to see that those aspects are well reflected in the buildings, in the wrought iron work of security doors and balconies and in window decoration. Statues abound, as do squares full of individual public chairs set out a bit like a gappy theatre with the road as the performance. People sat there in the evenings and watched the show of cars and of people passing in between the seats. I saw elderly women being assisted to walk along and then deposited on a seat by a younger person. Presumably they had a chance to take the air, to see others and to chat before being picked up again.

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We came upon Gaudi’s temple suddenly, our first view being between the trees of the gardens in front of it. Antoni Gaudi was an amazingly creative and innovative architect who started work n the Sagrada Familia in 1882. He based his design on the geometric shapes that can be found in natural forms, but went way beyond this in designing a temple with pillars like a forest of plane trees with leaves above, and with every detail meticulously designed and harking back to plants and animals. The façades and the eight towers already built are detailed and complex, with interesting differences due to the characteristics of the sculptures done by different artists in different periods. A very distinctive Gaudi touch is the use of vivid colour and plant motifs on the towers, with the colours being created on curved surfaces by an intricate mosaic of broken coloured tiles. It is estimated that the building will take another thirty years to complete, making it a 156 year project.

It is a truly magnificent building and the builders and architects have stayed true to Gaudi’s designs and vision since his death in 1926. It is fairly difficult to feel as if you are in a holy place inside, but easy to imagine the many other cathedrals we have admired going through stages of construction just like this, with the workmen treating it like any other building site as they toil away in what will one day be a temple. A glass wall separates the workers from the stream of tourists and I wondered if Notre Dame had once been like this, with curious medieval folk having heard of the great unfinished building coming from afar to see it.

Our memories of our previous visit over thirty years ago were of a very different scene, since we can’t remember work on the inside and we definitely remember being able to clamber up high over the unfinished exteriors, following a plank path and stone work with no guard rails or protection at all. Could it really have been like that? We will have to check our photos and ask our travelling companions.

The crypt houses a fascinating museum which tells the history of the project and of the inspiration for the design. I found the drawings for some of the sculptures by Josep Maria Subiracha fascinating and I very much liked his style and the finished works. Somehow they seemed to be both finished sculptures and blocks of honest rock at the same time.

The building is certainly breathtakingly amazing and will be even more so when completed with the other four bell towers, the central one of which will be 170 metres tall. That Gaudie was able to be so creative and yet so functionally practical as an artist and architect is mind boggling in itself, but even more fantastic to me is his ability to take care of, and to consider, every tiny detail. We peered through a window into the model makers’ workshop, where plaster models line the walls as guides for the builders. Gaudi used a similar workshop on the site to test his ideas and to explain them to others. The building has only ever had funding from private donations and alms, so it was with a great deal of faith that it was ever undertaken and I wonder if even Gaudi, in his initial interview to be the architect, imagined that it would still be incomplete in 2008.

Since we were on a Gaudi theme day, our next destination was the Parc Güell, which Guadi designed. We seemed to approach it crab-like, taking many side streets through the suburbs, with the trees of the gardens appearing occasionally then disappearing again. We were gradually going uphill and when we did reach the main gates we could see that the gardens were built into and over the side of the hill. A busker in a mosaic-tiled outfit asked to be paid for photos and put out his paw, with a no photo sign across his face, if he saw a camera. Few people paid and most were just interested to see how he comported himself in a free for all photo snapping atmosphere.

We followed a line of colonnades and arches, seemingly dripping with melting stone and curved in a way that is a strong building form. It led us to an enormous empty terrace, with undulating walls of mosaic. We took a turn to the left to have our picnic under some trees, and we realised with a shock that we were back in a dry country, where the earth cracks, plants struggle and grass is not a bright and well watered green. A guitarist played on, unseen, and the water fountain nearby acted like a magnet on this hot and thirsty day.

After lunch we explored the park, climbing to the very top and then taking the stairs for a quick descent. Barcelona stretched before us, a built up hotchpotch of old and new, tall and taller, snuggled between two hills and the sea. The area under the terrace is like a shady meeting hall or an underground cavern, with enormous pillars supporting a mosaic decorated ceiling. Tourists galore sheltered there from the heat and we were loathe to go out into it again. We decided that the only viable option was to accept the climate for what it was, to learn from the locals and to go home for a siesta. Having made a decision, we were a little revitalised so we descended past the fountain, the iconic mosaic lizard sculpture and the mosaic decorated buildings near the gate.

Much as I was loving Gaudi, I was not so keen on the mosaic work en masse and I was keen to see his other works in domestic architecture; but not now and not in the heat. Pedantic signs which told us how many metres we were from a Metro station assisted us to find one and then we whizzed back to the station at Arc de Triomf. The Spanish Metro is the best we have been on, with the trains having a route map which uses green and red lights to indicate the direction of travel and a flashing red light to show the next station.

After tea we set out in the delicious cool for a walk along the famous street, La Rambla, which leads from the Plaza Catalunya to the sea. It is a busy street at any time, but particularly at night, with warnings of pickpockets having influenced us to bring virtually nothing. The street is very wide, with service roads on each side providing for a single lane of traffic, and with the central avenue being entirely for strolling, sitting at one of the extortionately priced restaurant tables eating, drinking and watching the crowd, buying or selling newspapers and souvenirs, or busking. Countless human statues tried to entice with payment for moving, ranging from men sitting in electric chairs to petite statues covered in the by now passé gold paint. Artists offered portraits and others used spray paint and rubbing cloths to create amazing effects, most of which involved cosmic and birth of the world type themes. A small medieval wizard rolled a seemingly weightless glass globe up and down his arms and a burly man aggressively faced up to an equally muscly operator who had just fleeced him in a game of guessing under which box a coin lay. A concerned female friend was drawing him away but there was a lot of face being lost if he acquiesced, so he was equivocating on what to do. This was better than the buskers and quite a crowd had gathered. It took another person holding back the operator for the man to withdraw, perhaps with the feeling of some honour since both sides had been restrained and he could feel that he would have continued if the other man had kept on. We sat down for a drink but left when we saw that they would be seven euros each, with Keith buying some drinks much cheaper at a shop a little way along.

Columbus gazed out to sea in the fading light where La Rambla met the port, and we told the boys of how we had gone aboard a replica of the Santa Maria and had been astounded by the tiny size of the craft that carried Columbus away to ‘discover’ the New World. The ship was nowhere to be found, with the passing of the years having set other priorities for the port, such as a floating walkway out to an enormous restaurant and shops. The mirrored ceiling of the restaurant enabled us, from our angle at the edge of the pier, to observe all the diners at work consuming their meals. We did see a sailing ship with rigging, so I took a photo of Rohan in front of it because it reminded us of the intricate rigged ship that he made as a boy.

Certainly Barcelona is a night city, with whole families strolling around with no thought of bed time, and dog owners using the portside walkway to train up their pets, who apparently never sleep. The weather at night is so much kinder and the shabby aspects are hidden in the shadows while the glow of the street lights dazzle and entice.

The day had felt longer than a regular one, and the chats with our sons made it last until we were all too tired to think.

The Smart car is quite common in Barcelona and we also saw quite a few in England. The are so short that they are sometimes seen at right angles to the kerb in parallel parking zones.