Why slow, you may ask. We had lots of activities planned but Patricia was under the weather, so we had to curtail most of our activities. We took a couple of short walks, but our visit to Park Güel was cancelled. Instead of what we had planned, I did a good bit of walking around, deliberately trying to not re-visit places I had seen before.
On Thursday we took an afternoon walk, mostly to get Patricia out of our hotel room but she got tired pretty quickly. We did manage to get some churros and chocolate for me and Ice cream for Patricia before returning to the hotel.
On Friday, I went out by myself to see a couple of churches I knew about but hadn’t really investigated. Both Santa Maria Del Pi and Sanata Maria del Mar were begun in the 1300s. Barcelona was a rich city then and could (sort of) afford two more large churches. There was no city government then to sign off on the design and construction plans. They are both examples of Gothic architecture. Both were partially burned during the Spanish Civil War. Both Santa Maria del Pi (Holy Mary of the Pine) and Santa Maria del Mar (Holy Mary of the sea) impressed me we their large interior spaces.
In many churches we have visited, the interiors are decorated with statues and pictures—think of the churches in York, London, and Canterbury we visited last year. These 2 were relatively spartan in their interiors. The were several side chapels in Santa Maria del Pi which had elaborate altars and paintings, but in Santa Maria del Mar, the side chapels were as simple / plain as I have ever seen. I had to wonder of that was a result of the widespread destruction of churches during the Spanish Civil War.
I had my usual problems of trying to capture the scale of these edifices in images and to capture the colors of the stained glass but I did get a few good images.
There were hardly any visitors to Santa Maria de Pi when I was there which made it easy to explore. Santa Maria del Mar, on the other hand, was packed with school groups whien I first arrived, but they cleared out and left that church nearly empty, too.
On my way back to the hotel, I found Mercat de Santa Caterina (St. Katherine’ market), which is a covered food market with many vendors of fish, meat, vegetables, nuts, flowers, and other foodstuffs. The most famous food market in Barcelona is the Boqueria, but our guide on Wednesday said that Santa Caterina is the best market and is the one frequented by locals. I wandered around in there for a while and I would say that (this is just me) I would not eat about 95% of what I saw.
There are now quite a few pictures on the Barcelona pictures page, but something has changed in the formatting. I will try to fix the problems when I get back home.
