Barcelona - Sagrada Familia Basilica

Staying another few days to make sure we saw the inside of the Sagrada Familia (Holy Family, I believe) was such a good decision.  We missed our first chance when we bought tickets to enter during a strike and found all entrances to the Sagrada closed due to a sit-in.  Our accommodations noware not as nice as we had before (unfortunately, the Spain smell is back in force with this apartment), but the Sagrada Familia makes it all worthwhile.  This is the Catholic cathedral that Antoni Gaudi designed and did not live to see completed.  In fact, many of us will not live to see it completed, either.  Construction began in 1882 in the Eixample (ee-shampla) neighborhood, the working class extension of the city that connected Barcelona with some of the surrounding villages.  Gaudi was working with the original designer, but had to take over the project in 1883 when the designer died suddenly.  Gaudi significantly influenced the construction of this building until 1926 when he died after being hit by a tram in Barcelona.  Construction was expected to be completed in 2026, but we shall see.

Here is a pale imitation of what I saw yesterday.

The setting sun side

Then, the sun started to set and the light came through the stained glass and reflected splashes of the rainbow over every surface, including us.

Setting sun side

Morning sun side

Selfies just didn't seem to catch the colour; probably the angle

Then, after the sun was almost down, the alter (where the crucifix is hanging from a strange parachute arrangement) is the place of calm and focus.  The colours that Gaudi chose for the setting sun side of the sanctuary were red and yellow at the back and purple and blue toward the altar.  On the rising sun side, he had all the calm colours: green, blue, aqua.  The mornings must be another, soothing kind of colour experience.  But, afternoons, you went from fire and brimstone to calm and focused.  I'm really no Christian, but it is a moving and exhilarating experience and you must be there to feel it.  These photos don't do it justice.  I'm so glad we went.

Afterward, we walked out into the last rays of the sunset.

It was magical and I will never, ever forget it.  Now, we have one more day (well most of a day because I sat in bed and posted on my blog).  We'll do errands and see what we can.  Then, we fly out to Malta (where the Warm is) tomorrow morning at 11:45am on Veuling Airlines.  There are cheap flights available in Europe to Europe, but we are nervous.  That last EasyJet flight to Madrid did a wing wobble thing as we landed that made us both feel a little insecure.  I hope this one will be better.

Barcelona - Gaudi houses

We were more tired than we realized.  So, yesterday we just visited a couple of the Gaudi apartment buildings on Paseig de Garcia, a short walk from our current apartment.  Gaudi was so amazing.  We took the tour of the Casa Batllo and we learned so much about him and his work.  I had no idea that Gaudi was an early recycler.  All those mosaics that cover his sculptures and the rounded shapes of some of his walls are actually made from pieces from demolition sites.  Old houses, old ceramics and tiles, old metal - they are pieced together to create something new and beautiful.  He also intentionally looked at nature to create solutions to architectural problems and challenges.  His ventilation system had areas that looked like gills, solving an architectural challenge of the day.  He used the arches that looked like the ribs in a skeleton to replace timbers and other, more space hogging kinds of arches to give his walls the support they needed from the inside.  (This among other things, like the balconies that looked jaw bones, earned the house the nickname House of Bones.) He created calm by mimicking the color, reflections, rippling, and sound of water.  He made windows large in the lower floors, where the rays of the sun can't reach as well, and small at the top of the building, where the sun is most intense.  He took Spanish traditional building norms and made them more efficient - the internal light shaft (like a large elevator shaft) that opens to the sky creating that water effect inside the house, the roof terrace with mosaic trimmed pots attached to the walls,  the use of stained glass and curving staircases.  Yes, these buildings look kind of weird inside and out, but they are also comfortable, appealing, restful, and beautiful.

Casa Mila aka La Pedrera - named a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1984

The Casa Mila balconies have railings and decoration of twisted forged iron.  

Casa Batllo  (the building in the middle with green coloring on it) - this was a Gaudi remodel  in 1904 of a traditional Spanish house from the mid-nineteenth century.  It broke some of the bylaws of building in Barcelona, but was named one of its best buildings in 1906.

Notice the large windows at the bottom and comparatively small ones at the top.  It has been said that most homes of the wealthy of the time had small windows at the top because that's where the servants lived.  But, I have seen how dark it is at the bottom of these city buildings, especially with narrow streets.  It makes sense to catch as much light as possible at the bottom of a building with large windows and less at the top.

The living room with windows overlooking the main street

Living room ceiling

Living room from the other side

View from the lower stairway - Higher up, the stairs and landings go around the light shaft.

The dining room looking out at the terrace.  Notice the two columns (beautiful multicolored mosaic) within a few feet of the door.

The back wall of the terrace, with ceramic pots attached to the wall.  That arched shape is the shape of the wicker tunnel (which attached in that shape) that the family used in the summer for shade and privacy.  The opening was directly in front of the dining room door.

The tiled floor of the terrace, looking toward those two beautiful columns standing in front of the entrance to the dining room.

The fully tiled air/light shaft that run up through the middle of the house.  Can you sense a little that feeling of being underwater?  It really was soothing.  You had to use the stairs or the landings around this shaft to get anywhere in the building.

A view from the roof with those smooth almost-animal shaped edges

There were many chimneys.  Gaudi seemed to love to decorate chimneys and he would group them together, rather than line them up as was traditional.  All are covered in mosaic tiles pieces.  The pieces had to be broken into odd shapes in order to cover the curves and angles of his designs.

The door is to the stairway back down into the building and this styliszd cross crowns the front of the building.

The view straight down to the street from a front corner of the roof.

The opening of the ventilation system.  Those vents have been compared to fish gills, suggesting that is where Gaudi got his inspiration.

The skeletal arches I spoke of 

The place our official photo was taken.  It was scary because I am rather afraid of heights.

This is what it looks like at night.

Here's the photo that we had taken at the top of Casa Batllo!

We have decided to stay another 3 days and, of course, have to move to another AirBnb apartment (that makes 3 for Barcelona).  The new apartment is actually 2 blocks up from this one in the Eixample  district (pronounced ee-shampla; it means addition, because it was a new more consciously designed area of Barcelona).  I particularly like this district - lots of groceries, restaurants, bakeries, and shopping.  There are a several plazas and parks  nearby and we are within walking distance of many interesting sites, including these Gaudi-designed buildings and the Sagrada Familia (and only a few blocks from the Sants railroad station).

We still want to see the inside of the Sagrada Familia and there are a couple other Gaudi houses, the Magic Fountain, and a couple Plazas to see.  We'll see what we can pack into the next few days before we fly out to Malta to see if it is a warm spot we can settle in for a month or so.

Barcelona photos

Here are the promised Barcelona photos.

Place de la Catalunya (for some reason this was black and white and I kind of like it)

The Arch de Triumf (I didn't know that there were more than one; perhaps they are everywhere in Europe)

The view from Montjoic (the Mountain of the Jews) at the front of the National Museum of Catalonian Art.  Much of Barcelona is laid out here.

Sculpture created by Roy Lichtenstein for the  1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona

Gaudy's famous Sagrada Familia, still under construction probably for my lifetime.  Those are police and sit-down demonstrators blocking the entrance behind me.

I loved Park Guell, the residential development started by Gaudi that failed.  The few houses he built are so unique and the grounds are fascinating.  This is a colonnade walkway with another walkway above.

The entrance to Park Guell

The staircase up to the market area under the columns.  There are side staircases that go up to the plaza on top, which is being remodelled/refurbished right now, but you can walk on part of it and sit on a few of the mosaic benches that line the edge of the plaza on top.

The iconic dragon sculpture on the main staircase

The two remaining houses near the entrance that are inside the ticketed "Monumental area".  The one on the right is actually the gift shop and you can tour the one on the left.

This the original house on the property purchased for Gaudy's development.  He touched it up so that it would blend in with his development.  After the City bought Park Guell for a park, this large building was opened as a school, which it still is today - lucky children.

Close-up of the colonnade

This was Gaudi's house at Park Guell.  It is outside the ticket area in the free portion of the Park and it is used to house the Gaudi Museum.

In front of the Gaudi Museum and all along the walkway are huge palm trees.  You can see and hear the South American cockatoos in the tops of these palms, screeching, fighting, and flying back and forth.  I understand that there are cockatoos all over Barcelona nesting in its palm trees.

Well, we plan to get into the Sagrada Familia before we leave.  We also want to see and tour a few of the Gaudi designed buildings that are sitting along the Avenue Diagonal here.  Tomorrow night, there is an outside concert at the Magic Fountains in the Place de Espanya and I really want to see it if the city seems peaceful enough.  It's a night light-show and the fountain, I'm told, dances in time to the music.  Who wouldn't want to see that!