Barcelona Travelogue: Day 5, Dec. 27

Day 5, Dec. 27: Tourists, at last

We got an early start on our last full day in Spain, determined to see as many of the sights as possible, now that the holiday was over and places were open again.

We began at La Sagrada Familia, an ever-under-construction church which has become Barcelona’s most recognizable land-mark. Work began on the church in 1870 and with luck, it should be complete within 25 or 30 years. The architect, Antonio Gaudi, devoted the later portion of his life to this project, and his design is at once strange and breath-taking. Gaudi emphasizes natural, organic forms – the interior of the church seems to be a grove of tall, tall trees; the spires put me in mind of coral and sponges; and the symbolism is pervasive and striking – for example: eighteen bell towers: twelve for the apostles, four for authors of the Gospels, one for Mary and one for Christ.

I was especially struck by the challenge of maintaining the design and managing the work over the course of 150+ years. Construction has been financed solely through donations from the parish and visitors to the site – this meant that work was halted periodically during the early years of the last century; now, however, the coffers are filled by the admission fees and donations left by tourists like myself, and work is paced only by the difficulty in finding stone of the right character and craftsmen of appropriate skill.




After doing our part to support work on La Sagrada by spending untold hundreds of Euros at the gift shop, we took the metro to the old-Barcelona and toured a museum devoted to Picasso. It was great, but I had been so moved by La Sagrada that I was not up to the task of absorbing these smaller master-pieces.

Tapas for lunch, followed by mugs of xocolata (sp?) – essentially small bowls of chocolate sauce, served piping hot… deliriously decadent. I really, really like Spain.

We finished the day with a walk through the Barcelona Zoo, turning the reigns over to the kids at long last (so far as they were concerned). I was surprised to discover a dolphin-show in what was otherwise a small and (for me, slightly depressing) zoo.

For dinner, a final feast of tapas, this time at a restaurant which from the exterior seemed to be an upscale and happening, but turned out to be a high-volume, eat-it-and-beat-it place similar to Blue C Sushi back home in Seattle. After five months of trying to slow down and eat our meals at a pace similar to our French hosts (two-hour lunch, three-hour dinner), eating-it-and-beating-it was a welcome respite, so we did.

The next morning, we were up at the crack of late-morning, packing, throwing our bags into our double-parked car, stocking up on churros for the road, and heading “home” to France.