The tourist bit

Sagrada Familia, 26 July 2004

 We spent yesterday being tourists in Barcelona, and it was a hot, sweaty and thoroughly worthwhile experience.  We were last in the Sagrada Familia ten years ago all but a week, and though the plane tree inspired columns were mostly in place, it was still very much a building site.  Now, though some of the outside building work is still to be done - and they reckon it'll take another 11 or 12 years - the interior is essentially complete.  It is utterly stunning, and worth the journey.  It is also lousy with visitors, of course, and the queue to book timed visit slots looked like it was hours long.  Having booked on line and printed our tickets, we breezed straight in, a few minutes ahead of our scheduled time.

Sagrada Familia, 19 July 2014

There is a museum in the undercroft, and highly informative it was.  They are recreating many of Gaudí's scale models, and there are plenty of images of the early stages of building.
The central tower has yet to be built, so the full impact of this extraordinary building has yet to come.  But the exterior is already vast and hugely impressive, in its zany and incoherent way.  I hadn't registered before that the flamboyant modernist structure is added to a complete neo-gothic crypt and apse walls.  That's already enough to make the design of the place thoroughly puzzling, and it just gets stranger as the work progresses, giving the impression, Martyn felt, that they were making it up as they went along.  We'll be watching progress with interest.

From there, after a bit of humming and hawing on my part, we bought day tickets at €27 per man for one of the tourist bus services.  First we headed for the the Parc Güell.  It's still quite a climb to get up there from where the bus drops you, but at least there are escalators for the steepest parts at the top.  Having failed to pre-book entry tickets, we got there to find the familiar long queues.  We just had a wander round the free bits, from which we could get a good feel for the place, and quite good views of some of the houses.

Effects of litres of beer: before and after.  Girls on R to note woman on L

Unmemorable lunch at an egg-and-chips with everything joint, then back on the tour buses.  We had a pretty comprehensive survey of the city's exuberant architecture, and also views across the harbour and out to sea.  We got off the bus at the wet end of the Rambla, and people-watched for a while at a café we'd used the previous night.  Hundreds of people go there to strut their stuff in the evening, or, like us, to watch the world go by.  A current craze seems to be Mr Punch-type swizzles, through which countless hawkers squeak at you as you pass.  I wonder how many children choke on them each week.  And I'm not sure I care to know why one fellow was walking up the Rambla dressed in a two-metre inflatable phallus suit.  From there we ambled back to the Plaça de Catalunya to get the bus back to base, taking side streets in the gothic quarter, and getting predictably lost.

By the time we got back to the bus, we were definitely finished with tourism for the day, and were happy to sit downstairs in the air-conditioned bit.  It's always a bad sign when I start to react audibly to people walking out in front of me and then stopping and gawping at whatever had caught their eye.  I'd also had to deploy the elbow a few times to deter queue-jumpers.  Grumpy old man credentials suitably reinforced, I fear.