Kiwi Roaming

Gaudi – It seems Antoni Gaudi wasn’t really appreciated in his lifetime but his architecture is certainly one of the biggest draw cards in Barcelona. I wrote about his basilica the Sagrada Familia in my last blog but there is so much more to see and we barely scratched the surface. Rich people did commission Gaudi to design their elaborate houses. Walking through the centre of the city you can see Casa Batlló which is known as the house of bones, and Casa Milà both UNESCO world heritage sites (like all of Gaudi’s work to be fair). The street they are on is full of large mansions with amazing embellishments by other architects. Now all hotels and some of the most expensive shops in the world, it’s awesome to see them from the outside for free (yes you could queue to get tickets and go inside).

Park Güell – One of the rich Catalan industrialists he worked for was Eusebi Güell who had a vision for a 35 house subdivision for the very rich like himself, so he commissioned Gaudi to design and oversee the build. Unfortunately the land they chose was far from the city, and built in the late 1800’s / early 1900’s before wide use of motorcars, so only 3 main houses and a number of satellite buildings were created (one where Gaudi lived, one Güell and the other his lawyer) but they made the most amazing infrastructure, a water management system, grotto’s and community spaces, all fantastically designed and embellished with mosaics. Mike raved about Park Güell when they visited and said we should go for a guided tour which we did and we loved. I hadn’t slept much that night as was up supporting Imogen who was at the hospital with Marian (she is home and well again) so we didn’t spend as long as we’d hoped there – and it started to rain as we left anyway. But wow, the works, the design, the modern ideas, the setting were all amazing.

Eixample – during this same period of industrialisation Barcelona grew significantly but unlike so many other cities that growth was designed with a grid system of octagonal blocks, wide wide streets, amazing tree lined pedestrian promenades alongside cycleways and the streets for cars. This was called Eixample or the expansion. The buildings are all low rise apartments with balconies, there are parks and squares everywhere with restaurants and shops. We loved this aspect of the city. Gaudi was one of the many architects involved in designing buildings here and his influence is seen often.

Ciutat Vella – or the old city, includes a really well preserved gothic quarter with narrow alleyways that aren’t very straight, a massive gothic cathedral, civic squares and again low buildings. They even have their own Arc de Triomphe which is made with bricks! While we enjoyed the walk around here we had just been to a few gothic cities so it felt familiar, which may be why we enjoyed the Eixample more?

Glòries – we stayed on the edge of Eixample where there are newer office buildings and apartment blocks. We could walk to the old city and we enjoyed walking down one of the wonderfully wide avenues called Av. Diagonal. It was a well serviced area with the metro and trams and right next to Clot (like 6 minutes walk) which had an outdoor Westfield (I will write more about this tomorrow). There were heaps of bars, restaurants, small markets and huge supermarkets all in our neighbourhood, not to mention gig venues like the one we went to when we arrived. We walked around late at night and just after 5am on the day we left and always felt perfectly safe. The streets are wide and footpath seperate from cyclist areas makes it very easy to navigate safely too.

Barcelona is such an easy city to navigate. We also went to the port area, up into the hills to Parc de Montjuïc – where we took the funicular then walked (didn’t take the gondola) and used the amazing network of outdoor escalators. Plus on the other side of the city google took us up above Park Güell where we walked through suburban streets and down hundreds of steps. So we saw a really diverse slice of the city. On our last evening we encountered thousands of Barca supporters heading to the game walking in the opposite direction to us and with such wide streets we weren’t crushed. Such a great walking city.

Below are pics from Park Güell.