Barcelona – we have loved you!
Tuesday 2 July
Another homage to Antoni Gaudí today – we had tickets to Parc Güell, so after an easy morning we took a taxi up to the Parc which is located on the north face of Carmel Hill which belongs to the mountain range of Collserola. The Parc is private and includes gardens and architectural elements designed by Antoni Gaudí and was built from 1900 to 1914 and officially opened as a public park in 1926. It is named after Eusebi Güell, a rich entrepreneur and Count who had a great passion for Gaudí’s work and who became his patron, and together the two men conceived it. It has also been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It was originally part of a commercially unsuccessful housing site and was inspired by the English garden city movement and contained a country house and a neighbourhood of upper-class houses with the intention of enjoying the views to the sea and the fresh air away from the smoky factories. Sixty triangular plots were provided for luxury houses but only two were built. Gaudí, at Güell’suggestion, bought one of these two houses with his savings and moved in with his family in 1906, where he lived until his death in 1926. This house now contains the Gaudi Museum located in the parc.
Gaudí not only managed to bring a fairytale to life with his architecture he also invented Trencadís. Trencadis is a mosaic created by small pieces of broken ceramic. The use of this technique is almost unanimous throughout the park from the fluidity of the design to their structure, from sculptures to motifs, that allowed this concrete architecture to stand as one with nature. We saw so many examples of this as we walked around - animals such as the salamander, which stands guard over the twin flights of steps and is also an icon for Barcelona; a snake, an octopus, and lions are also incorporated at various junctures by using trencadis, while flowers are introduced via various motifs spread all across the park.
There was just so much to see …..by the entrance is the Porter’s Lodge Pavilion which resembles something like gingerbread houses from Hanzel and Gretel, the two trencadís-speckled pavilions stand on either side of the entrance. The Hypostyle Room is a structure that is supported by 86 stone columns with the outer ones leaning in like bent trees and incredible mosaics in the ceiling. One of the highlights for me was the serpentine bench called the Banc de Tracidis – a long bench adorned with tile-shard mosaics which also acts as a balustrade alongside the Nature Square – the colours and patterns of the mosaics were mesmerising and only enhanced by the view of the Sagrada Familia and the Mediterranean beyond. Gaudí believed that nature doesn’t do a straight line and therefore he only used curved lines throughout the property. The serpentine bench is probably the first ergonomically designed bench in the World.
We had a wonderful few hours immersed in these beautiful shapes, mosaics and colours and also time to sit in the park itself and admire the flora and fauna around us.
We have a dinner date tonight with one of my son Ben’s friends, Hamish. Stella and Chloe were 10 years younger the last time they saw Hamish who is in Barcelona for the next 4 months as he is the Media and Communications Manager for Emirates Team New Zealand. Hamish had been out on the AC75 boat, Taihoro, for two practice races today and is working seven days a week preparing for the America’s Cup Match in October. Fortunately for us he was able to spare a few hours and met us down at Port Vell after the boat had returned (see my photos in the previous blog). We had a delicious Spanish Tapas dinner at a restaurant on the water almost opposite Team NZ’s base and a lovely catch up too.
Wednesday 3 July
We have done so much walking around since we arrived last week so rewarded ourselves with a morning off and a swim in the rooftop pool before we headed out again. Yes, it was on foot, back into El Born for a last look around at those lovely little shops before our fun appointment tonight. We have an interesting evening ahead of us and are taking part in a Spanish cooking lesson. Our meeting point was the San José Market, so we decided to get there a little earlier to give us time to look around all the incredible stalls. Popularly known as La Boqueria, it opened in 1840 on the site of the convent of San José near La Rambla and covers an area of 2,583 m² with more than 300 stalls offering a wide variety of products. You can see from the photos, the deliciousness of all the fruit, vegetables, cured meats, chocolates, pastries and nougat on offer.
We duly met up with our fellow budding chefs and were taken first to the fish stall where our host for the night, Sally, talked about the various fish ingredients that she was buying from Senora Carmen’s stall to include in the paella lesson. Then off we went, following her through the busy streets until we arrived at her cooking school. What followed next was a lesson on how to make a traditional seafood paella, and a chicken paella for those of us not eating fish. It was quite hands on for the guests and Stella and Chloe were delighted to be able to join in and help mix up the ingredients for the chicken dish. Whilst this was cooking, we enjoyed some meat and cheese tapas and had a lesson on how to make traditional Spanish Sangria which went down well with more than a few of the crowd. After having seen how much wine, rum, vodka and Cointreau was added into the jug and knowing I was sole charge of two teenagers, I decided to give it a miss! We had a really fun, different kind of evening, and thoroughly enjoyed eating the fruits of our labours before heading back to the hotel.
Thursday 4 July
Our last day here today and because we feel we have “done” Barcelona we thought we might have a bit of an adventure and get out of the city for a day by the sea. So off we went to Barcelona Sants train station, considered the most utilised transport hub in Spain as it’s the primary train station for national and international arrivals and departures, and it was certainly humming! We managed to organise ourselves some tickets and headed off to catch the train into Sitges, a coastal town located on the coast about 38kms south of Barcelona. Half an hour later we arrived into its pretty little station. Sitges is a town with three marinas, the most in Spain and one of them, Port Ginesta, is the largest marina in Europe. An article in the New York Times Style Magazine called Sitges the St Tropez of Spain for its beauty.
We quickly walked through the main street and down to its beautiful promenade, the Passeig de la Ribera, which stretches 2.5 kilometres from the Church of Sant Barthomeu i Tecla to the Terramar Gardens. It was lovely being by the sea after being in the centre of a city and we loved the fresh sea breezes and openness of the wide promenade. We were starving so found a lovely little restaurant on the seafront where we enjoyed a lunch of chicken Catalan style – the national dish of Catalonia! Then it was time for a promenade walk – so many amazing sculptures to look at – Doménikos Theotokópoulos, known as El Greco, the Greek painter, sculptor and architect of the Spanish Renaissance and a great scenario of two sculptures depicting Santiago Rusiñol and Ramon Casas, two of the great successful bohemian painters of Catalan Modernism of the late 1800’s. Next was the sculptural monument that honours the famous son of the city of Sitges, Facundo Bacardi Masso who settled in Santiago de Cuba and after experimenting with the process of distilling rum, found a satisfactory formula, acquired an old distillery and founded the Bacardi company in 1862. This is an interesting sculpture as it depicts the iconic Bacardi bat logo which came about when Doña Amalia, Don Facundo’s wife, spotted a colony of fruit bats in the rafters of the first Bacardi distillery in Santiago de Cuba, symbolizing good health, family unit and good fortune, she knew the bat was the right choice to symbolize Bacardi! As we walked towards the Church – we saw the sculpture of a woman holding a bunch of grapes representing the grape harvest and finally, just by the steps to the beautiful Church of Sant Bartomeu i Santa Tecla, Pere Jou’s bronze sculpture of the mermaid – La Sirena - which was inspired from Maragall’s poem that talks about the relationship between a mermaid, a shepherd, the sea and the land – and like those two sculpures I talked about in Croatia, her hand is gold from everyone touching it for good luck.
The Church of Sant Bartomeu I Santa Tecla is 17th Century Baroque and one of the most important symbols of Sitges, overlooking the sea and the promenade it stands out for the two bell towers on its façade. Sadly, its doors were firmly closed so we weren’t able to see the various Renaissance and Baroque altarpieces inside. Walking around the sea side of it, we passed the Cau Ferrat Museum which is located in the house-workshop of the artist Santiago Rusiñol, housing his collection of sculptures, ceramics, wrought iron, glass and paintings by himself, Picasso, El Greco, to name a few.
We had a lovely walk through the cobbled medieval streets of the old quarter, plenty of colonial buildings and I particularly liked the old ceramic street signs, a feature in Sitges and one that the Culture Department of the local Town Council continues to upkeep and renew.
The last notable building we passed enroute to the Station for our return was the Casa Bartomeu Carbonel, also known as the Clock House, which was a commission from the fabric importer of the same name and built by the architect Ignasi Mas i Morell, who also built Barcelona’s Monumental bullring. I never tire of photographing and looking at all these wonderfully designed, magnificent, sometimes colourful, buildings – makes me realise just how new everything is in New Zealand!
Then it was back on the train and to our hotel to pack up for tomorrow’s departure – almost 90 kms walked this week – and now Home to Rome!
