We head for Barcelona today, and make a stop in at the Monastery at Montserrat on the way. Montserrat is about 3 hours east of Zaragoza, and around an hour north of Barcelona, so a little detour, but also a very worthwhile one. Mont Serrat actually means ‘serrated mountain’ which is a bloody good description of what you see. It’s highest peak is 1,236m (4,055ft). The chapel here was first written about in the 9th century and the monastery was founded in the 11th century. Pretty remote place to have a monastery, and I’d say that there would have been little disturbances or distractions up there in the 11th century. The monastery was destroyed in 1811 (War of Independence with France) and all the monks were killed. It was rebuilt and repopulated in 1844. Benedictine monks live there today.
Mark says “It was a very windy drive on narrow roads up to Montserrat, however the view as we came around 180 degree turns was spectacular, whether we were looking upwards at Montserrat or down through the valleys. Like every other tourist spot in Spain, Montserrat was chockers with people, and it was little wonder, the views really were spectacular.
The basilica was pretty standard as far as Spanish churches go, plenty of height and gold trim!
I can just imagine a hermit monk coming back to the monastery and announcing a vision for the future – turning their isolated monastery into a massive tourist spot, complete with hotel, shops, train station and cable car, and let’s throw in mountain climbing for good measure. Ahh the irony".
The only thing that I will add about Montserrat was that we had a really big bowl of strawberries and cream in the café there!
- We just drove past a big lego man on the side of the road. We may have the big Pineapple, and the big Prawn, but just outside Lleida (on the way from Zaragoza to Barcelona), Spain has the big lego man!
- There are large nests on top of electricity stations and on some old church spires. And I mean BIG! It turns out that these are stork nests. We’ve seen lots of nests, but no storks yet. We have however, seen lots of eagles and falcons.
BARCELONA:
Well, we’ve made it to Barcelona, and the navigation was pretty easy actually. Looks like a nice place so far! We checked into our hotel and then headed to a laundromat – we really, really needed to wash our clothes more than what they get in the bath! So that involved jumping on a train and finding a place we had the address of (thank you internet for travel blogs and google searches). The trains (metro) are just as fast, efficient and clean as they have been over the rest of Europe. €1.40 gets you a single trip… there are also day passes and ten-trip savers which are very worthwhile. You buy tickets from a machine which is really simple, and then put your ticket into a machine to get in – all nice and easy. When we were coming back, we went to buy two single ride tickets and a young guy stopped us and told us to get one ten-trip saver which we could both use – very handy indeed! (Logical I know, but my brain didn’t work that way when we were looking at all the ticket variations in Spanish!)
We found the laundromat, and a couple of other Aussies in there as well. The concierge in London said it’s only the Aussies who want laundromats, everyone else just has it done by the hotel. At €1.80 for a pair of knickers, I’ll choose the laundromat any time. Anyway, these girls had been travelling for a month, and we had a big discussion about food and wine, the standard Aussie focus.
Laundry done, we went to a bar down the road for dinner. We had grilled vegetables (they do them so well here, we’re falling in love with rock salt), Mark had fish of the day, and I had a steak. It was all really yummy and as we went to order dessert, the waiter talked us out of the tiramisu and into the Crème Catalana as it was ‘home made’. It was very nice too! We like how the waiters all give you their opinion here – every time we have followed them, they have been spot on.
Just a little note here about the area we are staying in. It is called ‘Eixample’. The suburb was part of a new expansion (example) of Barcelona in the early 19th century and follows a rigid grid system of streets. Every corner though is chamfered off, to allow the buildings there to overlook the squares below – it looks very cool and the people who live in the apartments on the corners all have great views from their balconies. Because it was a ‘new’ area, the city’s elite were able to employ the groundbreaking new architects to develop some really spectacular and modern buildings, which are in the ‘Art Nouveau’ style – known in Catalan as ‘Modernisme’.
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