Now that we have established that the local food alone is worth a trip to Barcelona (by eating a lot of it, intrepid adventurers that we are), only one question remains: how do we get all those calories off our waistlines? Well, by walking, of course.
I am sure you had already figured that out all by yourself. The website is called Easy Hiker, after all, not Heavy Eater.
A walk will come in handy for another reason: it’s surely a good idea to reconnect with nature after all the artefacts (architecture and museums) that you will have been seeing.
Instead of taking you for a single day-long walk – if that’s what you want, look for inspiration here – we shall invite you today to two short 1-hour walks through adjacent parts of the city. You can squeeze them individually between other items on your travel agenda or, if you feel like it, knock them together into something that will occupy you for a whole morning or afternoon.
Our Suggested Barcelona City Walks
We start at the Arc de Triomf. (Catalan, the language spoken by most people in Barcelona, sounds a lot like Spanish, but written it often looks like some sort of pidgin Esperanto.)
A few hundred meters to the south of the Arc (and the metro station of the same name), you will find the Parc de la Ciutadella. Barcelona – unlike, say, London and New York – is not famous for generously dimensioned green spaces, and there is not even an equivalent to Paris’s vast but scruffy Bois de Boulogne.
The Ciutadella may be less famous and much smaller than any of these three, but it offers something else: it has been landscaped not to mirror the spread and sprawl of “real” nature but the carefully conceived artifice of an operatic performance.
The Ciutadella leads the visitor from the bombastic overture of the Zoology Museum near the entrance …
… along the quiet banks of the (even in December) sub tropically lush lake …
… slowly building up the tempo with the classically balanced facades of the conservatory …
… passing the odd divertimento along the way …
… to the crashing crescendo of the large cascada, the fountain-cum-waterfall which is the dramatic highlight of the park.
Fountains, triumphal arch, hippogriffs, the Birth of Venus, the quadriga: all of this was only added after the park had been long finished and the general public had complained that this section of it looked “boring”.
The “upgrade” took six years to complete, almost as long as the construction of the entire garden, and it is said that one of the assistants of the head designer was a certain Antoni Gaudí. (One wonders what became of him.)
Once you have crossed the Parc de la Ciutadella, you are now almost standing by the seaside. On your right hand side is Barcelona harbour, and on its outer periphery, you will find the world-famous Barceloneta beach, the Mediterranean equivalent to Rio’s Copacabana. It may perhaps not be a terrific idea to walk down this beach in summer, but in winter it is a blissful experience.
The beach is quiet but not abandoned, with plenty of people huddling around in pairs or sitting in their winter coats on the cafe terraces.
The shadows are long and the sunlight is pleasantly mild rather than blistering: even at mid-day, it feels like four o’clock in the afternoon.
The whole scene looks like a TV ad for life insurance or some other product aimed at the over-55s: look, it seems to say, this is how beautiful autumn can be – it isn’t always a bleak, wind-swept, miserable day in Grimsby or Hull.
The best stretch of the beach lies between the futuristic, D-shaped W Barcelona hotel and the “Peix”, Frank Gehry’s 56-m long sculpture of a filleted fish, ready for some giant’s dinner table.
Perhaps it’s just me, but that’s what I will be taking home from Catalonia: that wherever you go and turn in Barcelona, food is simply everywhere.
