SPAIN
2009
Day
17 May 25
Tuesday
BARCELONA
We got up a little after 8:00 and went downstairs for another
good breakfast.
We walked over to Santa Maria del Mar church, which is a
beautiful Catalan-Gothic church dating from the 1300s.
It was built during the reign of King Jaume II, who also oversaw the
construction of Barcelona’s cathedral. Begun
in 1324, it only took five years to complete.
At the time, the church was situated on the seashore. Now it is some
distance to the beach. Its magnificence was intended to symbolize the naval
supremacy of the Kingdom of Aragon.
The church has a huge interior, octagonal towers, large bare
surfaces, rib vaults and soaring vertical lines.
The interior was burned out in 1936 during the Spanish Civil war.
The interior was more like French Gothic than Spanish as there was no
choir in the middle as in other Spanish churches that we have seen. An
interesting noveIldefonso
Falcones, Cathedral of the Sea.
From there we walked up Via Laietana until we came to the
stree
t on which the Palau
de la Musica Catalana. The front
looked very Gaudi-like, but we couldn’t get a good look because the street was
very narrow. We could not get a tour
for today, but bought tickets for tomorrow at 11:00.
I will also give a full description for Day 18.
Buy your tickets early!!
We walked back out to Laietana and found our way over to the Ramblas.
We walked past the hotel where we stayed on the tour.
Several blocks down, we stopped at a chocolate shop and had their famous
hot chocolate. It was very rich. 
We also explored the Bocheria St. Josef which is the market.
It was quite large with everything imaginable for sale.
There was beautiful fruit displays, racks
of ham hanging, tables of all kinds of seafood and meat, wonderful fresh
vegetables, breads, sweets – all good enough to eat if we had had a place to
cook it.
After another short walk we found the information
office so we might get information about music events.
There didn’t seem to be any today or tomorrow.
We walked all the way down the Ramblas to Columbus’ monument.
The
monument is 197 ft tall. It was constructed for the Exposicion de Barcelona
in 1888, and is located at the site where Columbus returned to Spain
after his first voyage to the Americas. The monument serves as a reminder that
Barcelona is where Christopher Columbus reported to Queen Isabella and Ferdinand
after Columbus' most famous trip. At the very top of the monument stands a 24 ft
tall bronze statue atop a 131 ft tall Corinthian column 
The statue was sculpted by Rafael Atche and is said to depict Columbus
pointing towards the New World with his right hand, while holding a scroll in
the left. As it was sited, instead of pointing to the west towards the New
World, the statue points east towards Columbus's supposed home city of Genoa .
The column, hung with a device bearing an anchor stands on an octagonal
pedestal from which four bronze winged Victories
taking flight towards the four corners of the world. Four buttresses
against the octagonal pedestal bear portrait medallions that depict people
related to Columbus. Seated against the buttresses are four figures that
represent the four realms of Spain: Catalonia, and the kingdoms ofLeon, Aragon
and Castile. The octagonal base has eight bronze bas-relief panels that
depict important scenes in Columbus's first voyage to the Americas; alternating
with the bas-reliefs are eight coats-of-arms representing locations that
Columbus visited. This monument was
most impressive.
We crossed the street and bought tickets for a 35
minute cruise around the harbor. It
was a bright sunny day and we had a good ride along the docks where we saw many
large cargo ships and loading docks with their large cranes.
We went back to our room at 3:00 and found that
it had not been cleaned. We
took our books and went up on the roof where there was a bar (no bartender),
comfortable chairs and umbrella and a wonderful view of the harbor. We finally
found someone who located a bartender and we enjoyed a refreshing drink.
We walked back over to Barceloneta and had dinner at Casa De Estalivi.
It was very crowded. There
was a party of young ladies from England next to us who were celebrating
someone’s birthday and an upcoming wedding.
We had a fairly good dinner. My
wife said it was too “brown”. We
had a salad. I had calamari -too
many to eat, and my wife had paella (again).
