Barcelona (1) La Rambla and Barceloneta

A Brief Whinge from Someone with no Real Problems

I am fed up with the Rona (who isn’t?) but, as I admitted in Swynnerton: A Village in Lockdown last April, we have it easy. Many, probably most, are having a more difficult time than us so, as the saying goes, mustn’t grumble. But I will, anyway. While grateful for our relative good fortune, I yearn to go places, do things and meet people. I am seventy, I do not want to go wild, I just want some reassurance that I am still alive.

The lockdowns have had another strange, personal consequence. It takes me a year or more to complete the posts for a long journey, six months for a week’s break. Since 2010 I have permanently been working on a backlog of two, sometime three trips. I was happy with that, the backlog would disappear, I thought, when the problems of old age stopped us travelling, and I was in no hurry for that to happen.

Barcelona

But we are well, and and the backlog has gone. Becoming bored with tarting up old posts and dragging together portmanteau offerings on diverse topics like mosques and puddings, I am now resorting to historic travels. We enjoyed a city break in Barcelona at Easter in 2008; I have photos, all nicely dated and timed as digital images are, and with these, my memory and a guide book I can reconstruct our trip. And Lynne’s diary provides another invaluable source!

Barcelona Intro

Everyone knows where Barcelona is, but here is a map anyway, showing the city is at the northern end of Spain’s Mediterranean coast.

Spain

Catalonia

The city’s origins are obscure but a Roman castrum constructed in 15 BCE grew to become the Roman colony of Barcino. The Romans left and the Moors arrived but were eventually chased out by Charlemagne and Barcelona became capital of the County of Barcelona – a buffer state between Carolingian lands to the north and the Moors to the south. In time the county became the Principality of Catalonia and by the 16th century Barcelona was the largest city of the ‘Crown of Aragon’. In the Civil War, Catalonia was staunchly Republican but Barcelona was the scene of much fighting between rival Republican factions in 1937. In January 1939 the city fell to the Nationalists and Catalonia lost much of its autonomy during the 35-year dictatorship of Generalisimo Franco.

Spain

With Franco days a distant, if bitter, memory, Barcelona is now a cultural, economic and financial centre, a major port and tourist magnet and was host of the 1992 Olympics.  It has 1.6 million citizens and is the centre of a metropolitan area of 4.8 million making it the second most populous city in Spain, and the capital and largest city of Catalonia (I have carefully used the English spelling to avoid choosing between Spanish and Catalan and thus inadvertently making a political statement).

The Districts of Barcelona (the map has been turned, the coastline actually runs SW to NE)
The work of Vinals Reproduced under CreativeCommons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0

25/03/2008

We arrived at Barcelona’s El Prat Airport (Catalan for The Field) just after midday on a cool and overcast (Lynne described it as cold) Tuesday. The suburban railway station was closed for engineering work and the city Metro would not reach the airport until 2016, so we took a taxi to our hotel in the Cuitat Vella (Old City) - see map above. We could even see the medieval cathedral square from our bedroom window – well a bit of it anyway.

A Corner of Barcelona's Cathedral Square from our hotel room

The Cathedral

As it was just round the corner our first visit was to the Cathedral of the Holy Cross and St Eulalia.

I did not bother to photograph the outside as it was covered by scaffolding. The exteriors of Catalan churches are traditionally plain; the cathedral's elaborate (if hidden) façade was a 19th century neo-Gothic addition to the 14th Cathedral.

The interior, though basically a huge stone barn lined with chapels, is lavishly decorated. Lynne’s diary records that she was impressed by the quire and its carved misericords, and amused by the coffins of a medieval count and his wife marooned on a shelf half way up the wall. We were both winced at some of the paintings, the torture and martyrdom of the saints being depicted with, we thought, unseemly relish.

Inside Barcelona Cathedral

The story of St Eulalia, Barcelona’s co-patron saint is typical. Tradition states the Roman authorities punished the young Christian virgin by having her exposed naked in the public square. When God sent a miraculous spring snowfall to cover her nudity the enraged authorities put her in a barrel with protruding blades and rolled her down the road. I suspect that story tells us more about the pre-occupations of the early church than St Eulalia.

We met St Eulalia’s Geese in the cloister beside the cathedral. According to tradition white geese (or possibly doves) flew down to the dying martyr. In commemoration 13 geese (Eulalia was 13-years-old at the time) have free run of the cloister.

St Eulalia's Geese, Barcelona Cathedral Cloister

Leaving the cathedral, we wandered the medieval streets, stopped for a beer and eventually returned to our hotel.

Later we dined at a restaurant 15-minute’s walk away recommended by the friendly man on reception. Arriving at a Spanish restaurant at 9.00 is one way to have the place to yourself, but holding out until local eating time is beyond us. Two other customers eventually arrived, just before we finished eating. Lynne’s cuttlefish kebab cooked in squid ink and my ‘baby pig’ with pumpkin chutney were excellent, as were the desserts, a melon soup with lychees for Lynne and for me Mató, a Catalan whey cheese served, as tradition demands, with honey.

Wed 26/03/2008 to Sat 29/03/2008

To treat the rest of our stay in chronological order would require too many geographical jumps. The next post will deal with the delights of the Gothic Quarter, the final one with the Exaimple and Gracia districts – Antoni Gaudi will feature there - but I will end this introductory post with a 'walk', actually pieced together from three different days, round two sides of the Gothic Quarter and down to the beach.

La Rambla

The Old Town, la Ciutat Vella, has three sections. Our hotel and the Cathedral were in the Gothic Quarter (el Barri Gótic) inside the medieval city wall, while the smaller El Raval was without the wall, at least until it was extended in 1377. The third, Barceloneta, is the old fisherman's quarter.

Dividing the Gothic Quarter from El Raval is La Rambla. Once a storm drain and sewer beside the wall its status has risen considerably and Federico García Lorca called it "the only street in the world which I wish would never end."

La Rambla is a dual carriageway, but the roadways are of minor importance, much wider and busier is the tree-lined pedestrian area down the centre. Once churches and monasteries lined the street and it was used for festivals, markets and sport, now its popularity with tourists means it is a place of cafés, kiosks and human statues ever ready, for a small fee, to move or pose for a camera.  It is always busy in the summer, indeed it was busy in March too, when the tourists were very much in the minority. I wonder if Lorca would think it had been spoilt?

Looking south down La Rambla from near the Plaça Catalunya

La Rambla runs some 1,250m from the Plaça Catalunya, where the Old City meets the modernista Exaimple district, southeast to the old port.

Mercat de la Boqueria

About a third of the way down is Boqueria market. A market was held on this site in 1217 and there have been meat markets here under various names ever since. The present all-purpose food market was built in 1840, and for lovers of food markets this is as good as it gets. In the stall below are mushrooms, firm, fresh and inviting, of a dozen different varieties . The next stall has baskets of oysters behind sacks of, perhaps, winkles. The Spanish eat more fish and sea food per head than any other European country…

Mushrooms and sea food, La Boqueria Market, Barcelona

….but they also love their ham.

Pernil, Embotits i Foratge (Catalan: ‘ham, sausages and cheese’), La Boqueria, Barcelona 

We were taken aback by the prices of some hams, €140 per Kg Lynne’s diary notes with apparent shock. We learned more about ham on our 2019 trip to Andalusia where they produce arguably the best ham in the world – and locals would take offense at ‘arguably’. The clearly visibly black trotters are unique to Iberian black pigs, the black label lower down indicates these are free range, acorn fed, pure bred Ibericos - the top quality. As we saw in Aracena, hams like these start at €700 and the most expensive can fetch over €4,000.

Christopher Columbus

The end of La Rambla is marked by a statue of Christopher Columbus, as we would call him, Cristóbal Colón in Spanish or Cristòfor Colom in Catalan. Born in the Genoese Republic in 1451, he went to sea at the age of 10 and became a merchant, seafarer and self-taught geographer. Like most educated people he knew the world was not flat and was not alone in conjecturing there might be a shorter route to the riches of India and the Spice Islands by sailing west rather going round the southern tip of Africa. He persuaded King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella to back his projected trip and the rest everybody knows. The marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella had united the crowns of Castille and Aragon and Barcelona's importance to the Crown of Aragon is, as far as I know, Colombus’ sole local connection.

Christopher Columbus Monument, Barcelona

Google suggests the site has changed since my photo. He now stands on a sizeable traffic island and is further away from the self-important building behind him. He now points vaguely out to sea but in 2008 he gives the impression of pointing back up La Rambla, not the way to India, or the Caribbean – perhaps he fancied some ham

Maritime Museum

Appropriately the Maritime Museum occupies the site of a medieval dockyard opposite Columbus.

Inside, Lynne records, there were copies of old maps, all so inaccurate or vague it was no wonder Columbus did not know where he was, and models of ships. She also mentions trawlers, small fishing boats, canoes, catamarans and plenty of maritime equipment.

Pride of place went to a full-sized replica of Don Juan of Austria’s flagship at the Battle of Lepanto (1571). It was rowed by slaves chained to their seats and was capable of speeds up to 9 knots.

Replica of the flagship of Don Juan of Autria at the Battle of Lepanto, Maritime Museum, Barcelona

John of Austria was born in 1547, an illegitimate son of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. In the service of his half-brother, King Philip of Spain he was Admiral of the Holy Alliance fleet at Lepanto. The battle was the first major naval victory over the Turks by Christian forces, and with over 400 galleys involved, the last significant galley battle in the Mediterranean.

Barceloneta

The road running northeast beside the ferry dock and the Porto Vell Marina from the Columbus memorial is the Passeig de Colom, which to the anglophone sounds less scatological than its Spanish equivalent. This brings you to the Barceloneta quarter curling protectively round the end of the harbour.

Once a poor and run-down area, the rows of fisherman’s cottages facing the harbour have been smartened up and include many seafood restaurants, those in the first row noticeably upmarket. Restaurants in the rows further back tended to be more modest and we earmarked one offering a set lunch for €12.50, wine included.

Half past one was a little early for a Spanish lunch so we strolled down to the beach. Spain has a long Mediterranean coastline chockful of beach resorts but I had never thought of Barcelona being one, but it is. Used, I would expect, largely by locals it is pleasant enough, though not in March. I took off my jacket for the photograph in the vain hope of making it look warmer.

Barcelona beach

Back at the restaurant, lunching with the locals, we started with paella. Lynne followed this with a substantial sole while I ordered ‘whinting’ from the bilingual menu expecting whiting. What arrived looked more like overlarge whitebait, very fresh, lightly floured and less aggressively fried than whitebait is in the UK. It was basic but wonderful. Lynne described the cheesecake dessert as ‘a very light cake made with some mild curd cheese and chocolate bits served with a light syrup’. I suspect this is what cheesecake was before it became the highly processed article sold at home. The food industry has messed up a simple delight. A bottle of house white completed the set menu.

A beer and a tapa (just the one) were all we required that evening.

Barcelona
Barcelona (1) La Rambla and Barceloneta
Barcelona (2) The Old City
Barcelona (3)Sagrada Familia and the Eixample District