My wife and I will be spending 2 nights in Barcelona, first week of September (we’re on a cruise that ends there, and decided to stay for a bit before rushing home).
So we’re looking for any tourist tips: what’s a good neighborhood to stay in? Any hotel recommendations? Restaurants? Must see, things to do?
I was there eons ago (Jesus, has it really been 10 years?), and my memory of it is sadly fading now. But I recall really liking Cal Pep – http://www.calpep.com/Ingles/index_ing.html. Great tapas.
My wife and I were there for a week and loved it. Wonderful city. I think. What was the question again? And where are my keys?
I stayed in the Hotel Colon a couple of years ago for a week. The room was nice enough, and the location was excellent.
A large cathedral and its plaza are right in front. Easy walk to the metro in case you want to get to a different part of town.
Las Ramblas is an easy walk.
Mobile phone stores are close by (if you want a local SIM).
All kinds on unique alleys, restaurants, bars, and historical points of interest right out the door, and the old historical district on the other side of the adjacent road (sorry, I can’t remember its name, and I don’t know how to force Google maps to use Spanish instead of Catalan – I can’t find anything there that I remember!).
Now that I’m fondly remembering Barcelona, I really want to go back again.
Heading off to a meeting so excuse me for not stopping to gush, but there have been several threads where both mattmcl and I (among many others) have answered similar questions. One was opened by Eva Luna. I think Bayard already recomended Cal Pep in the last one
Balthisar, the local government has decided that everything has to be in Catalan… if you go for example to the metro transports webpage and search for Plaza Cataluña they claim unknown, it’s got to be Plaça Catalunya :rolleyes: Compare with Bilbao metro, whose database contains names in Spanish, Basque, several foreign languages, nicknames, and an algorithm to try and figure out what may you have typoed.
I was in Barcelona in the spring of 1965. I stayed at a cheap hotel on The Ramblas recommended in Frommer’s Europe on Five Dollars a Day (No, this was not science fiction. It was a great guidebook then).
As an Architecture buff I had to see La Sagrada Familia, Antonio Gaudi’s masterpiece cathedral, plus several other of Gaudi’s architectural creations. Barcelona is an eminently walkable city, mostly flat, with The Ramblas as a good starting point for exploration.
Fifty years on, Barcelona remains one of my favorite cities, and I hope to see it again before I die.
My hotel recommendations are as follows:
5Rooms - a small B&B set on two floor of an amazing townhouse, a block away from Placa Catalunya/Passeig de Gracia (www.the5rooms.com)
Praktik Bakery - www.hotelpraktikbakery.com
It’s not a cathedral, it’s an expiatory temple. The cathedral is in the Old Town; there are at least two Spanish cities that have two cathedrals (León and Vitoria), but Barcelona isn’t one of them.
I visited Barcelona several years ago, and was absolutely enthralled by Gaudí’s architecture. I spent five hours exploring Sagrada Familia, and could have spent five more. My other favorite was Casa Batlló.
I stayed right off the Ramblas, convenient to everything. Barcelona is one of my favorite cities; I hope to return some day.
I tried looking up “expiatory temple” but mostly it only led to links for Sagrada Familia and some temples in Mexico. For those of us that aren’t Catholic, can you explain the different a little bit? If it’s Catholic, it’s always been a “cathedral” to me.
Is this something that’s being built because Gaudi wanted expiation, or is one expected to go there for expiation?
I’m Catholic, and I’ve never heard the phrase. Maybe it’s an architectural term.
A cathedral is just whatever church is home base for a bishop. The diocese I grew up in was split into 2 at one point when I was a kid; and the humble parish church in the next town was the HQ for the bishop of the new diocese, and was therefore re-branded as a cathedral (with no other changes).
A cathedral is “a bishop’s parish”, in the shortest definition; it’s the church where the bishop usually celebrates Mass and in whose territory (sometimes in the same building, sometimes not) he lives and has his offices. The name comes from Greek καθέδρα via Latin cathedra, meaning “seat, chair”: the cathedral is a bishop’s seat - his “capital church”.
The Sagrada Familia was an idea of Josep Maria Bocabella, a friend, mentor and mecenas of Gaudi’s. It’s a sacrifice, to be built with the donations of believers. In some churches, you will have seen the mementos left by people who reckoned their prayers were answered (I understand Guadalupe sanctuary has tons of them, for example): this is a similar idea but taller.
Gaudí, who was very devout of Our Lady, wanted to dedicate it to her; Mr. Bocabella, president and founder of an association of Brothers of Saint Joseph, countered with his own favourite saint. Half for you, half for me and let’s add the Holy Child, we got the Sagrada Familia, the Holy Family.
The money from visitors is considered part of the sacrificial donations; after all, if you want to visit it enough to pay for the pleasure, you probably want it built, right? None of that money goes to the diocese, and the diocese doesn’t provide any money for the construction (money from general collections still goes to Caritas and the diocese pays the priest’s salaries, as in any other parish).
For those who have time and would rather not go running around the city, my best recommendation is start at Hospital de Sant Pau, have lunch nearby, then walk down Paseo Gaudí to the Sagrada Família. The Hospital’s architect, Lluís Doménech i Montaner (we normally use both lastnames in his case because Doménech is one of the Catalan “Smiths”), had the fortune and the misfortune of being contemporary with Gaudí: he was part of the same movement and will probably spend eternity being “that guy who made very pretty buildings in and around Barcelona c. 1900 and who was not Gaudí”. Sant Pau is still a working hospital but the hospital parts are now completely outside the historic buildings. Another option is to start at the SF and go up to the hospital.
There’s tons of restaurants in the area, of all types and price ranges. Across the street upside of the SF you have bad-sandwich places, a buffet that’s a favorite of local retirees and families with children, a Fargi (wraps and ice cream); a Basque-ish style asador (for meat lovers) in Roselló between Nàpols and Roger de Flor, property of an Argentinian; a vegetarian in the corner of Roger de Flor with Diagonal (the store across Roger de Flor from it sells some dangerously-good ham), a Vietnamese that’s stood in place for almost 50 years in Nápols… around the hospital, the best way to find a place to eat is to just start down the Passeig. Again, there’s all kinds. Avoid the places with the big cardboard paella pictures, those are precooked.
Since I see your last post now, jsc1953: if you attend Mass in the SF and you get a priest who gives peace in a dozen languages, he likes meeting visitors right after and gives them a special blessing.
In addition to Gaudi’s masterpieces, I highly recommend the *Palau de la Música Catalana. *Walk around it to experience everything in the exterior. Then enter and sign up for a guided tour (in English). It’s the only way you can see (but not photograph) the magnificent interior, including the concert hall with the inverted stained-glass dome and the muses emerging from the stage walls.