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Barcelona - Day 1
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Sophie and I just got back from a vacation to Barcelona with her family. It was very nice. Barcelona is a beautiful city with a lot of history.
Barcelona is the capital of Catalonia. Catalonia is an autonomous region of Spain. This autonomy gives Catalonia the right to make certain decisions and grants official recognition of the fact that the Catalan people have a unique culture and heritage. If we go way back, Catalonia was first occupied 200,000 years ago in the middle paleolithic. Around 900 B.C. Celtic tribes came over the Pyrenees. They merged with the local tribes and eventually became the Celtiberian people. Later the Greeks showed up and established market towns. Then it was the Carthaginians. It is theorized that the Carthaginians were the ones who established what would become modern Barcelona though there had been settlements in the area for a long time.
The father of the famous Hannibal, Hamilcar Barca, a Carthaginian General, has been mythologized as the founder of Barcelona. Though it is usually accepted that the origin of the name is from the Iberic name Barkeno. There is another romantic myth of Barcelona's founding. This one has Hercules on a journey with Jason and the Argonauts. One of Jason's nine ships goes missing and Hercules sets out to find it. He finds the ship ashed up and destroyed. The crew is alive and well. They are so taken by the beauty of the place they landed that they name it Barca Nona (Ninth Ship).
In 218 B.C. Hannibal came through Catalonia on his way to Italy during the second Punic war. During the course of the war Rome conquered Catalonia. They called Barcelona Barcino and used it as a base to conqure the rest of the Iderian Peninnsula.
In the 5th century, after the collapse of the Roman empire, the Visigoths invaded the area. After that it was the Moors in the 8th Century and the Franks in the 9th. Catalonia became part of the buffer zone between the Moors and the Franks known as the Spanish Marches. This area was ruled by the Count of Barcelona. Eventually the Moors and the Franks declined and over time a whole slew of independent little kingdoms sprung up. until the 12th century Catalonia a ruled by the duke of Barcelona it was then incorporated, through marriage, under the crown of Aragon. In the 15th century the kingdom of Aragon was merged with the kingdom of Castile and Spain was born. A lot of confusing and boring crap happened after this but worth mentioning is that Napoleon occupied Catalonia during the Napolianic wars and it was annexed to France.
After this Catalonia and Barcelona's history are more or less just the a subsection of the history of Spain itself and I don't really care to explain The civil war and Franco and all the rest.
Our trip to Barcelona began when we left Meribel at around 8:00 in the morning on October 4th. There was snow on the ground and we couldn't wait to get somewhere warmer. The drive took about 7 hours. We didn't do anything the first night other than a quick shopping trip and getting a cup of coffee at a cafe. They have something called cafe con leche here. I call it a normal cup of coffee.
I will make room here for a little tangent:
There is this problem in Europe where they have coffee and espresso but they don't make a distinction between the two. I can not even begin to describe how frustrating this is. When Sophie and I went to Hyeres I had to go completly without coffee. You go to a restaurant and order coffee and you get an espresso. When we got to Line's parent's house I was offered a coffee. I was so glad to finally get a coffee and I was given an espresso! Why does everyone say coffee if it is an espresso? If you use an espresso machine to make it why would you call it coffee? there are two differant machines; A coffee machine and an espresso machine! Needless to say, at 9:00 in the morning when you want a coffee and someone hands you a shot glass of dirt tasting crap it can put you in a somewhat foul mood.
Anyways, cafe con leche comes in a mug and cream. Amazing! Even more amazing is how the French seem to love it but are unable to decipher the cryptic secrets that lay behind it's flavour and thus make it themselves when they return home.
On our first whole day in Barcelona we went to the Sagrad Familia. I can only say that it was everything I had been waiting to see and more. It is completly amazing. Gaudi has long been my favorite architect. I am completly puzzled that there is nobody emulating his style today. He is kind of like the cafe con leche of architecture. modern archicts see his work and say "Wow, it's so spectacular. Gaudi is one of the greatest architects of the last 500 years" and then they go and build another concrete slab building.
Construction of the Sagrada Familia began in 1882. Gaudi spent over 40 years working on it. It was originally thought it would take a few hundred years to complete due to all the intricate stone work but thanks to computers this process will take a lot less time and construction is now planned to conclude in 2026. I'll let the pictures say the rest.
After Sagrada Familia we went to Park Guell. Another Gaudi creation. This place is also very cool. Originally, park Guell was designed to be a park only for certain people. There were property developements all around the park and it would have been a private park for them. The problem was that nobody bought the properties. A complete mystery to me. I'm sure if people had the opportunity to have their own private Gaudi park today the property would sell for top dollar. Anyways, again, I will let the photos speak for themselves.
That night we did some walking around and I took some more photos. Check them out
Latest Comments (2)
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the cafe con leche of architecture (reply)
Oct 14, 2008 15:23 EST by dardodd
Hey Matt, I like how you talk about the cafe con leche and then later on incorporate it into the bit about architecture...well done I say.
Nice pictures by the way.
Darius
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history lesson from matt (barcelona) (reply)
Oct 13, 2008 00:43 EST by johnddr
love the pictures and the history .....the pictures are not very big though.do you have any idea how to enlarge them. i can see that doing a proper blog takes more effort than what i imagined, very nice keep,em coming. i,m up late it,s after one a.m. happy thanksgiving (holiday monday here). going up.....dad
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