Our apartment in Barcelona was located in the heart of Sagrada Familia and couldn’t really be better positioned for exploring the city. With the metro just a 100 meters down the road we enjoyed not having the “worries” of car travel and parking. It was Daniel and Amy’s first exposure to underground trains and the loved it.

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The two photos below are taken from the balcony of our apartment.

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On Sunday afternoon we went to Park Guell, a garden park designed by Antoni Gaudi on the side of a hill and built between 1900 and 1914. The park was originally part of an unsuccessful housing development, yes they occurring back then as well, and the idea was birthed by Count Eusebi Guell whom the park is named after. Evidently the idea was inspired by the English garden city movement. As it was the most unusual park/garden I have every visited there are a lot of photos included in this blog to give you a rough idea about what it was like.

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On top of the structure above is a large park area with seats around the edge. The photos below show how decorated the seats are. The designs are all different.

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In the view from the park over the city you can see the Basilica De La Sagrada Familia near where our apartment was. See the middle right side just under the over hanging tree.

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The other highlight to me was simply wandering around the inner city at night and also around the old city areas.

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Walking around the city you find Antoni Gaudi’s famous buildings like these:

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We also liked sitting around in cafes sampling the coffee and pastries. Although the photo below was taken from McD (again) and the coffee and cakes were fantastic, we didn’t only frequent McD’s, you can read one of Karen’s blog on our chocolate experience, which she will no doubt write sometime, for proof of this. I should add not all McCafe’s are created equal and this one was probably my favourite in our trip to date because it was right opposite one of Antoni Gaudi’s buildings in a very active upmarket retail area. I have written a few other blogs on our Barcelona time so will leave this one here. It truly was an awesome city to visit but 3 nights is not enough time to allocate to this city, next time we will spend a week.

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