Barcelona, Day 2

Monday, 2 July 2012

Our second day in Barcelona was worlds better than the first day. To start, when we woke up, the skies were clear, without even a cloud visible. That did wonders for our spirits – rain sure puts a damper on things when your main mode of transportation is walking.

La Sagrada Familia

The first place we headed once we got into the city was La Sagrada Familia, which is a huge church in the middle of Barcelona. Not only is the church huge, but the architecture of the place is visually interesting, covered with carvings. One of the other things it is famous for is it’s long construction time. Though construction began on the church in 1882, it is still under construction today, and is not slated to be completed for another fifteen years or so. I’m not sure why it’s taken so long to build the church, but it seems insane that it will have taken nearly one hundred and fifty years to complete. Unfortunately, we were unable to go in. We didn’t realize that it was such a major tourist attraction (probably the biggest tourist attraction in Barcelona), and as such, we did not plan accordingly. We arrived in the late morning to find that the line was already wrapped around at least three sides of the church. I followed the line around for a while, but it just kept going and going. I couldn’t find the end, and we decided that the part of the line we could see would probably be at least an hour line. The long line plus the hefty fee to get in was more than enough to deter us, especially when we had other things in the city we wanted to see.

La Casa "Les Punxes"

La Pedrera

When we were planning to go to Barcelona, I went to a website that showed me attractions of the city, and I got to pick and choose things that I thought looked interesting. However, the website didn’t let me know exactly what there was to do at the places that I picked. Consequently, we ended up walking around the city, just to find that our endpoint was a building we couldn’t go in. This happened at least twice. The first instance was la Casa “Les Punxes.” For some reason, I thought it was a church, so we wandered around, looking for a building that looked like a church. That didn’t work. That’s because it’s not a church. It looked more like a wannabe castle. The building itself was interesting, but we didn’t get to do anything there aside from take pictures. I don’t know what its original purpose was, but it has since been converted into a shopping center. From there, we moved onto la Pedrera, which had looked really cool when I looked it up. Once again, the building itself was really neat, but we didn’t go in because it was a museum. We wouldn’t have minded a museum, but we didn’t think we would get anything out of it considering it was all in Spanish.

The Arc de Triomf

After two disappointments, we headed over to the Arc de Triomf because we knew what to expect there. We had been to the Arc de Triomph in Paris, so we were expecting to be a bit underwhelmed by the one in Barcelona, but we were pleasantly surprised. The arc in Barcelona was much different from the one in Paris. The Arc de Triomph in Paris is made completely of white marble, while the arc in Barcelona is made out of red brick. While the Arc de Triomf in Barcelona is quite a bit smaller than the one in Paris, it was still pretty impressive. The landscaping around it was also really pretty – it is at the end of an avenue lined with palm trees.

View of Barcelona from the castle

To round out our sight seeing in Barcelona, we headed out to el Castell de Montjuïc, which is on top of a hill overlooking one of the harbors in Barcelona. To get up there, we had to take a cable car up the hillside. During the ride, we were able to look out over the city and see all the things that we had seen on foot. By far the most prominent building in the Barcelona skyline is la Sagrada Familia. It towers over everything in the city and is quite easy to see. The cable car ride dropped us off at the castle, so we walked around the grounds, which gave us a really good view of both the city and the water. From there, it was easy to tell that Barcelona is an absolutely gorgeous city, something that wasn’t always so obvious when we were down in the streets, wandering around and not knowing where we were.