Friday, June 12: The Barri Gotic

"Barri Gotic" is Catalan for "Gothic Neighborhood", which is the name of the oldest part of Barcelona.  It's fascinating!  We spent most of our time on pedestrian streets, some wide and some quite narrow.  Most of them were bordered by tall buildings with businesses on the first floor and apartments or condos above, and the usual wrought-iron balconies.  Most of the buildings, especially on the narrow streets, were quite old.  The businesses, however, were quite modern.  There were some fascinating and different shops, like one that made very old-fashioned sorts of baby clothes, and lots of more usual clothes and shoe shops and places that sold modern things like computers and cell phones.  It was a lovely day and lots of people were out strolling and shopping.  It was a fun place to be.

Here are two pictures of the sort of streets we walked along, one narrow and older-feeling and one wider.  You can see that many of the balconies had lovely plants on them.

 We also saw a few balconies making very practical use of the outdoor air:

Sometimes the streets opened up into plazas.  Here is a lovely old mosaic fountain in one of them:

 That same square opened up into a display of Roman tombs:  

There were signs explaining that when these tombs were discovered they designed the plaza around them.  We had a wonderful lunch of tapas in a outdoor restaurant in that same square.  Spanish tapas are small savory dishes.  Each would be just a little snack on its own, or you can order a bunch to make up a whole meal. Delicious!

This picture shows a very typical Barcelona building, with stores on the first floor and people living in the floors above.

It was very common to see flags hung from the balconies.  We guessed that they are expressions of Catalan patriotism and the wish for an independence referendum.

Some more pretty things we saw during our wandering:

And a small friend we met who demanded a bit of attention from us, since we're all three committed cat lovers:

Barcelona is full of pretty churches.  We explored three more of them today.  First, La Iglesia de Santa Anna.  Second, Santa Maria de Pi.  Like Santa Maria del Mar yesterday, these churches were too close to other buildings for me to take a good picture of either one from outside and this time the lighting inside wasn't good enough to get any good pictures inside with my little camera.  You'll have to take my word that they were beautiful.  The name of the second church puzzled me.  As a math geek I was wondering if there really is a patron saint of 3.14159.  I asked about the meaning when I bought my ticket to go in and it's actually pronounced Santa Maria de Pee.  I was so glad I didn't have any small children with me to fall over giggling!  It actually means Saint Maria of the Pines.

Finally, we visited the cathedral: La Catedral de la Santa Cruz y Santa Eulalia  (the cathedral of the Holy Cross and Saint Eulalia).  Saint Eulalia is one of the patron saints of Barcelona and was apparently martyred during a period of Christian persecution in 303 AD at the age of 13.

The other churches we saw in Barcelona would be considered large by North American standards, but the cathedral was *huge*.  And it was in a large square, so I could take pictures:

Very impressive, both inside and out.  Here is one of the many side altars:

Our ticket included a ride in a "lift" up to the roof.  I wasn't sure I wanted to do that, but after some sisterly persuasion I made it.  I am not too good with heights.  It was pretty scary at first, but the views were breathtaking.  They had sort of a metal scaffolding over some of the roof, with railings at the edge that were quite a bit behind the actual edge of the roof, which helped a lot.  I was very glad I stretched my comfort zone and went up.  Here are two views over the rooftops of Barcelona.  In the first one, you can see the Mediterranean in the distance:

Looking up at the high steeple and the bell tower:

There were pretty little windows way up there too  I wondered how often anyone besides tourists actually looks out of them.

After we returned to the ground, we walked through the "chapter house", where they had a shaded courtyard with a pretty fountain...

 ...and also of all things, a flock of geese.

At many points in our walk, especially near the churches we saw many whimsical little carvings, which Barbara says are technically called gargoyles:

 

The last one is hard to make out because it was peeking down from a high roof, but it reminded me of Jiminy Cricket!  They were fun, but I also liked them because it meant to me that the individual stone carvers were allowed some freedom to express themselves.  It felt like getting a glimpse of the workers who created all of these incredible buildings.  It's hard to imagine the effort and number of people it took to build things like these without all of our modern technology.  No cranes, power tools, or trucks to carry all of those heavy blocks of stones!

Our original plan was to continue to the museum near the cathedral, which included more Roman artifacts from that area of the city, but our explorations had taken long enough that we were had just half an hour before closing time, so we left the museum for another day.   Exploring always takes more time than you budget for, but part of the fun is giving yourselves time to stop and look at things that might not have been on the original agenda.

We were tired after all of this walking and decided to eat at the Italian restaurant that was right next door to our building.  The food was great (like all the food we had in Barcelona!) and it was fun communicating with the waiter.  He spoke to us in a mixture of Spanish and Italian.  I answered him in Spanish but Barbara and Mike had learned a little Italian for a trip to Italy several years ago and they were able to use that as well.  And since Italian and Spanish share a lot, we got along just fine and didn't need to fall back on English much at all.