Montjuic is the mountain overlooking Barcelona. We visited the fortress at its top and were just in time to catch the English tour. The young man who led us frankly explained that the citizens of Barcelona didn’t like the place. It has largely been seen as a symbol of first Castilian, and then Fascist, oppression. Historically, Barcelona was the centre of Catalonian separatism for hundreds of years, and then, in the Spanish Civil War, was a hotbed for the Communist and Anarchist groups which fought each other, and Franco. Our guide kept it simple but rather gleefully told the story of the demilitarisation of the fortress, culminating in the removal of Franco’s statue to storage; a process that culminated in the mysterious disappearance of its head.
Grim past or not, Montjuic has great views.
In the dungeons there were very human reminders of the prisoners who suffered in the civil war and Franco years. There were poems, pornographic drawings, calendars, notes from prisoners recording their own sentences of death, caricatures and political comments.
Our next stop, Catalonia’s art museum, could not be more grandiose.
The glory of this collection was the effort made to collect and preserve the Romanesque frescoes from the churches of the region.
The modern section was great too, though both of us wondered why the man was strangling the cat.
Then it was off to Catalonia’s archaeology museum where I got to use virtual reality glasses and Lyn discovered she’d lost an earring. We can create virtual reality exhibits but nobody seems able to design non-losable earrings.
Finally, we shopped in two of the big department stores. We’ve packed for our train trip tomorrow when we will leave Catalonia behind us. So here are morning and evening photos of Sagrada Familia.
No comments:
Post a Comment