Espana Produces a 5-Star Moveable Feast

As our three-week Spain adventure recedes in the rear view mirror, Jan and I find no reason to award anything less than an A rating to our experience of Catalunya and Barcelona in the northeast, Andalucia and Granada in the south.

The first chapter of our three-part Spain sampler was a week-long hike in the Garrotxa Volcanic Natural Park region of Calalunya northwest of Barcelona. We’d selected a UK company, On Foot, to look after arrangements other than the actual business of tramping 20 km and climbing 800 m on a given day. On Foot arranged our nightly domiciles, hauled our bags from place to place and – most important – provided detailed instructions and maps to guide us from A to B to C.

In our previous European junkets we traveled with companions – Mary & Mike, Lynn & Louise – but this time we traveled alone with only the On Foot instructions and a compass to get us where we wanted to go. Fortuitously, we managed not to disgrace ourselves by getting lost. We’d been warned by On Foot to expect afternoon thundershowers at this time of year. Not a drop of rain fell upon us. Our route afforded countless photo ops: impressive views of the Pyrenees on the near northern horizon, flashy wildflowers, startling local geology, occasional ‘lifer’ birds including the storied griffon vulture, the world’s highest-flying bird, a giant that makes mighty eagles look diminutive.

Much of the Garrotxa terrain is covered in oak and beech forest that provided welcome air conditioning in the heat of the day. We came upon churches and fortresses many centuries old.  Much of the time on the trail we had the world to ourselves, just as we’d hoped might be the case. Every day we wound up in a Garrotxa village, many of them conspicuously medieval. One of the great end-of-day joys for me was the opportunity to appreciate the spectrum of Spanish cervezas – at a price my friend Mike Whitney would particularly cherish: often less than two Euros apiece. More than once Jan’s carbonated water turned out to be costlier than beer. Elysium.

After seven days in hiking boots with daypacks strapped to our backs we moved on to Barcelona. The city was a tumult. Barcelona has a population of about three million and a flood of who-knows-how-many thousands of turistas at any time. In our three days there it was my impression that about half of them were on the street. Like perpetual Mardi Gras.

Sant Jordi (Saint George if you prefer) is the patron saint of Catalunya. Our first day happened to be the annual Sant Jordi holiday. That night we joined the legions at Placa Espana to watch a non-stop fireworks extravaganza, complete with classical musical accompaniment, the like of which we’d never experienced. I ventured that not only was their virtually no chance we would see a familiar face in Barcelona, that was absolutely no such possibility. The next morning who should pass right before my eyes but good pal Doug Hensby. No fiction writer would dare imagine such a preposterous coincidence.

Barcelona was a revelation. Emerging from the metro station on arriving downtown I was stopped dead in my tracks by the sight of a building. I didn’t know it in the moment but what had me slack-jawed was Casa Batllo, a diamond among the many jewels of Barcelona’s outlandish, ornate, some might say outrageous modernista architecture dating from the late 19^th, early 20^th centuries. I had never heard of Catalan modernism – or of its prime architect practitioners – Gaudi, Puig i Cadafalch and Domenech i Montaner – but I was instantly mesmerized . . . and diverted into a full day of gawking at a long string of the most celebrated modernista buildings.   

After Barcelona we flew to Granada in south-central Espana. My nephew Michael and family are in the midst of a months-long stay in Granada; Michael and Alice were generous in the extreme in showing us the ropes, not to mention the best of Granada’s tapas bars and ice cream parlours. Granada is only a tenth the size of Barcelona, the roof tiles are yellow rather than red, and it is in the surrounding mountains of the Sierra Nevada, not the Pyrenees, that you find Spain’s highest peaks.

We had another hike: Mike led us on a tramp through a narrow, towering gorge quite unlike anything I’ve ever laid eyes on across cable footbridges not designed for those fearful of heights, beneath rock-climbers scaling sheer cliffs. Just the sort of habitat preferred by one of our favourite European birds, the voluble, daredevil chough, gathered there in their dozens.

We went to the Mediterranean to gorge on an array of unfamiliar seafood on the beach and climb to the ancient hilltop fortress at Salobrena, one of those old oh-so-photogenic Mediterranean hamlets where streets are narrow and every house is whitewash-bright.

Once upon a long-ago time, when I was even more foolish than I am now, I went to Agra in India and declined to look at the Taj Mahal (strictly for stoopid tourists I reasoned). In Granada I made a point of not repeating the blunder: we spent a half day at the remarkable Alhambra, for seven centuries the stronghold of Muslim Moors and a present-day, UNESCO-recognized treasury of Moorish splendor. At a time when European Christians were locked in the dark ages, Moor artisans, astronomers and mathematicians worked wonders at the Alhambra. My feeble vocabulary is not up to the task of conveying a worthy account; perhaps the pictures I assemble on Flickr will perform a little better.

And then, poof!, our nineteen days in Iberia were over. We bade farewell to my Granada kin, flew to Barcelona for a final night before re-crossing the Atlantic October 4. European travel guru Rick Steves claims that intensified living is the great reward of travel. We couldn’t agree more. Spain was our sixth European sojourn in the last eight years. We’re already daydreaming about what comes next.