Barcelona Part 1 (Montjuic)

Waking up in complete confusion as to where you are is not the greatest way to start of your day, I assure you…but it got better in a hurry: the ear had equalized and the bed was as comfortable as the one I slept in at the Watergate Hotel in D.C. (which was a LOT more expensive and had pretty much been the benchmark for comfortable beds in my mind).

Getting an decently early start (considering how hard I had traveled the day before) I left the hostel and struck out to see Barcelona…the city so amazing, Freddie Mercury wrote a song about it.


First was the business: get to Sants train station, active the Eurail Pass we got for the trip, reserve my seat for the train to Madrid leaving at 10:00 that night, and ditch my bags. After that was taken care of, I struck out.

My handy-dandy little fold-out map (yeah I bought one – so what) showed a large park on top of a mountain with a castle and all kinds of other stuff on it south of where I was called Montjuic. This seemed like a good enough place as any to start my twelve hours in Barcelona. I struck south. (By the way, if you’re going to travel, especially in the older cities of Europe, bring a compass.)

I realized that I hadn’t eaten since the apple I had had before I boarded the plane in London, and stopped at the first place I saw that I could afford. A little pizza shop that was completely unoccupied. After I narrowly avoided buying a whole pizza with my limited use of the word “uno” (I meant one slice, he wanted to sell the whole pizza), I continued toward wherever I was heading (south I guess).

After a five minute walk I found this:


Barcelona Plaza

...and this:


The National Art Museum (Front)


The National Art Museum (Back)

A little short on the Euro for right now, so I moved on to see what else I could see, but before I did that I marveled at the view:



Continuing up the mountain, trying to find that castle, I stumbled upon the remnants of the Olympics, I didn’t take a picture of the stadium because it didn’t really seem all that interesting, but here are some things from the (96?) Olympics that I remember from TV that I now have seen in real life.







Found all kinds of interesting stuff, but the castle was eluding me, until I found the one side road that seemed to go up the way that I wanted to go. Following the road, I noticed a footpath that lead off over a hill on the left. My logic being that a footpath is meant to be walked on, I followed it and guess what I found over that hill…




Yup…that would be Barcelona Harbor and the Mediterranean Sea. A heck of a thing to stumble upon.

The trail ended and I backtracked to the road that was supposed to lead to the castle, but at this point I was getting tired of going up hill. Finally I found it:






Castell De Montjuic

Not so much a castle as much as a fortress looking over the sea facing the southeast. The Castell De Mantjuic was built in 1799 and is now pretty much a very pretty running path:



Making my way down the mountain I got some great views of the city…





…and I found a nice little backway down.







…there’s more to come, but that will do for now.