More Gaudí and Home Today

 Barcelona--We complete our trip today.  It has been a fine journey.  Odyssey has been an excellent tour company for us.  The guides have been very informative at each stop and the entire trip has been flawless.

However, it is time to write the conclusion to the trip.  We head to the airport in about an hour and will be home this afternoon.  It's a long nine hour flight, but we might get some sleep. 

Yesterday, we visited the last of our Gaudí sites, the Casa Milá on the Passeig de Gracia.  We had seen it before from the exterior but had never visited the inside.  Our guide made sure that we spent time learning about the construction and the design, with a walk around the roof as well as a visit to one of the apartments in the building, now set up as if it were a residence in 1920.  

There are several other architectural buildings along the Passeig, including the Casa Batllo, which has a design that is representative of St. George killing the dragon.  Gaudí is also commemorated in the tiles of the sidewalk.

We finished our trip last night with a farewell banquet at Nurio, a restaurant on the Rambla.  Very good paella, good verdejo white wine and fine conversation.  We crashed into bed late and are up early for the trip home.

Gaudí, Dear Friends and Seafood

 Barcelona[--After 16 years we walked once again the aisles of Sagrada Familia, the huge Gaudí basilica that towers over its neighborhood in central Barcelona.  Nearly finished--it's missing towers and a south front--the place is a masterpiece.  Not completely Gaudí because he died leaving incomplete designs, it is so totally different to any architectural masterpiece because of the way the building is arched, the light inside and the various styles of adornment since styles have changed since the 1880s when construction began.  It should be finished within the next 10 to 15 years as the final towers are put in place.   

It was quite amazing to walk an almost completed building compared to the scaffolding and dust we faced in the first decade of the 2000s.  Now the altar and windows show light everywhere, the organ is in place, though we did not hear it, and the crowds stand in awe or sit just admiring the place.

We also had an excellent tour of the Park Güell, pronounced Way, that Gaudí built on a hilltop as a gated community that was never successful.  With a magnificent, though hazy, view of Barcelona, the whimsy and naturalism of his designs show through the construction.   Our guide Cesar, was excellent and gave us a much better tour than our visit in 2006.

We got back to the hotel and spent the afternoon in a shaded restaurant with old friends Tony and Christine.  John has known Tony since 1949 and they have been long-term friends.  Chat from family to travels to aging made for an interesting and fun afternoon.

In the evening we checked out a few of the local restaurants, then decided to go the opening night of a new restaurant in the hotel--Batea Bar Marisqueria.  It's a venture of friends who want to bring the seafood of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic together in a small plates tasting menu.  It's virtually all seafood and ranged from excellent oysters, clams and cockles from Galicia and fish dishes such as miniature monkfish and sea bream from the Mediterranean.  A Galician beer made the evening very enjoyable.  Clearly this is a restaurant with a great idea and fine execution. 

Catalonia, Citrus and Clothes

 Barcelona--We arrived yesterday after a long drive from Bielsa.  The first part is rather hard on the bus driver, like many of the roads we have driven.  Winding, narrow and occasionally one lane, the roads required Victor's complete attention.  However once south of the mountains heading east to Barcelona the roads are superb.  Huge numbers of trucks took over parking spaces at the restaurant/rest stop.  Including one German one with visions of interstellar travel and the first vehicle from Morocco we have ever seen. 

In Barcelona, John decided to rest while Ben took a long walk through the Gothic Barrio with several others.  He and Richard managed to lose the group, absorbed in conversation, but all was righted when they were discovered.  John had a good view of the city from the roof-top pool and then napped before dinner at Citrus.

Citrus, whose menu includes a variety of seafood as well as a sushi was a delight.  We enjoyed every bite of the tomato bread, the octopus and the rare tuna. along with an outstanding Albariño, that compared favorably with a Sancerre.

Along the Passeig de Gracia the fashionable shops offered some latest creations.  This is a very well-dressed city for many, but there's always a large number of really badly-dressed men whose clothes are more like those seen at football games.   And of course the flag of the seperatists is evident, though not so much since the beginning of the Ukrainian War.

Valley of Chistau

Parador of Bielsa, Spain--Yesterday was a trip into the higher elevations and tiny villages.   The Valley of Chistau was nearly abandoned forty years ago but a well-advertised invitation to visit by a group of young men who were seeking ways to revitalize the valley brought a hoard of visitors and the place is now a tourist destination.  Heading into it requires a small bus that fits through the small tunnels.  But when we arrived we had a stop that allowed us to see two of the three unique species of vultures, far too distant for a good photo, but we were very lucky. 

The valley has five villages, and we visited two of them.  One, Gintain, is truly alpine with steep streets, lots of manure and a few BnBs along its winding streets.  Very pretty.  Our guide told us that the tower in the shot below was a competitive venture hundreds of years ago as to which of two or three residents would build the tallest.  A bit of mine is bigger than yours!

We also got a history of this valley as a place where the Maquis against the Fascists during and after the 1936-1939 Civil War were able to maintain contact with the outside by the three hour hike over the mountains to nearby France.  This bridge, called the Bridge of Sins, from which the decapitated body of a despised noble was thrown hundreds of years ago, was also central to the movement of the anti-fascist Maquis.

Now of course there is no border between Spain and France and hikers move over the the Pyrenees at will.  We saw a couple climbing a mountain face, too.  Instead of lunch in a restaurant, we decided to picnic in a Bielsa square, stopping at a supermercado to buy local yoghurts and a sheep cheese.   We finished off the day with a treat of local vermouth, courtesy of Marco, our guide, and a good dish of local lamb for John and mountain trout for Ben.  A very good day.  Now it's off to Barcelona.

Pyrenees and Pamplona

 Parador de Bielza, Spain--The view from the window is grand!  We're high enough that these is visible snow melting into waterfalls.  We are here till tomorrow.  We had drinks last night in the warm weather (for here) and heard the water flowing to the river over the rocks at the base of the hill whenever we woke.  

Getting here we stopped in Pamplona.  Yes, the bulls do run down this street in July before they go to the bullfight and their end.  Specially raised, they have never seen crowds before the fight and some say they are terrified as well as physically hurt.  Some cities in Spain ban the fights.  Not Pamplona.

It's also the city of Hemingway, who lived on the main plaza for a time and drank his way through the Cafe Iruña looking over it.  He is "memorialized" by many souvenir shops.  

Along the way we stopped in a small village, Ainsa, before the main road heads up through the canyons on its way to France.  Ainsa is a fortified village ruin.  We added it to our list of visited ruined forts.

Getting here meant about an hour on roads that were barely big enough for our tour bus as they wound through the Pyrenees.  A couple of times we had to wait for other vehicles to pass before many a hairpin turn.

THE CANTABRIAN COAST AND GUERNIKA

The shrine of St John in the distance

 BILBAO--We are completing two full days of visiting here.  We arrived on Wednesday afternoon and will depart tomorrow morning for the Pyrenees.  We have fallen in love with Bilbao and the countryside.  Of course this was helped by the superb weather.  It generally rains here, but we had only one night of rain--after we went to bed last night and, like Camelot, it had stopped by breakfast.

Basque is hard!

Today we explored the north coast. We visited the lovely north coast of rocky islands and bays.  One site contains islands with a shrine and two natural sea bridges.  Just lovely.  Gaztelugatxe (Gaz-tey-loo-ga-chay) is a shrine St John, where mass is only said once a year on his saint's day, June 23.  It's 300 steps up to the shrine, sort of a pilgrimage.   This coast is also a must-do for surfers, though today it was low-tide so there wasn't much to see.

Wine is such fun

Our last stop was the Berroia Winery where we enjoyed pintxos (pin-chos) and two superb whites made with txocali grapes.   It is a wine that is similar to a good albariño or vinho verde with a bit more character than many of them.  We will explore for it in DC.

A view to the ocean

The vineyard is not far from the sea, though you cannot see the Bay of Biscay from the winery building itself.  After a tour of the winery, our lunch included a local sheep's milk cheese and four traditional pintxos: a fried anchovy, cod on local cheese with a béchamel sauce, a small pancake stuffed with a mushroom past and albacore tuna.  A lovely lunch with friendly people and the winemaker himself.

The trunk of the old oak tree where the Kings
guaranteed Basque rights--
until the Franco fascists took them away

Along the way to the winery, we made one big stop of the day:  Guernika.  It was bombed by the Italian and German fascists during the Spanish civil war, and still is remembered as a place where air bombers "trained" to destroy civilians, as portrayed in Picasso's great painting we saw in Madrid during our last trip to Spain. Guernika has nothing in the way of military importance.  However, the Basques are very proud that John Adams talked of the foundation of democracy perhaps coming from the representative system set up by the Basques hundreds of years ago. So, it became important for Franco to destroy the city as a citadel of self government.  

Its Assembly today is divided between five parties, some supporting independence or at least more control of their own activities from Madrid and others who are content with the Basque region's autonomy, in place since the late 1970s.  It's a complicated issue that our guide described in detail. 

The Basques believe they are the original Europeans, speaking a language unlike any other.  Here's thank you in Basque.  It's pronounced Scarey Costco:

We completed a full and enjoyable day with a walk into the residential/commercial area near the hotel looking for an interesting dinner.  We found it at Ca Silda, a lovely restaurant with a dining room lined with diagonally stacked wine bottles and an upscale mostly middle-aged clientele.  The women, of course, were beautifully dressed and coiffured--a standard practice among the people of Iberia.  Dinner was fun, but difficult to chose because the waitress spoke no English and the menu was all in Spanish.  We ended up with a lovely plate of cecina with dried tomatoes, (cecina is a dried beef, like carpacchio), tempura style vegetables with a mayonnaise sauce, and a small entrecôte of beef.  This was a guess, not exactly what we thought we wanted, but it turned out beautifully done with grilled red bell peppers and patatas bravas. The wine was an excellent godello from the Ribeiro district.

I

The Guggenheim and Around Bilbao

Anish Kapoor's The Tree & The Eye

 BILBAO--Day two, and we walked by 4 PM over 13,000 steps!  There's a lot of walking on our trips in smaller cities, including those with highlights such as the Guggenheim Museum.  It's magnificent, set along the river and towering over its park setting.  The sails of its profile make it soar over the city.  

Richard Serra's steel structure

1934 Czech modernist design Tatra

The collection is good.  We enjoyed a couple of abstract impressionists including Yves Klein, who used naked women as his paint brushes to create the blue blotchiness of his works.  There was no Jackson Pollock on display although we learned that the reason he flung paint around to create his pieces was that he did not believe his hands should ever touch the work or the canvas.    A show on auto design brought the 1934 Tatra that we have always admired from a Modernist show a few years ago, and a Richard Serra "The Matter of Time," a huge steel maze-like structure completed our excellent time at the museum.

Basque flags everywhere

Our tour through the city included an hour's walk through the Old Town, which dates in part from the 14th century when Bilbao was given its charter to establish a port.  We learned that the city has rebuilt itself since the 1980s when its shipyard and steel industries collapsed in the fashion of Pittsburgh and Manchester.  They are two cities we know a great deal about.  Ben was born in Pittsburgh and John was born in Manchester.  Bilbao has done a wonderful job--of course our view is definitely helped by the five star hotel we are staying in and the nearby parks and deco architecture.  In some ways, too, it is similar to Recoleta in Buenos Aires. 

The importance
 of transition

While we were at the Akzuna Zentroa, a civic center building, we picked up a brochure for a show about trans and non-binary people, with work by and produced by Cabello/Carceller (one person whom we assume is gender fluid).  We appreciated the effort of this difficult-to-undersand view of non-binary people.  The main value of it was bringing the issues non-binary people to public awareness.  

Tonight we stayed in the hotel, with an early night unlike last night when we retired at a fashionable 23:30!

Bilbao and La Gavilla

BILBAO--We arrived in the Basque country yesterday afternoon.  From the 80s in Leon to the high 50s here in Bilbao, we realized once again that the fog on the coast brings down the temperature.  Today it is dreary, and last night on the way home from our dinner at La Gavilla it actually began to rain.  We expect a bit more today, but we will be in the Guggenheim this morning, so that won't affect us.

The drive through the Cantabrian mountains was lovely.  There actually still is some snow on the highest peaks.  The roads tunnel through some of the mountains.  Once again they show the fine Spanish engineering on their highways.  

Our first stop on the north coast was Santander.  The big bank, though not headquartered here any longer, was born here.  It is a wealthy community on a lovely bay, once the summer residence of the kings and queens of Spain.  King Philippe VI doesn't come here.  He vacations in the Balearic Islands in the Med.

We lunched at an excellent restaurant overlooking the surfers and the beach,  A very nice lunch of hake served with a good rioja and a fine rueda.  

Then a quick trip to Bilbao, check in, and a later dinner at La Gavilla, a superb pintxos restaurant near the hotel.  It is rated #5 of over 1000 restaurants by Trip Advisor and lived up to the recommendation,  We had a Priorat red, with  three medium-sized plates:  tempura shrimp with their own kim chi (very mild) and caviar, then scallops in a sauce of carrots and potatoes that came in a dome that steamed when the waiter opened it.  Our last dish was barbecued spare ribs.  The interesting thing about this is that the meal showed how much influence four years in Washington, DC, had had on the chef.  He worked at several of Jose Andres' restaurants in Washington, including Jaleo, one of our favorites.

Paradors and Cathedrals

Gaudí's work

 LEON--We arrived here yesterday after a long-ish drive from Santiago.  We had a short stop for lunch, meat-filled bocadillos (grinders, subs, torpedoes, etc) at a plaza in Asturga where we had a good view of one of three Antonia GaudÍ buildings not in Catalunya: lovely religiously-inspired turreted bishop's house on the same plaza with the cathedral and incorporating some Roman walls.  

The day before, Monday, we enjoyed a tour of the parador where we were staying.  At one point it was a hospital and many of the stoneworks in the interior cloisters are quite graphic in their visual representation of what you need to do to you body if you are sick, particulArly if you have venereal diseases!  Most of the population, of course, was illiterate so the use of pictorials and graphics was essential to pass on important messages--much the same as stained glass windows are visual representations of holy lives.  The hotel, the parador, is magnificent and a wonderful place to stay.  The food was fine, the wines enjoyable.

Yesterday here in Leon we had wonderfully good tour of the town (which was established by the Romans) and the cathedral.  The cathedral is small compared to many other Spanish, and French, cathedrals, but inside the use of stained


glass is magnificent.   It is very reminiscent of Ste Chapelle near Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.  The windows date from the 13th, 14th and 16th centuries, with a few 19th century thrown in.  Our excellent guide was able to explain the difference and the techniques used to create the masterpieces.

The drive from Santiago is through mountains, some of which still had bits of snow on their peaks.   The Spanish engineers did an inspiring series of viaduct to carry the road across the valleys and ravines in the hills.

Pilgrims, Pontevedre and St James

SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA--The drive from Portugal north yesterday into Spain is quite mountainous with ocean and fjord views from time to time. Very pretty countryside, unlike much of Spain that is so arid. We stopped for a quick tour and lunch in Pontevedre just over the border. We learned about the architecture and history of the town, noting that it has many covered porches along the sidewalks. They were built to give refuge from the rainy days, which we gather are many, though the weather has been perfect for us. We introduced friends Carl and Bonnie to two dishes they had never had before, local octopus and mussels. Coupled with a small glass of home made coffee liqueur, and two plates of grilled pimientos de padron, the lunch was a big success. 

Regrettably, the dinner of tapas at the hotel in Santiago that evening duplicated the dishes we had had for lunch, adding some steak with frites, a salad and some small tunafish sandwiches. At our table the octopus and the tunafish were not hits. The white wine, though, from the Ribiero region was very good, though the Mencia red was ordinary. 

The hotel, the Hostal dos Reis Católicos, is a parador, a five star run by the state in a historic old building, a hospital from the Middle Ages that was turned into a hotel about 65 years ago. It has huge rooms with heavy furniture, magnificent courtyards and a beautiful site right on the main praza (Galician for plaza) and at the door is the magnificent cathedral of Santiago. 

The city is built on the idea that St. James the Greater’s body was found here about 800 CE, and at this site the cathedral was built. It has been a goal of pilgrims for hundreds of years who walk 500 miles from Roncesvalles, France, to Santiago de Compostela and receive an indulgence wiping away all sins if they walked for at least 60 miles or biked for at least 120! The cathedral is magnificent, even for jaded cathedral visitors like us. Though not as grand as Sevilla in Andalusia, it is equally as golden and awe-inspiring.  St James symbol is a shell, seen all over the city.

Galician Piper

  

Joaquin, very good guide

The high altar

Galicia was founded by Celts and there is often the wafting sound of bagpipes in the air.  Further it has its own language, similar to Portuguese, but not a dialect of Portuguese.   

Port, Porto and the Douro

 Porto--Sunday morning and the sun is coming up, marking the end of our time in Porto, a city that has charmed us.  With its steep hills, antique tram cars, river, port wine, and wonderful architecture, some dating to the Middle Ages, some of it very modern, it seems to be the kind of place you'd like to live.   

We had a full tour from the sea anemone installation by the port in the fog, to the downtown of narrow streets, then on to the river for a trip on the Douro to time spent tasting port at Graham's with an excellent guide, Jorge, and then a lunch of a francesinha, or little French sandwich ,made with ham, roast pork and linguiça covered with cheese and gravy.  A fine time and a heavy lunch.

The tour took us to such various sites as the modern architecture built since Salazar's overthrow in 1974 with the Carnation Revolution, to becoming a European City of Culture twenty years ago, to today.  We stayed in the Pensata Riverside hotel built into to an old soap factory up river from downtown.  The food was at best adequate, certainly nothing to remark about any further, though the wines at both dinners were pleasant.  The hotel is very modern which, of course, means that sound reverberates against the hard surfaces and ceilings, making conversation difficult.  

The day's high points were numerous.   The port tasting certainly heads the list, but walking along the river and the boat trip were great fun.  Watching water jet skiers play with their machines (from what we can gather they are paid to perform) for over an hour as we munched lunch, particularly when the drivers or riders fell into the river, entertained us.

Much of the old city dates from the days of Prince Henry the Navigator, who was born here in 1394, and even Moorish and Roman times.  Old walls crop up from time to time, even though most of them were torn down in the 18th century for the city to expand.