Walker’s delight is one way I’d describe Barcelona. Richard
and I bought a metro ticket on our first trip into Barcelona and I don’t think
we ever used it again. Given the good weather and long evenings, we never felt
the need to go undercover though we visited Park Guell and Sagrada Familia and
Plaça d’España and Castell de Montjuïc and Hospital Sant Pau and the Plaça de
les Glòries Catalanes.
The built environment is marvellous in the true sense of the
word with so many different architectural styles and wide boulevards to enjoy
as well as lots of trees for shade and relief. Walking through the Arc de
Triomf to the Parc de la Ciutadella (in search of somewhere to eat) is one of
those things every tourist most likely does, and ending up in the El Born Centre
is not a bad thing to do.
Restaurants line the square, many offering outdoor
eating experiences and the Roman ruins museum in the old market building are a
special drawcard – great and creative use of a large old market hall no longer
used as a market … but uniquely blessed with splendid Roman ruins below the
foundations.
It’s really difficult to pick a best in Barcelona but the tour
of the Palau de la Musica and attending the concert the next night in its
Concert Hall was a hot contender. As far as I am concerned you would be crazy
to visit Barcelona and not visit this UNESCO World Heritage monument.
The
Concert Hall with its magnificent translucent gold, dome ceiling and sensory-overload
Art Nouveau decoration, while possibly not to everyone’s taste, is a splendid monument
to its era and a delight and especially a photographer’s delight. It’s
wonderfully preserved and the tour was well done and packed with interesting
anecdotes – one about the benefactor who owned the building at one stage and
lived in it and sat in his apartment above the stage of the concert hall which
had an opening into the hall listening to concerts in his pyjamas! Naturally I
cannot find reference to that anecdote to verify the story and I hope that my
memory of it is at least somewhat accurate.
Wikipedia says the concert hall was designed in the Catalan
modernista style by Lluís Domènech I Montaner, built between 1905 and 1908 for
the Orfeè Catala, a choral society founded in 1891 that was a leading force in
the Catalan cultural movement that came to be known as the Renaixença (Catalan
Rebirth).
Alexa and I were two of the half million plus people who
attend musical performances in the Palau that span jazz to pop to Catalan song
to chamber and classical music. We treated ourselves to a piano recital by Luis
Fernando Pérez, local virtuoso pianist and academic, clearly passionate about
Spanish composers’ music. It was very special to sit in such a quintessentially
Barcelona building under a glorious golden dome surrounded by sculpture and
decoration that was a banquet for the eyes listening to a Spanish pianist
playing music by Granados and Albéniz and Mompou.
And I must not omit to mention the glorious stained glass
windows, the magnificent mosaic columns outside the building with tiny ticket
office windows, murals, Jules Verne balloon topped turret and gloriously
vaulted and deliciously decorated café/bar for those pre-concert cavas. I could
go on and on ...
But I will now vault over to our last day in Barcelona when
we more or less stumbled on another extraordinary Art Nouveau experience barely
mentioned in the list of top things to do in Barcelona. That is about to
change. The same architect was responsible for a hospital complex “with its own
urban layout”, according to the brochure. The Hospital Sant Pau is also
not to be missed and it’s no wonder that it now houses The Centre for Knowledge
and Cultural Dissemination in Barcelona, after serving as a hospital until 2009
when the new nearby modern hospital was built.
Also on the UNESCO World Heritage list, the former hospital site has
been open to the public again only since February 2014 after four years of
refurbishment work which is continuing. The origins of the hospital date back
to 1401. Of the 12 pavilions, six have been finished and the gardens
surrounding the refurbished buildings are a delight on a sunny Barcelona day,
featuring medicinal plants like lavender, rosemary, lemon verbena and bay trees.
I can think of nowhere I’ve travelled where such relatively modern “old”
buildings exist on one site in such excellent condition. And for the tourist,
it’s great to know that the street leading up to the hospital from the Sagrada
Familia direction is a boulevard with shady trees down the middle and lots of
outdoor eateries.
The title of this posting tells you that we walked to these
places – given the perfect weather, it was a no-brainer. Public transport is
excellent but you can learn so much about a city by walking about. We would not
have wanted to miss anything we experienced along the way.
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