Barcelona, Spain

 Barcelona! In casual chitchat when people asked where we were going next, if we said, "Barcelona" we'd get a knowing smile.  Everyone, it seems, had an opinion. 

Barcelona was a beautiful city which my photos don't do justice to. Wide streets, lined with trees, and buildings of limited height so sunlight reached to the ground. Many buildings where we were staying were from the Industrial era, so elaborate sculpted facades, wrought-iron balconies, heavy carved doors. There were diagonal cuts to corners of buildings at street intersections so every intersection was wide, great sight lines for cars and pedestrians. Outdoor dining was everywhere in the pleasant climate. A little too large and sprawling to be totally walkable, but we put lots of miles on our shoes.

In the plaza near the maritime museum, 

An eternal flame at the top of the red arc, dedicated to the defenders of the city during the invasion of 1713-1714.

 

Here's a straight-on view of the base of the eternal flame, with the dedication explained in many languages.

 

Overlooking the city

Many cathedrals; this one in the main plaza

Nearby, but far less grand in scale, this one is dedicated to mariners.

the "rambla;" pedestrian friendly and lots of outdoor dining options

with buildings in the city limited to 5 or 6 stories high, and wide streets, there's lots of sunlight

For everyone who said “Make sure you go to Sagrada Familia,” here it is. Just a quick grab of photos from my phone, not well sorted. The details are incredible. Just two quick facts that intrigued me: when completed, the central tower will be just a few centimetres shorter than the neighbouring mountain—deliberately, so the works of humans don’t seem to arrogantly challenge the works of god; and all the images and statuary are on the exterior of the building while the inside is all abstract and alludes to forest in the shape of the columns. We're extremely non-religious but the symbolism in many parts of the building really transcended a particular religion.

 

 

We also visited the maritime museum. It’s located in the original royal shipyard from 800 years ago. They have a model of the Nao Victoria and a full-size reproduction of a Royal galley as it would have looked when new (the gold statue of Poseidon is its figurehead). They also have a floating 100-year-old sailing ship docked nearby, of similar point in time to the Pasquale Flores (a ship owned by the same Fundacion that owns El Galeon). And when we went aboard and started chatting with Carlos, one of the crew members of the museum's ship, it turned out that he had briefly crewed on El Galeon in 2013! We tall ship folks are a very small group, geographically spread out.

While walking near the main downtown center and the government plaza, I did find some rubber duckies. But our guide walked instead to a display of small statues of a medieval peasant ... pooping. Really! I guess in ancient times, when famine was a substantial risk, feces both animal and human were valued as fertilizer (no, we're not going to think about the possibility of disease spread...) and somehow became associated with good luck. Further on, though, the statues became embellished -- similar to the way the basic yellow rubber duckie had a pirate hat added, or Queen Elizabeth's crown, etc, -- the "pooping peasant" statues became cartoons of cinematic figures, or political ones, or other unlikely icons. After that amusing cultural discussion, one of the members of our walking tour complained that we spent so much time on the end of the digestive system, and oh look! there's a cute pastry shop to attend to the beginning of the digestive system, and wasn't that a lot nicer to think about?

 

Here's one of the massive doors I mentioned. 

   

There was a disconcerting amount of graffiti in the city, but not on more elaborate surfaces like this; mostly on the roll-down shutters that closed businesses at night, for example. We learned that the graffiti didn't necessarily indicate a dangerous area like it would in many cities we'd visited in the US. One of the sanitation workers explained to me that well, graffiti wasn't a priority. Their first priority was litter, and rats -- indeed the streets were amazingly clean and huge trash bins were easy to spot. The graffiti was just an inconvenience, not a "risk." 

And finally, you can't think "Spain" without flamenco, so we caught a show while we were there; here's a tiny clip.