Poble Espanyol
This is our 100th blog post, and it's almost exactly one year after the covid lockdown began in Spain. How ironically appropriate to mark it with a post about Poble Espanyol, since we still haven't seen any of Spain outside of Catalonia! An "open-air museum" on Montjuic, it's a walled compound comparable in area to a large castle. Built for the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition, it's like an early twentieth century Spanish Epcot Center, showcasing a sampling the architecture of the whole country of Spain. Originally planned as a temporary exhibition, the fruit of an encyclopedic effort by its architect and artist creators, it was so successful that it was spared demolition.
Typically it would be mobbed with tourists, but instead it was full of locals eating on the many restaurant terraces. It has great views of the city (like many other spots on the amazing Montjuic)
and a sunny and inviting Placa Major where we ate outside at one of the many restaurants.
I can't say it scratched my itch to see Andalucia:
But it has a series of nice small plazas and nooks to discover:
An homage to the grand stair of the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela (Las gradas de Santiago):
And a small monastery, a composite of a handful of Catalan monasteries where I found a lovely framed view to la Sagrada Familia. At the time Poble Espanyol was constructed, the basilica (begun in 1882) was 15-25% complete, and Gaudi had died a few years before, in 1926.
