1) An early alarm roused me from slumber and down to the hotel breakfast room. I had an early ticket to Sagrada Familia, that great monument to Spanish architecture, vision, and ingenuity, and they emphasized how difficult it would be to be late, or bring anything with you. Knowing this was a religious site at which a dress code was likely to be enforced (how wrong I was!), I wore white linen trousers and one of my Greek cotton shirts over a blue T-shirt.
2) My first metro station involved taking an elevator to Twilight Zone depths into the earth. At this hour I was surprised to see only one other person on the platform.
3) The next train was busier, and let me out immediately at the corner of Sagrada Familia. So my first vision of this remarkable church was its Western, or Passion, façade. There’s a small park across the street, and I was able to stand there and take everything in — try to take everything in — before continuing to the Eastern, or Nativity, façade where the tourists enter.
A detail of the Nativity façade.
4) Here I remembered what Mary McCarthy famously said about Venice: “Everything about Venice, including this sentence, has already been written.” Or something like that. The Nativity façade, by far my favorite, has a certain Disney whimsy to it (but with the knowledge that Gaudí predates Disney), and I’ll confess I felt a touch irreverent when I started remembering “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody” from The Great Ziegfeld. Because there’s a little bit of everything in this façade.
5) They don’t mess around at security, but everyone was courteous. “No hat, no sunglasses” was the immediate directive before going through the metal detector. I was glad I hadn’t brought anything but change and my phone.
6) Then up to the entrance with the growing crowd, in the morning sun already hot at 9:30. And then inside to absorb Gaudí’s genius vision of symbolism, “a forest of stone,” using materials and designs as no one had before. The treatment of light, from darkness over the altar to pure white at the back, with all the rainbow colors on each side, and how he sculpted the light with stone — it’s amazing.
7) My English-language tour began about 9:45 AM just inside the Nativity entrance. The guide, an engaging woman with a heavy accent, used the “tell you three times” strategy in her talk: tell ‘em what you’re gonna tell ‘em, tell ‘em, and then tell ‘em what you told ‘em. From this much useful information emerged about Gaudí’s vision, methods, symbolism, and more than I was able to retain. The tour took us back outside (hot) so she could interpret the Nativity façade, back inside to explain interior features and tell a few stories, and then outside the Passion façade in the west to point out the stark contrasts with the Nativity. All in all very helpful, but for myself, next time I’ll get the audio guide and do it at my own pace.
7a) The Passion façade was completed in a style familiar to me from postwar midcentury sculpture that is very angular, powerful, and brutal to my eyes.
The Western façade includes herb plantings.
8) After that, I had a break to find the restroom and buy a bottle of water from a vending machine. It is very helpful to have change on these occasions! If you’re coming to Barcelona, by all means, prepare to hydrate every chance you get.
9) I got into line a bit earlier than my time for my extra tour of the Passion Tower. And when the elevator operator called for a party of one, I was able to jump the line! They really do squash everyone they can into that tiny elevator for every trip up, and I don’t blame them.
After my tower tour.
10) But as soon as I stepped off that elevator however many hundreds of feet up in the air we were, I knew it was a bad idea for me to have come. Just the sound of the wind, so firm and strong, put me on edge, and then the discovery that I would have to walk outside briefly on an elevated bridge/buttress between two towers nearly did me in. I didn’t stop to take one photo but began my descent at once. This occasionally involved waiting patiently while people paused to take photos. And there were occasional alcoves to stop in, not that I spent much time stopping. Toward the end the railing of this hollow corkscrew staircase moved from the inside to the outside, and I became sufficiently anxious that I used both hands on it. Irrational, but there you are. I was never so glad to reach the ground floor, which appeared just when I thought it never would, and I sat in a stone seat against the wall of the church, feeling a little shaky and letting myself be surrounded by the color and light and people inside the church.
11) Because my goodness, the number of people had picked up. They say there’s no time you can visit Sagrada Familia and avoid the crowd, because it is always crowded, but I say morning is better because the light is better.
This lean dog on the metro appeared like one of those mythic beasts that get embroidered on tapestries. This also turned out to be the Day of the Whippet, as I saw five whippets in different parts of the city.
12) After that, more water, a quick tour of the museum (I was not in a space to take in more information), the shop (nothing appealed to me), and the decision to return to my room for a NAP. It’s not a bad thing to listen to your body.
13) It’s a given in Barcelona that no matter what, you will feel damp. After this I confess I felt saturated, and it was beautiful to stretch out in my room in the dark for an hour of deep sleep before resuming my Gaudí journey. The afternoon’s destination: Parc Guell in the northwest of Barcelona, a space designed by Gaudí, which I reached on three metro lines quite easily.
The view of Sagrada Familia from Parc Guell. Definitely worth it! But be prepared for a lot of stairs.
14) My lack of research on this trip showed, however, by my surprise at basically having to climb a mountain just to get to Parc Guell. I turned a corner and boom . . . a vertical street before me, with a line of intermittently working escalators in its center! The park itself is beautiful and has many interesting features, including one curious tunnel-like passage with diagonal spiral columns that was a magnet for slim young women having their photos taken by female friends or relations while I was trying to walk through it. No kidding, there were at least three photo sessions I interrupted just by existing.
During the few seconds I was not interrupting a future supermodel photo shoot.
15) But the view of Barcelona spread out to the Mediterranean, with Sagrada Familia dominating like a mountain — absolutely worth it.
16) At this point I needed to find the part of Barcelona that had wine, tapas, and elegance. I stumbled into a place called Vivo in a swish part of town near the Diagonal metro stop and had a delicious experience involving three or four plates of delicious little somethings (ham croquettes are my new favorite) and a white wine several people recommended to me, Albariño, in a room of glass and brass and marble of dark temperature. And I just got to sit there and read my book (The Invention of Murder by Judith Flanders, a Christmas gift from Oldest Nephew Who Must Not Be Tagged), chat with the hostess in a mix of languages, and feel like, yes, I’m an Americano tourist, but this is what I need right now.
17) But I actually needed one glass less of that Albariño than I had, and by the time I returned to my room I had the start of a bad headache. Remember in Gigi when Aunt Alycia was teaching Gigi to drink wine? “Did you feel the perfume?” Eventually Gigi answers “Mahhhhhhhhvelousssss . . . .” I had been loving that Albariño . . . but I knew the moon would be bright next day.
Atop Parc Guell.