Barcelona

[babidi]

I’m planning a 14-day trip to Barcelona and Seville, and I’m really looking forward to capturing in this beautiful city.  Do you've good spots where I can make nice pictures? I am thinnking about El Raval. 

[cteno4]

Casa Batlló And Casa Milà are very fun to photograph, many odd little views and details, it’s one of those places you have to keep looking around and looking for different views. Also lots of changes in the light in rooms and especially on the roofs and their figure headed chimneys over the course of the day. We spent many hours at each and I wish we had spent more.

Sagrada Família Is amazing, but huge and at times hard to frame in shots. They have been adding all sorts of led lighting to help make the architecture pop as it was pretty monotone and everything looked pretty gray when we were there a decade ago. Again a place you have to look for those shot angles that pick up cool details and angles. I’m hoping the new lighting will help make the place really shine now.

 

The Rambla and El Raval are fun and great places to hang out and watch the tides of people go by. Lots of interesting architecture to see and good public art. We stayed at a place on the Rambla and was great to have an aerial view of the river of people.

 

Park Güell has interesting bits and pieces but wasn’t all that taken with it myself. It may have been due to the crowds as we unfortunately went on a weekend so both tourists and locals crushed in.

 

Seville has a lot of interesting architecture, like a lot of this area tons of baroque cathedrals. These can get repetitive at times, but if you look closely at all the wild sculpture done o the walls and columns, you can find some very interesting things to photograph in the details. The Parasol is wild, it had just been built when we were there.

 

If you can get to Córdoba the grand mosque is quite spectacular. It’s huge and its internal dimensioning makes it sort of an infinity space and it feels like it never ends! It’s even got a good sized cathedral in the middle of it and wild how that floats in this larger space and it totally swallowed up by the mosque. Challenging to photograph as it’s dim lighting and the visual effects don’t make it into the camera well, but definitely one of those experiential, neurochrome places.

 

I know Bilbao is the other side of the country (but Spain has nice high speed rail!), but Gehry’s Guggenheim is mind blowing. In my book truly the best pice of architecture in the world. One of those places you can keep walking around and look at spaces and details from different angles and not find a bad view (I really tried), really amazing. Usually in most good architecture the main space and path everything looks right and good, but go off the main path or look at spaces from odd angles and things can look bad or sloppy, but at Bilbao it’s not the case. Gehry’s mind I think is 4 dimensional and what we see is that projected into 3 dimensions for us. The exterior is also amazing to take in and also at many different distances and angles. Building really changes a lot depending on the distance from it. It nestles in well with the rest of the city, river and bridge. We found a nice little riverfront cafe on the other side of the river and it was a grand long lunch watching the light change the look of the structure over a couple of hours. Best time I’ve ever had scoping out a building for 3 days.
 

Bilbao is also is fantastic as it sets an extremely high bar for the art shown in it. You can clearly see art below the bar “have no clothes” when presented in Bilbao, while those above the bar shine wonderfully in the space. There was a temp exhibit on some comparison of old masters and abstract pieces and the old masters were fine in the way out building. Serra’s pieces there are amazing to experience. Scale and mass are dimensions that is usually not a big part of art that is played with much, but his are all about that and such amazing detail to curves on massive chunks of iron! 

 

enjoy your trip and eat a lot of ham for me! Food is really wonderful in Spain.

 

jeff

[chadbag]

Spain is a place I'd like to visit but have never been.  When your back upload some photos for us!

 

Hopefully you can check out the trains as well.   Looking at Wikipedia it appears the Renfe Class 251 freight locomotives are still in use?  They have the EF 66 as one of their ancestors (though with many changes in mechanical design etc).  They very much look related.

 

[SL-san]

18 hours ago, babidi said:

planning a 14-day trip to Barcelona and Seville,

I would endorse cteno4 comments on Barcelona and Gaudi's architecture, except to say that we found Park Guell pretty amazing too.  Yes it does get overrun with tourists (as does the whole of Barcelona) and the locals are becoming less enamoured with mass tourism.  Cordoba Mosque and Cathedral is truly one of the great sites of Spain.  Seville (like most Spanish cities) has an amazing cathedral and Alcazar but my personal favourite (besides Bilbao) is Granada with the Alhambra and Generalife Gardens (ok I am biased as I am a retired Architect and Landscape Architect).  But as Jeff says enjoy the food, and yes the ham in Spain is wonderful.  There used to be a chain called the Museum of Ham (or some such) which had an array of legs of ham suspended from the ceiling and a choice of ham to sample (and buy) that was beyond belief!  Oh and the wine is not bad either.

Graeme

[cteno4]

11 minutes ago, SL-san said:

Granada with the Alhambra and Generalife Gardens (ok I am biased as I am a retired Architect and Landscape Architect).

Whoops totally forgot these! Yes I agree. Yeah I chalk my reaction to Park Guell to really heavy crowds, luckily the rest of our time in Spain did not have much in the way of crowds and this was the exception.

 

ham, wine, repeat! The kinds of ham is just stunning. Lots of great cuisine, but the ham just kept calling in all of its wonderful ways.

 

jeff

[babidi]

19 hours ago, cteno4 said:

Casa Batlló And Casa Milà are very fun to photograph, many odd little views and details, it’s one of those places you have to keep looking around and looking for different views. Also lots of changes in the light in rooms and especially on the roofs and their figure headed chimneys over the course of the day. We spent many hours at each and I wish we had spent more.

Sagrada Família Is amazing, but huge and at times hard to frame in shots. They have been adding all sorts of led lighting to help make the architecture pop as it was pretty monotone and everything looked pretty gray when we were there a decade ago. Again a place you have to look for those shot angles that pick up cool details and angles. I’m hoping the new lighting will help make the place really shine now.

 

The Rambla and El Raval are fun and great places to hang out and watch the tides of people go by. Lots of interesting architecture to see and good public art. We stayed at a place on the Rambla and was great to have an aerial view of the river of people.

 

Park Güell has interesting bits and pieces but wasn’t all that taken with it myself. It may have been due to the crowds as we unfortunately went on a weekend so both tourists and locals crushed in.

 

Seville has a lot of interesting architecture, like a lot of this area tons of baroque cathedrals. These can get repetitive at times, but if you look closely at all the wild sculpture done o the walls and columns, you can find some very interesting things to photograph in the details. The Parasol is wild, it had just been built when we were there.

 

If you can get to Córdoba the grand mosque is quite spectacular. It’s huge and its internal dimensioning makes it sort of an infinity space and it feels like it never ends! It’s even got a good sized cathedral in the middle of it and wild how that floats in this larger space and it totally swallowed up by the mosque. Challenging to photograph as it’s dim lighting and the visual effects don’t make it into the camera well, but definitely one of those experiential, neurochrome places.

 

I know Bilbao is the other side of the country (but Spain has nice high speed rail!), but Gehry’s Guggenheim is mind blowing. In my book truly the best pice of architecture in the world. One of those places you can keep walking around and look at spaces and details from different angles and not find a bad view (I really tried), really amazing. Usually in most good architecture the main space and path everything looks right and good, but go off the main path or look at spaces from odd angles and things can look bad or sloppy, but at Bilbao it’s not the case. Gehry’s mind I think is 4 dimensional and what we see is that projected into 3 dimensions for us. The exterior is also amazing to take in and also at many different distances and angles. Building really changes a lot depending on the distance from it. It nestles in well with the rest of the city, river and bridge. We found a nice little riverfront cafe on the other side of the river and it was a grand long lunch watching the light change the look of the structure over a couple of hours. Best time I’ve ever had scoping out a building for 3 days.
 

Bilbao is also is fantastic as it sets an extremely high bar for the art shown in it. You can clearly see art below the bar “have no clothes” when presented in Bilbao, while those above the bar shine wonderfully in the space. There was a temp exhibit on some comparison of old masters and abstract pieces and the old masters were fine in the way out building. Serra’s pieces there are amazing to experience. Scale and mass are dimensions that is usually not a big part of art that is played with much, but his are all about that and such amazing detail to curves on massive chunks of iron! 

 

enjoy your trip and eat a lot of ham for me! Food is really wonderful in Spain.

 

jeff

Wow jeff, thanks for such elaborated reply. Appreciate it. And sure, I will have a lot of hams.

[babidi]

13 hours ago, chadbag said:

Spain is a place I'd like to visit but have never been.  When your back upload some photos for us!

 

Hopefully you can check out the trains as well.   Looking at Wikipedia it appears the Renfe Class 251 freight locomotives are still in use?  They have the EF 66 as one of their ancestors (though with many changes in mechanical design etc).  They very much look related.

 

I was reading an article about a restaurant beside the railway station near Barcelona. I can't really remember the name, I guess La Mundana or something. I might visit there as well. I did check them out on Quora, looks like they are still in use

[Tony Galiani]

Watch your wallet!  Especially in places like Las Ramblas.

 

There are a number of nearby places for a day trip by train.  We went to Montserrat and enjoyed that.  Got to see both passenger and freight trains on the ride so bonus for me.  If you do a search on the Rick Steves' Travel Forum you can find a list of potential options.

 

Tony

[cteno4]

@babidi you are most welcome. We really enjoyed Spain. We spent 2.5 weeks there and one week of it was an architecture tour of southern Spain with an academic which was very fun. Rest we did on our own using trains. 
 

You can’t go wrong with food in Spain, we never had a bad or mediocre food experience. Little cafes usually had interesting and tasty stuff and lots of light tapas fare everywhere to snack on while out and about and feeling peckish. Even little grocery stores had a little deli counter and would whip up small sandwiches on the fly for you. Tons of great reds from Spain and Portugal that were dirt cheap and fresh and tasty. Find a few place to have a long, late dinner with multiple courses, it’s a real experience. Many places have them at not exorbitant prices (well hopefully they still do!)

 

As tony notes, like any places with tons of tourism watch your wallet and possessions. Las Rambles is notorious for pick pockets as it’s just a huge meandering stream of people. I tend to look around at people around me in public, make eye contact and smile. Makes folks around you aware you are not out to lunch and observing what is going on around you and folks with bad intentions tend to not target you then, they want the spaced out tourist oblivious to all around them. It’s served me well traveling to very dicy places for decades, never had any incidents. Plus acknowledging others around you with some eye contact and smiles gets you nice smiles in return (and sometimes in very touristy areas looks of bemusement) and sometimes folks will actually strike up conversations when you don’t look like the oblivious tourist. I’ve found folks very appreciative of such a simple, human act. I also just enjoy watching people in different places, fun to see the similarities and differences and big point to travel to me. It has made travel more safe and enjoyable for me over the decades.

 

jeff

[babidi]

On 6/22/2024 at 1:21 AM, cteno4 said:

@babidi you are most welcome. We really enjoyed Spain. We spent 2.5 weeks there and one week of it was an architecture tour of southern Spain with an academic which was very fun. Rest we did on our own using trains. 
 

You can’t go wrong with food in Spain, we never had a bad or mediocre food experience. Little cafes usually had interesting and tasty stuff and lots of light tapas fare everywhere to snack on while out and about and feeling peckish. Even little grocery stores had a little deli counter and would whip up small sandwiches on the fly for you. Tons of great reds from Spain and Portugal that were dirt cheap and fresh and tasty. Find a few place to have a long, late dinner with multiple courses, it’s a real experience. Many places have them at not exorbitant prices (well hopefully they still do!)

 

As tony notes, like any places with tons of tourism watch your wallet and possessions. Las Rambles is notorious for pick pockets as it’s just a huge meandering stream of people. I tend to look around at people around me in public, make eye contact and smile. Makes folks around you aware you are not out to lunch and observing what is going on around you and folks with bad intentions tend to not target you then, they want the spaced out tourist oblivious to all around them. It’s served me well traveling to very dicy places for decades, never had any incidents. Plus acknowledging others around you with some eye contact and smiles gets you nice smiles in return (and sometimes in very touristy areas looks of bemusement) and sometimes folks will actually strike up conversations when you don’t look like the oblivious tourist. I’ve found folks very appreciative of such a simple, human act. I also just enjoy watching people in different places, fun to see the similarities and differences and big point to travel to me. It has made travel more safe and enjoyable for me over the decades.

 

jeff

Man, you sure made me crave forfood more. Now, instead of listing out the places to visit, I am making a chart of foods to try. Actually, I even contacted a guide from https://gowithguide.com/spain to arrange a food tour of authentic Spanish dishes. After coming back, I will make a list of my favourites.  

[kami_illy]

On 6/20/2024 at 5:26 PM, cteno4 said:

Casa Batlló And Casa Milà are very fun to photograph, many odd little views and details, it’s one of those places you have to keep looking around and looking for different views. Also lots of changes in the light in rooms and especially on the roofs and their figure headed chimneys over the course of the day. We spent many hours at each and I wish we had spent more.

Sagrada Família Is amazing, but huge and at times hard to frame in shots. They have been adding all sorts of led lighting to help make the architecture pop as it was pretty monotone and everything looked pretty gray when we were there a decade ago. Again a place you have to look for those shot angles that pick up cool details and angles. I’m hoping the new lighting will help make the place really shine now.

 

The Rambla and El Raval are fun and great places to hang out and watch the tides of people go by. Lots of interesting architecture to see and good public art. We stayed at a place on the Rambla and was great to have an aerial view of the river of people.

 

Park Güell has interesting bits and pieces but wasn’t all that taken with it myself. It may have been due to the crowds as we unfortunately went on a weekend so both tourists and locals crushed in.

 

Seville has a lot of interesting architecture, like a lot of this area tons of baroque cathedrals. These can get repetitive at times, but if you look closely at all the wild sculpture done o the walls and columns, you can find some very interesting things to photograph in the details. The Parasol is wild, it had just been built when we were there.

 

If you can get to Córdoba the grand mosque is quite spectacular. It’s huge and its internal dimensioning makes it sort of an infinity space and it feels like it never ends! It’s even got a good sized cathedral in the middle of it and wild how that floats in this larger space and it totally swallowed up by the mosque. Challenging to photograph as it’s dim lighting and the visual effects don’t make it into the camera well, but definitely one of those experiential, neurochrome places.

 

I know Bilbao is the other side of the country (but Spain has nice high speed rail!), but Gehry’s Guggenheim is mind blowing. In my book truly the best pice of architecture in the world. One of those places you can keep walking around and look at spaces and details from different angles and not find a bad view (I really tried), really amazing. Usually in most good architecture the main space and path everything looks right and good, but go off the main path or look at spaces from odd angles and things can look bad or sloppy, but at Bilbao it’s not the case. Gehry’s mind I think is 4 dimensional and what we see is that projected into 3 dimensions for us. The exterior is also amazing to take in and also at many different distances and angles. Building really changes a lot depending on the distance from it. It nestles in well with the rest of the city, river and bridge. We found a nice little riverfront cafe on the other side of the river and it was a grand long lunch watching the light change the look of the structure over a couple of hours. Best time I’ve ever had scoping out a building for 3 days.
 

Bilbao is also is fantastic as it sets an extremely high bar for the art shown in it. You can clearly see art below the bar “have no clothes” when presented in Bilbao, while those above the bar shine wonderfully in the space. There was a temp exhibit on some comparison of old masters and abstract pieces and the old masters were fine in the way out building. Serra’s pieces there are amazing to experience. Scale and mass are dimensions that is usually not a big part of art that is played with much, but his are all about that and such amazing detail to curves on massive chunks of iron! 

 

enjoy your trip and eat a lot of ham for me! Food is really wonderful in Spain.

 

jeff

 

Also nice to see; Montjuic with the olympic facilities and the old castle (haven't been inside yet though) from which you have some nice views over the city. Also close by is the Mies-van-der-Rohe-Pavillion and the Caixa-Forum which is a nice museum where you can escape the scorching heat at middays. 

Also interesting is the Cosmo-Caixa; a modern museum with a huge inside rain forrest exhibit and science museum, again with a nice view from the surrounding neighborhood. 

 

But in general, just go around, and find the small alleys where its not full of tourists and you'll find tons of places that are worth checking out and look good on photos 😉 

Other than that, sit in the small cafes/restaurants/bars, drink something nice, have some tasty food and enjoy!

Edited June 24 by kami_illy
typos

[kami_illy]

One question for the community since this is the only active 'Barcelona' topic right now; does anybody know if there is any hobby shop / model shop in Barcelona worth checking out? 

Since a few years I am spending the summertime there but for some reason never connected the two things.

Sorry for hijacking the topic (mods, feel free to move that part somewhere else if it doesn't fit here).  

[kami_illy]

So, i've been to Barcelona for some weeks now and gathered some (though few) infos. 

 

There is a model train market in the station "Estacion de Francia" (https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/model-train-market-at-estacio-de-franca) which I could not visit bc it is paused in the summer (bc it is too hot and its holiday season) but I heard it will resume in september. 

 

There is also a bunch of hobby / train shops here. I shortly spoke to someone at the "Planet Train" shop, which has only H0 stock. I didn't check around there since I got there right at closing time on a Saturday. He told me that there is only one shop in Barcelona which deals N scale; "Rocafort Modelismo" in Gran Via, close to Plaza de Espana. 

It's a nice shop. They have a lot of other model and toy stuff as well. Couldn't find any japanese things aside from some Unitrack sets and some of the European / US stuff from Kato and few generic Tomytec. Still worth to check out if you are around.

 

That's it so far. I didn't put too much energy in finding out more though. The heat slowed me down a lot (can't imagine to do any model work with this climate) and the city and beaches around kept me busy anyways 😁