Barcelona Spain

80 days to departure from Sweden and one last big European vacation trip is done. Barcelona Spain was a wonderful choice to spend an entire week in one place. There's still stuff there I haven't seen after trying to hit the major tourist spots. It was a cheap 3 hour flight on Vueling Airlines. Sometimes the Swedish airlines are cheapest and sometimes it's best to take whatever budget airline they have at the destination.

There's way too many photos from a week to put in a post so I'll try to pick just a few of the best and keep this post relatively short. Lots of tapas had to be eaten and lots of art and artistic architecture had to be seen. This is another city where the hop-on-hop-off buses give you a good method to get around to interesting places outside the main city area. The Gothic Quarter near Las Ramblas was a good place to be in the middle of it all with hotels, restaurants, and plenty of walking streets.

Gaudi and his many creations are the thing to see and do. My favorites were Palau Guell and La Sagrada Familia. There's just too many pictures to post of these so here's just a few of Palau Guell:

And the rightfully famous La Sagrada Familia:

There are many fountains but one possibly little known gem is the Cascada Monumental:

 

Another little gem was the Museu Europeu d'Art Modern. The 18th century building is wonderful and not too big to add into a day of other Gothic Quarter wanderings. Some of the contemporary figurative art consists of paintings that look so real they're almost like photographs. It's not a place for kids if you don't want them to see contemporary nudes but here's a few samples of the regular stuff:

Poble Espanyol can take an entire day if you want to see it all inside the open air museum of architecture from across all of Spain. This one little village is complete with shops, restaurants, and a contemporary art museum that is fine for a quick tour.

 

These were just some of things done in a week. I'll stop here with just these highlights in the interest of not making this post too massive. Barcelona is definitely worth a visit and if/when I get back to Europe it'll definitely be a place to revisit since there's still many things I didn't see!