Day 28 Montjuic

Our destination today was the Montjuic (Jewish Mountain) Park, a large green area with with magnificent views of the city from the fortifications at its peak. The precinct contains at least four museums (of which we visited two), and Olympic complex plus a number of gardens. One could easily spend several days here. We were surprised at how easy it was to get up onto the mountain - aided by a seamless transition from Metro to funicular railway, all for the price of a single fare. The funicular station was not at the very top of the mountain. The peak could be reached by cable car for €6.50 or on foot. We chose the latter option because of our new economy drive. Before that though, we visited the Joan Miro (apparently pronounced zhoahn) museum just down the road from the funicular station.

Photography was not allowed in this museum. Although there were a few outstanding pieces, the majority of the work did not inspire us. As with Picasso, Miro started out as a figurative painter but then moved on to abstract forms. Many of the paintings were entitled either Painting, Person, or Woman with bird and star. Our opinions differ on this - Joan thinks they were ordinary, but I liked a fair few of them. The museum was at great pains to point out that Miro was constantly experimenting, and he did express in various media apart from painting.

Following this we did the walk all the way up to the fortress, a good kilometer or more, but it wasn't too hard because it was a beautiful day. As mentioned earlier, there were pretty good view in all directions, including over the Mediterranean. At the base of the seaward side of the mountain was a humungous port catering for containers, ferries and cruise ships. We ate lunch from a cafeteria inside the fort and then made our way to our next stop using a bus which dropped us at the Plaza de Espagna, back down in the city. The air was quite hazy, so photographs don't come out right.

The then walked up to the grandiose building (probably originally a palace) housing the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya. This sat on a hill about 500 m from the plaza, and we we gratefully used the escalators provided to scale these heights. After getting our tickets we wanted to view three of the galleries - Romanesque, Gothic and Renaissance/Baroque. We were shattered to find that the entrance to both the Gothic and Renaissance sections were cordoned off for maintenance reasons. Recovering from this shock, we wandered upstairs to at least see the Baroque and Modern sections, only to discover a vast open and empty space under a huge dome (perhaps the palace ballroom?). Another British tourist commented how surreal it was to have an art gallery with no pictures. However, we eventually found the Baroque and Modern. The latter was much better than we had expected because it included impressionists etc, i.e. not exclusively abstract.

For us, the highlight of the visit was the Romanesque section. This contained mainly frescoes rescued from small 12th century churches along the northern border area. The museum had gone to inordinate lengths to recreate the physical geometry of the chapels/naves etc of the source buildings so as to maintain the original visual effect. The many frescoes covered a large area.and are an outstanding effort at preservation. Very few people were in it, more's the pity.

Our day of art viewing left us exhausted, and especially foot weary.

In the spirit of economization, we bought French bread, Spanish cured ham, and cheese from a "supermarket" run by migrants from the sub-continent who spoke good English and were quite helpful. We consumed this in our little room, accompanied by a nice bottle of supermarket Rioja - a red wine. Following this, the washer woman and the human mangle collaborated to do the laundry.