This week’s travel dream: Barcelona’s artistic side

Barcelona is “one of the world’s great art centers,” said Rosemary McClure in the Los Angeles Times. There is much about this Spanish city to admire, but “at its heart, Barcelona is where art and architecture rule.” I wanted to see this vibrant Mediterranean city through the eyes of the artists who helped to create it. I wanted to “touch and taste the exuberance” of the place. So I plotted an itinerary that would take me from the ancient streets and medieval squares of the Barrio Gótico to the whimsical 20th-century creations of architect Antoni Gaudí.

Barrio Gótico, the city’s “well-preserved” Gothic quarter, has inspired artists for centuries. Created during a building boom that expanded the city’s Roman-built core, the neighborhood remains “one of Europe’s most impressive Gothic legacies.” I wandered from the 13th-century Barcelona cathedral to the Plaça del Pi, an outdoor square where locals dine on tapas. Nearby, the Museu Picasso “pays homage to the 20th century’s most acclaimed artist,”

and I popped in to peruse its collection of 3,800 early works. Exploring this museum allowed me to “discover the artist as he was discovering himself.” I had a similar feeling visiting the Fundació Joan Miró, a “spacious, light-filled” museum dedicated to Barcelona’s best-known modernist painter. Perched atop Montjuïc, a mountain inside city limits, it holds more than 14,000 Miró originals, including his late murals.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Finally, it was time to indulge my interest in Gaudí, so I crisscrossed Barcelona to see his many masterpieces: I marveled at the surreal apartment building La Pedrera, roamed among the mosaic spires in the garden complex Park Güell, and admired the skeleton-like Casa Batlló, built in honor of St. George, the patron saint of Catalonia. My last stop was La Sagrada Família, the Gaudí-designed cathedral that’s been under construction for nearly 120 years. I took a tiny elevator to one of its “dizzying spires,” its exterior “crowned in pinnacles.” Looking out over the city, I was inspired. It seemed to me that Gaudí and artists like him had “made an art of being nonconformist and so gave Barcelona permission to be different from the rest of Spain.”

Contact: Barcelonaturisme.com