When traveling to Barcelona, here are some of the must-see Spanish sights:

Catalan National Art Museum
Housed in the National Palace, the Catalan National Art Museum includes one of the most important Romanesque painting collections in the world.

Magic Fountain
Enjoy this spectacular show of water, lights, and music held in front of the National Palace every Sunday evening.

Football Club Barcelona Stadium (Camp Nou)
If you’re a football (soccer) fan, ask your Local Host for directions to view the stadium of the world-famous team. Maybe even see a match!

Barcelona Zoo, Aquarium, Cosmo Caixa Science Museum, Tibidabo Amusement Park
For some special family time, there’s plenty to do in Barcelona, including thrills and panoramic views at Tibidabo Amusement Park high above the city.

Sardanes Folk Dancing
The Sardana is Catalonia’s emblematic folk dance. See it on Saturdays (6:00-8:00 pm) and Sundays (12:00-2:00 pm) in the Cathedral Square.

Picasso Museum, Miro Foundation
The Picasso Museum is the reference center for the formative years (1887-1901) of Pablo Ruiz Picasso. With its complete collection of his early works, see the evolution of the master. Another exciting possibility for art lovers is the Miro Foundation to view the permanent collection of Joan Miro.

La Boqueria
Wander through Barcelona’s most popular food market, which dates back to the 12th century.

La Rambla, El Born, Barri Gotic
Sit back with a drink on La Rambla and watch street performers go by. Enjoy musicians, old-style shops, and flower, bird and souvenir stalls—the opportunities are endless on this famous tree-lined promenade.

Formerly one of the seediest sections of Barcelona, the El Born neighborhood with its medieval roots has seen a revival. It is now one of the hottest spots to shop and dine.

Barri Gotic, Barcelona’s Old City, is the perfect place to wind down at the end of the day. This section of town is filled with the best tapas bars.

The Olimpic Port
With great views of the Mediterranean, the Olimpic Port is a lovely place to stroll along the sea promenade, and there are plenty of fine restaurants. Specialties to try while in Barcelona include fish dishes, paella, Spanish omelet, Catalan cream for dessert, Catalan wines, and sparkling Cava.

Barcelona Beaches
Barcelona’s coastline is over 4 km. long and offers a wide variety of excellent beaches. Barceloneta beach is the closest to the city center and has many great seafood restaurants.

We hope that these Barcelona must-see sights will help you get more vacation from your vacation.  Make your trip even more unique and use our travel planning resources to help get your dream vacation underway. Start planning your European vacation today!

Anyone wandering the northern fringe of Barcelona’s Old City will pause in astonishment before a building that is flamboyant even by this city’s standards – the Palau de la Música Catalana, or Catalan Palace of Music.

It was designed in 1908 by a leader of Barcelona’s “Modernista” architectural movement, Domènich y Montaner, as a lavish temple to the Catalan Renaissance, the revival of interest in the Catalan language and culture that had been gaining pace since the late 19th century.

The Palace’s towering terracotta façade is a fantasia of columns and curlicues, with images of Beethoven, Bach and Wagner embedded in its decorations.  The interior is even more magical, with winged horses soaring over the balconies and ornately carved arches, one depicting the local composer Anselm Clavé leading maidens in a traditional Catalan song, Flors de Maig, May Flowers.  But the centerpiece is the ceiling, where an enormous bulb of brilliantly colored stained glass explodes downwards, suggesting the sun bursting forth from a blue Mediterranean sky.  Perhaps only Sydney’s Opera House can be compared to such a stunningly creative performance venue.

There are daily tours of the Palace, but consider instead buying a ticket for one of the evening concerts, so you can join the throngs of devoted locals (starting with a glass of cava, the Spanish sparkling wine, and selection of tapas, small plates of delicious snacks, at the exquisite bar, of course).  Here it’s easy to imagine Barcelona in its golden age of the early 1900s, when it first became a confident, booming city, filled with enough cabarets, bars and brothels to rival Paris.

No Spain vacation is complete without viewing Gaudi’s famous works.  With his wildly inventive design sense, the architect Antonio Gaudí is revered in Barcelona today as the ultimate Catalan genius.  Every one of his buildings is a prized monument; his fantastical shapes and whimsical flourishes are reproduced on millions of souvenir T-shirts, mouse pads and coffee cups; there is even a campaign by local Catholics to have Gaudí canonized as a saint.

But ironically enough, while Gaudí was alive, Barceleños were by no means convinced of his brilliance – in fact, many civic leaders regarded him as a crank and a vandal who was defacing the neo-classical beauty of the city.  And Gaudí was, without doubt, an eccentric figure.  He was born into a wealthy family, and in his twenties seemed a typical gentleman boulavadier, devoting his time to frivolous café life and the half-hearted study of architecture, almost as a part-time hobby.

Everything changed when, at the age of 31, Gaudí’s proposal of marriage was rejected by the woman he loved.  Heart-broken, he took refuge in religion.  He turned his back on his family’s wealth and decided to live as an ascetic, wandering the city long-haired and in simple robes, eating only a diet of nuts and lettuce leaves dipped in milk.  But he continued designing buildings, which he now thought of as offerings to God, drawing on the patterns of Nature – the subtle flowing of water, the shapes of tree roots, the scales of fish or membranes of butterfly wings.  Read the rest of this entry »

We disembark from our river cruise journey to travel back to Spain, this time visiting the capital of Catalonia.

During our series on Barcelona vacations we will wonder down Las Ramblas to watch street performers, explore Gaudi’s most famous works including La Sagrada Familia, and relax at one of the city’s many beautiful beaches.  The city is also home to many museums such as the Picasso Museum and the Catalan National Art Museum.

Spain is a country steeped in history and culture. Sit back, enjoy a dish of paella, and prepare to enjoy a Barcelona getaway.

When traveling to Madrid, the Spanish capital here are some must-see sights:

Church of San Francisco El Grande
Visit this neoclassical masterpiece with the largest dome in Madrid. Its walls and ceilings are decorated with superb frescoes.

Austrias Old Madrid
Wander in old Madrid—a delight to explore with its squares and churches.

El Retiro Park
For some gentle relaxation, stroll in El Retiro. Dating back to the 1600s, the park features a lake, statues, and fountains.

El Botin
The oldest restaurant in the world, El Botin specializes in lamb and roast pork suckling dishes.

Tapas Tour
Enjoy the Spanish specialty in typical taverns in the old part of Madrid. Tapas are an excellent way to taste small portions of different foods. Also sample local wines, Sangria, or Spanish lemonade.

We hope that these Madrid must-see sights will help you get more vacation from your vacation.  Make your trip even more unique and use our travel planning resources to help get your dream vacation underway. Start planning your European vacation today!

Madrid may be a sprawling, energetic city & vacation destination today, but it was an unlikely choice to be named Spanish capital in the 16th century – and nobody was more astonished than the residents themselves.

In 1561, it was a small provincial outpost, hardly larger than a village, when King Philip II sent a letter announcing his royal court’s imminent arrival.  Local Castilian aristocrats had to scramble to purchase enough banquet food just for their monarch’s table, and they (like the rest of Spain) were baffled to learn that Philip decided to remain permanently.  Unlike the great cities of Toledo and Seville, Madrid had no cathedral, no grand avenues, no university; it didn’t even have one of the new-fangled printing presses, considered a symbol of progress at the time.  But what it did have was its central location; from Madrid, letters could reach any point in Spain within five days.  King Philip was a devout Catholic, painfully shy and austere; he had no talent for leading armies into battle and he also disliked traveling, so had decided to run the ever-expanding Spanish Empire by royal decree.  (A prince amongst bureaucrats, it was said that he would deal with 400 complex documents a day).

As soon as the news was out, the once-sleepy Madrid was flooded the with wealth of the court and its noble hangers-on; the city quickly became an enormous construction site, resulting in the ornate palaces, majestic and fabulously wealthy convents that we see in the historical center today.  And Philip’s rather dull, methodical nature did not make Madrid a quiet place; far from it.  Hordes of artists and writers followed the aristocracy seeking wealthy patrons, as well as con-men, petty criminals, prostitutes and the famous picaros: Spanish adventurers who lived on their wits.  The atmosphere resembled a free-wheeling Wild West town.  One writer, Antonio Liñan y Verdugo, penned a guidebook in 1620 for gold-digging Spaniards flocking to the city, called Guide and Advice to Strangers Who Come to the Court.  His description gave a more vivid idea of Madrid than history books.  He suggested that Madrid had become a vice-ridden “Babylon” filled with tricksters and illusory wonders – “dreamed-up marvels, fairy-tale treasures and figures like actors on a stage.”

A trip to Spain is not complete without viewing some of Picasso’s famous works.

Nobody remains impassive after entering the white-walled gallery room in the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid where Picasso’s Guernica is displayed: Some viewers gasp in recognition, others are stunned, a few older Spaniards even burst into tears.  The enormous canvas, where twisted abstract figures cascade across an exploding landscape in agony and confusion, is the West’s most famous anti-war statement, and its story encapsulates the tragic history of Spain’s bloody civil war, which raged in the late 1930s and still resonates today.

Picasso, who had been born in Andalucia, was living as an expatriate in Paris in 1937 when the Republican government asked him to create a painting for the Spanish Pavilion in the World’s Fair.  He had been working on a quite different artistic project when he read a newspaper report of the bombing of Guernica in the Basque Country.  This town was considered a stronghold of left-wing Republican sympathy by the right-wing Nationalist forces led by General Francisco Franco, who was supported militarily by the German Nazi Government.

On April 26, the German air force swept down on the town, raining bombs upon its civilians indiscriminately.  Guernica’s male inhabitants were fighting on the front lines, so the attack caught mostly women, children and the elderly; planes strafed refugees mercilessly with machine gun fire.  Picasso was deeply affected by the account; he abandoned his earlier project and threw himself into painting Guernica.  The 25-foot-long, 11-foot-high piece captured all the barbarity of the attack and it became an instant icon.  After the Parisian exposition, the painting toured the world, finally reaching South America and the United States.

By 1939, Europe was engulfed in the Second World War, so Picasso asked that the painting remain safely at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and not be returned to Spain until Franco had been removed from power.  This change took far longer than anyone could have guessed.  The sinister dictator not only won the Civil War, he controlled the country until his death 36 years later, in 1975.  But democracy was finally restored in Spain the following year, and with great fanfare, Guernica traveled home to Madrid in 1981.

After taking a look back at our favorite blog posts of 2009 we are ready to begin traveling again.  Rejuvenate your sense of adventure, the  Spanish capital of Madrid is waiting.  Madrid, Spain is a strikingly modern city, the showcase of a country resolutely turned towards the future.

Over the course of our 2-week vacation series we will peruse Madrid’s Prado Museum, dine on mouth-watering Spanish tapas, sip on Sangria , relax in El Retiro Park and wander through Plaza Mayor.

If you are interested in culture or nightlife, history or food, a vacation in Madrid is certain to leave you with unforgettable travel memories.

El Rastro Flea Market

This market at the Plaza Cascorro and Ribera de Curtidores is the place to be on Sunday mornings—and has been for 500 years. Here you’ll find everything under the sun, including the snail special at the market’s Los Caracoles tapas bar.

El Retiro Park

Another Sunday morning tradition in Madrid is to stroll through El Retiro Park among the fortunetellers and magicians. Dating back to the 1600s, the park features a lake as well as statues and soothing fountains. Read the rest of this entry »

Catalan National Art Museum

Considered the Prado of Romanesque art, this museum is a must. Housed in the National Palace, it displays the world’s finest Romanesque and Gothic paintings, sculpture and metalwork, as well as the Catalan impressionists, art nouveau furniture, and religious art from the Thyssen Bornemisza collection.

El Born

Formerly one of the seediest sections of Barcelona, the El Born neighborhood with its medieval roots has seen a revival. It is now one of the hottest spots to shop and dine. Read the rest of this entry »