Sven’s guide to…

There was no post last week, because I was in Barcelona. Not Bar Celona:

Barcelona:

So you can guess what this post is going to be about, can’t you? I know I say it all the time about holidays, but seriously, I LOVED Barcelona. I could quite happily live there, and I’m quite jealous of James’s cousin and her husband who get to do just that for three years while he works there. If you lived round the corner from that beach, would you want to live anywhere else?

The first thing you notice about Barcelona is the architecture. Every building is fabulous and clearly a lot of thought has gone into everything, unlike a lot of the UK where things are thrown up in a hurry these days with scant regard for aesthetic continuity.

The second thing you notice about Barcelona is the people. Everyone in the city is beautiful. Not just run-of-the-mill good looking: utterly, strikingly beautiful. As James said: “Welcome to Barcelona. You will want to sleep with everyone.” I don’t quite know why it is that the city is full of Gap dancers, but I suspect it has something to do with the chilled out lifestyle (between June and September everyone works 8am - 3pm and then goes down to the beach) and the fantastic food.

Eating out in Barcelona is like anywhere else: there are good places and there are bad places but with a resident guide you are guaranteed not to waste your time in the latter. The best tapas we ate was in La Flauta, where I fell in love with patatas bravas and a surprisingly pleasing baked camembert covered in nuts and served with strawberry jam. Yum yum yum.

Of course, returning to the buildings, you simply can’t go to Barcelona without admiring the many works of Gaudi, who appears to have single-handedly designed everything worth seeing in the city. La Pedrera is an ordinary apartment building, apart from the only structural walls being found in the stairwells. Since no weight runs through any of the walls, Gaudi did what he liked with the façade and the interior layout, resulting in the wonderful building you see today.

La Pedrera is not the high point of his work, brilliant as it is. Everything he ever built is outdone by the monumental construction of the Sagrada Familia, under construction since 1882 and set for completion in 2026. Say what you want about religious belief, it takes some faith to start building something like this, knowing you will never see it completed:

And that’s just the side entrance. They haven’t even begun on the front door, which promises to be the most extraordinary façade ever constructed. In the meantime we’ll all just have to make do with the East and West façades and wait to see what the finished article will look like. Quite simply: amazing.

So that’s Barcelona. Next week: varsity rugby and the return of the writing group. Hurray!