How to Have Fun in Barcelona, Spain

There are plenty of great reasons to visit Barcelona, Spain. Located in the bight of coastline where the Pyrennes meet the Mediterranean and Spain abuts France, not far from the cities of Marseille and Toulouse, Barcelona has a long history as an important seaport and forward-looking artistic center. The food is as good as you'll find anywhere: smoked Iberian hams hang in the grocery stores and tapas bars, seafood is plentiful, including calamari, octopus, salmon, clams and sardines prepared in a number of interesting ways, plus the ubiquitous Spanish wine (it's included with the buffet meals at Freshco, a vegetarian all-you-can-eat chain with locations throughout the city) and the official beer of Barcelona, Estrella Damm.

La Rambla, a pedestrians-only thoroughfare which runs from the Plaza Catalunya to the waterfront and features an amazing variety of shops, restaurants, bars and seems to be populated twenty-four hours a day by throngs of tourists out for the perfect dish of paella, is a must-see attraction. By turning down any of the numerous narrow alleys along the way, visitors can discover medieval buildings, cobblestone streets and encounter everything from wide-eyed French students out for a quick vacation to personable young prostitutes in fish-net stockings and miniskirts. The farther one moves away from La Rambla, the fewer tourists one sees, finding instead a polyglot population of middle-easterners, Africans, Asians and Indians with mobile-phone shops, eclectic groceries, bars, cafes and liquor stores.

The architecture is of course unlike anything you'll find in the U.S. Apartment buildings which appear to be six or seven hundred years old are decorated with up-to-the-minute street art executed with a fine sense of color, composition and message; the primary message being independence for Catalonia, The prevailing opinion among the artists appears to be that the political status of autonomous region does nothing but hold Catalonia back.

Public transportation is the only sensible way to get around the maze of streets, but the underground Metro train and medium and short range Renfe train reaches just about anywhere a visitor or local needs to go. Tourists can buy a two-day pass for the Busturistic and ride double-decker buses which make stops at nearly every point of interest, from the stunningly massive and eclectic Park Guell, Antoni Gaudi's masterpiece of urban planning--which has been transformed from housing project to urban gallery of imaginative outdoor architecture--to the FCBarcelona stadium and Barcelona University. Gaudi's own house is one of the two houses actually constructed on the Park Guell site, and it has become a museum of Gaudi's personal belongings, in itself a fascinating collection of sculpture, painting, and architecture.

Gaudi's other works, notably the Casa Batllo, designed as a private residence and now a six-story museum of Gaudi's genius for design, along with treasures scattered throughout the city, are of course dwarfed by his magnum opus, the magnificent, if unfinished La Sagrada Familia, the towering, unlikely cathedral with narrow spires crowned by construction cranes and scaffolding, and its blend of organic forms and structural integrity. Gaudi devoted the last twenty years of his life to overseeing its construction, but the concept is so ambitious that, some 80 years after his death, workers continue their efforts to finish it, in the grand style of the great gothic cathedrals which inspired Gaudi. They too required vast fortunes and generations of labor to finish.

The massive cathedral of Saint Mary de la Mar, located in the old section of the city, stands as an impressive contrast to the modernist works, and ancient castles, walls, towers and residential buildings dot the old sections. The skyline of Barcelona is nothing short of breathtaking, with new buildings under construction everywhere one looks, and the finished ones are without exception striking in their design and originality.

With all this stone, steel and glass to look at, the people watching is almost, but not quite, an afterthought. Especially if you're interested in looking at beautiful young women wearing, for instance, their boyfriend's button-down shirts which barely conceal skimpy underwear.