Day 76 Gaudi and Paella

Barcelona has been another of the real surprises of this trip. It is a huge, wonderful, diverse, vibrant, modern and yet also historic, beach side city. With rivers running to the north and the south of the city, the sea on the eastern side and mountains in the west it was a natural place for the Romans to build a city over 2000 years ago. Today it is a shopping, cultural and tourist mecca.

We spent the first day exploring on foot beginning at a vibrant, colourful and exciting local produce market which sold fruit, vegetables, flowers, seafood, meat (including sheep heads), chicken, eggs, cheese and much more. Architecturally Barcelona is famous for its Gaudi heritage. There are a number of apartment blocks and other buildings that bear his unique style and design, as well as the famous, still to be completed, cathedral. It would be easy to call his buildings ‘ugly’ but his unusual lines, his love of nature, and the absolute uniqueness of his work seem to leave even the most cynical viewer impressed.

Barcelona is, first and foremost, a port city with a bustling commercial and cruise liner port. As a city it also bears the hallmarks of a government that is keen to invest in infrastructure. The railway station, roads, metro system, port facilities, aerial gondola, bike tracks, sculptures, public spaces and so much more make this a wonderful city – a city that the Catalan people are very proud of and one that visitors seem to also enjoy.

In the evening we headed back down to the port area to a restaurant recommended to us, but after searching for over an hour without success, we admitted defeat. We wandered out of the tourist area and into a suburb that we later discovered was where many local fishermen live. We stumbled across a little seafood restaurant, which was only just opening at 9pm. It was tiny, with only about four or five tables out the front. We had no real reason to choose it over the hundreds of other restaurants we had passed that night, but something about it appealed to us, so we sat down. We ordered a dish that needs to be shared by two people who are prepared to wait 30 minutes for it to cook. It was worth the wait to eat a local delicacy, paella; rice cooked with mussels, tender calamari, prawns and tomato. Yum!

Gaudi and paella were just two of the highlights of a great Day 76 in Barcelona.