Thursday 5th November (Guy Fawkes Night)

Awoke at 4am to find us edging into Barcelona harbour, which took about an hour past container cranes, an oil refinery & a grain handling area. After breakfast we took a shuttle bus to the base of Las Ramblas at the seaward end & then decided to try a Hop on Hop off bus as we didn't want to walk too far.

This proved a wise, if not inexpensive, decision as the city service has 3 separate routes to cover different parts & the ticket is valid for all of them. We had been to Barcelona & thought we were fairly familiar with it but how wrong we were. The first bus took us along to some well know places but it was amazing to us how little we knew about the place & particularly some of Gaudi’s less well known buildings. Changes to the Sagrada Familia were quite a shock to us as it has progressed well since our last visit in 2003 including the ceramic caps on a few of the spires which look like assorted fruits. After nearly 2 hours on two bus lines we left it for a coffee & then returned to complete a complete circuit. We then started to worry if we could possibly traverse all 3 circuits in a day but admitted defeat & so still have one to do in future. The city is an amazing mixture of old but predominantly much later buildings dating predominantly to the first decades of the 20th century as the streets are predominantly in a rigid grid pattern with some large diagonal boulevards. This early work is a strange mixture of styles from Gaudi’s totally bizarre buildings to other ornate but relatively restrained works predominating. Part of the route took us out to the various Olympic Games sites from 1992 which again were quite impressive & the whole experience made us feel very ignorant about the city of nearly 3million people.

Suffering information overload we retreated to a cafe to check our emails etc & then took the shuttle back to the ship at about 3.30.