"Frantically chasing Gaudi" a Barcelona Travel Page by KristaB

I had less than a day to try to see as many works of Gaudi as possible. Since I had to meet my colleagues in the Port Vell later in the afternoon, I started from Parc Guel, then kept on rolling downhill, well in fact by taxi to Casa Mila, on foot to Casa Batllo, continued walking to Barri Gotic area, then to Palau Guell unfortunatelly closed for renovation, so I caught another taxi and went to Sagrada Familia instead.

In case you have the whole day and there are no queues you might be able to complete this basic tour in one day. I wasn't able to visit Casa Mila because the snake of people waiting was too long and moving too slowly.

Running through it like I did is absolutely silly but hey I had no choice, better 6 hours than nothing, I was longing to see and touch Gaudi's works. He certainly broke many rules and introduced unusual, refreshing and creative designs.

Barcelona is vibrant and attractive city, amazing mixture of styles, historic eras, influences from distant cultures
but what I kept on noticing all day - it is one huge building site, construction works going on everywhere you look. I don't think I've ever seen a town with that many scaffoldings!

Christopher Columbus set sail from Barcelona and returned here claiming that he had found the shortcut to East Indies. He repeated this journey 3 more times, brought back some new unusual stuff like allspice leafs and chilli peppers but he couldn't get any peppercorns there and that still didn't ring a bell so he still believed that he vas visiting East Indies.
So of course in the end that continent wasn't named after him since he was so very lost there, but after Amerigo Vespucci, who had no idea that Egyptians and Chinese and Vikins and probably Croatians and Slovenians as well have been there before him.

Columbus believed the theory developed by the Italian astronomer and geographer Toscanelly, who claimed that the Earth was round.
The goal was to find the short sea route to India in order to enable the monarchs of Spain to accumulate wealth through the trade with spices. Back in those days, a sack of black peppercorns was worth a man's life.
After reading Marco Polo's stories about his 24 years long voyage by land in which he describes the places where these spices grow in abundance, monarchs decided they want to buy from the producers and not from the seventh or seventeenth reseller. Later they even figured they don't have to buy, if they just colonize the country and teach locals the proper ways and all.

Anyway, since then the intense colonisation and trade had begun and ironically caused Barcelona to loose it's importance as a major port.