Gaudi: Parc Guell and Sagrada Familla

Parc Guell

It was a grand sunny morning in November to visit Parc Guell, Gaudi's splendid recreation of the Mediterranean landscape in mosaics and rock formations with their primitive mock medieval, mock grotto, mock Arab shapes. High gleaming colorful columns--a hypostile--and rough brown rocks stuck together as planters for grand palms. Half monstrous, half graceful grottoes, endless fiddling with the long, long history of architecture around the Mediterranean.

We climbed round and round and up the lush gardens, past Indians and Spaniards selling artisanal creations, and music which filled every turn in the road. They rolled up their wares as their lookout spotted the strolling cop, usefully wearing bright neon. We rounded the park past a lovely white villa, and then found another faux antiquity, a tower with crosses jumbled on top, crowded with other climbers, while a skinny, ragged Rolling Stones wannabe screeched with his guitar.

Sagrada Familla

Then we hustled through the streets, looking for lunch and Gaudi's Cathedral, the Sagrada Familia. Lunch turned out to be a crowded local Chinese place called "America", where the 100+ menu items were heavy, fried and mostly meat, while we watched Spanish politicians in technicolor on the TV. The little Chinese waitresses did not seem to speak Spanish very well. Then we flew through neighborhoods of kids playing in schoolyards or walking home with their mothers, and stores closed for siesta, till at great length the enormous cranes of Sagrada Familia loomed.

Passion Facade

With our prepaid tickets that had nonetheless taken hours to procure, we walked in for our audioguides and the vast half built Cathedral, a kitsch yet earnest and amazing act of worship in stone and glass and concrete. The symbology, like so many Spanish Cathedrals, was exhausting.

Nativity Facade

The stark modernist Passion facade was filled with stories and substories from Gaudi's fertile creativity and the long history of Christianity.

Inside, light became one of the main characters, through the parabolic skylights, high as Montjuic in places, among the forests of columns with their significant color schemes and organic yet grotesque forms. Balconies lined the interior in Gaudi's waves for singers with intricate accoustical considerations.

The interior

High Venetian glass gleamed down, and from the Torre de la Passion we saw the ceramic fruits piled high in the conical so-called gothic turrets.

Infinite detail, ambitious grandeur, endless storytelling yet childish exuberance.

Christ looking down

Cornucopias of Mediterranean Fruit on towers