We started our day off with breakfast at a cute little cafe close to our hotel. It’s called “Hidden Cafe Barcelona” (http://hiddencafebcn.com) and it serves delicious coffee and sandwiches.
With renewed energy we then went to the nearest tram station to buy tickets for public transport. We decided on day tickets but it turned out that it would have been lots cheaper to get a T10 ticket which allows for 10 one way trips as we ended up walking most of the time.
From my time in Barcelona I remembered Plaça Catalunya being one of the central points in the city. So that’s where we went first. From Plaça Catalunya we started strolling down Las Ramblas until we came across “El Mercat de la Boqueria” (http://www.boqueria.barcelona/home). The flavors and colors of the produce sold there are amazing!
I could have spent hours here just browsing the stalls even though it was incredibly crowded.
From El Mercat we continued down Las Ramblas to Plaça Reial where we rested a bit by the fountain.
From there we walked down Las Ramblas all the way to the “Mirador de Colom”, the column which is topped by a globe and the statue of Cristóbal Colom (as Christophe Colomb is called here). The statue points towards Mallorca, the direction of his departure on his way to America.
We continued our journey along the harbour until we could walk no more. I had remembered a small tapas bar close to the “Port Veil” but when we arrived it was so crowded that we could not even go inside. So we kept walking and finally came across “La Casa Pascual” (Pas de Sota Muralla, 7) where we enjoyed a delicious “menu del dia” and very friendly service.
For early evening we had tickets reserved for Parc Guell. I was really glad I had stumbled on the information that you had to get tickets for the parque in advance. Last time I was here the parque was still free of charge. But I can understand that requiring the purchase of tickets is a good means to control the amount of people inside the parque at any given time. This way it is crowded but not so much that you couldn’t move anymore.
I really enjoyed seeing the structures of the parque (again). I just love the organic flow of the buildings and the bright colors of the mosaics.
For tomorrow we are thinking about taking one of the hop on/ hop off buses in order to go from one point of interest to the next a lot quicker than we did today. The sights are quite some distances apart and even though the public transport system is excellent we had to spend a lot of time in buses to get from one place to the other.