Details

As I've said before, this isn't a vacation-photo blog with postcard-ready, wide-angle shots of popular sights in Barcelona. These are images that you probably won't see on Frommer's or tripadvisor - the ones you have to be on foot to get to, or at least be willing to crop much of the image to isolate something even more interesting. (2nd blogpost of the day! I'm on a roll!)

(Plus, I don't even have a wide-angle lens :) this leaves me with only tight crops anyway!)

So, here's a bunch of photos I took last week while wandering around:

Casa Comalat

This is a detail of a building that is a couple of blocks from my apartment. Amazing mosaic work! It is under construction/renovation right now, which is really sad for me because if you click here you can see it's a cool building. At the moment there are huge sheets covering the front. If you compare this view with one of the others that are in the above link, you can see how the construction has dirtied the spaces between the tiny tiles. I hope I am still in Barcelona when they finish construction.

Around the corner is this mosaic on the side of a church. "Mare de Deu Del Carme."

J. Murria, 85 Roger de Llúria

Wow.. This is a beautiful store. It's a gourmet delicatessen that dates from 1898 and is part of the Modernist Route of Barcelona. A complete image and their site is here. Below are more details..

Vinos de Alella

Marques de Monistrol

agh shiny!!

Chartreuse! Tarragona is a town not far from Barcelona.

Modernist Farmácia

Plenty of these in Barcelona. I believe this one is also on Roger de Llúria. The window-box above the pharmacy is typical of this area.

Around the corner - dragon detail in a gate. Plenty of dragons to be found in Barcelona.

?? It looks cool. :)

This door is on my street. Elaborate!

The next street... spanish redundancy. Redundancy and graffiti. Sounds about right!

My street

I love the interior plaza!

The corner of my street, at sunset. Take that, Cedar Park!

Casa Milá/La Pedrera

Well, here is one of the wide touristy shots I told you would be uncommon - but I had to put this in order to put a better perspective on the next photos and I have never posted about this building before. This is Casa Milá, also called La Pedrera. It's one of the most famous landmarks of Barcelona, and has a very interesting history - see the link if you like! Also, it is famous for going against city building code on multiple counts... what do you think of that, mom?
Casa Milá / La Pedrera wiki link

Famous streetposts on Passeig de Gracia

Now that you've seen the building, I can show you the man painting it! Also you have a better idea of how huge it actually is.

Close-up of the painter

Day Trip: Sant Sadurni

As I´ve mentioned before, the train system in Barcelona province is well-run and cheap. For 2.80 euros each, we went an hour out of town on the Renfe train to Sant Sadurni, the home of Cava (Spanish sparkling wine). Here you can find so many different wineries, including the famous Freixenet. We didn´t have time to go to that one, but we went to another famous one: Codorniu. They have the largest cellar in the world and claim to be the home of Cavas.

site, with video: http://www.codorniu.com/home.html?wlang=en

Lucky for us it was a really nice day.

Here is the inside of the winery. It was designed by Josep Puig i Cadafalch, a famous Catalan Modernist architect. He also had a large influence on the modernist designs of Barcelona.

Holy crap they weren´t kidding about having a massive underground cellar. 30 Kilometers of cellars! You could definitely get lost. They even had ´street signs´for each hall and branch. I think there were something like 4 floors underground and all with so many cavas being stored.

Here´s the bar in the tasting room. They´re really proud of their bottles.