Barcelona and Montserrat, Catalunya, Espanya

Only a matter of days after returning home to the United States, my mother learned that she would return to Spain at the end of that same month, this time for work. As her company was sending her to Barcelona, Spain’s second largest city and capital of the Catalan speaking region of Catalunya (Catalonia in Spanish), I took this development as a cue to return to the city for the first time in eight and a half years.

I landed in Barcelona on a Wednesday in time to meet my mother and her coworkers for dinner. The following Thursday, we headed outside of Barcelona by train to visit the Benedictine monastery of Santa María de Monserrat. Located aside the face of a mountain with numerous jagged peaks (hence the name: serrated mountain), the monastery was built around a shrine to the black virgin, the most venerated saint in all of Catalonia. A site of worship for over a thousand years, many of the buildings existing today date to the 1400s. Overnight climbs to the top of the mountain remain a traditional pastime for Catalan youth. After wondering the grounds for a while, we were able to hear a short performance by L’Escolonia, one the oldest boys choirs in Europe, before climbing the grand staircase to visit the shrine itself. In the afternoon, we switched gears to visit Antonio Gaudi’s Templo de la Sagrada Familia, one of Barcelona’s signature sights and perhaps Europe’s oldest construction site.

Friday morning, after wishing farewell to my mother, I went to Parc Güell – another Guadi work – and for a long walk along the Passeig de Gràcia and the surrounding L’Eixample district. Of particular interest here were two Gaudi Batlló (left) and Casa Milà (above). On Saturday, I ventured around the old city or Barri Gòtic. Here I visited the Museu de Ciutat, where I walked above the ruins of the former Roman city and the adjoining ruins of the Visigothic Palace, and the Cathedral. My stroll also took me the famed (though to my mind overrated) boulevard of Las Ramblas and by a number of soaring medieval churches, architectural masterpieces burnt during the anti-clerical violence that shook the city at the start of the twentieth century.

On my last day in Barcelona, I joined my host, Antonio, and headed to the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya where, in additional to seeing some awesome frescos collected from chapels located high in the Pyrenees Mountains to the north of the city, I also briefly met accomplished Spanish historian Sir J. H. Elliott. In the afternoon, I wandered through the former grounds of the 1992 Olympics to view the city from the old fort at the very top of Montjuic. By dinnertime, I was back in Sevilla.