Cathedral city
John Torode seeks the best of Barcelona The invitation to spend a few days at the swish, new, family-owned Grand Hotel Central included a ‘partner’. My son the photographer loves the city. And the Catalan capital sells itself as a youthful, arty-farty, fashionable, party sort of place, which can also pull in cultivated characters of a certain age. Why not anoint George my partner, and together test Barcelona’s boast?
So it was that we found ourselves in a ten-storey, l920s former office block, five minutes from the waterfront. It is now a starkly minimalist/modernist, 147-room boutique hotel, all grey, black and off-white, with seriously subdued lighting, and not a picture or a vase of flowers to be seen. The owners decreed that such frivolities would spoil the razor-sharp mood. As for curtains, no way José. Electronically controlled matt metal blinds did the business in my room. The staff drifted about in black suits, black shirts, a touch of designer stubble and — no ties. George was over the moon. I was, well, initially a bit taken aback.
Luckily, the Joe Cool image slipped, and the staff became our new best mates, in a manner that would not, alas, have been permitted in a smart British establishment. We both like our hotels to have a wow factor, and the Grand obliges with two. A dinky little roof terrace, complete with bar, provides stunning views across the flat-roofed city, and an infinity pool. There is an award-winning restaurant, the Actual, offering Catalan food with a twist. The team led by celebrity chef Ramón Freixa offers three simple but effective meat and fish dishes each evening. We created our own sampling menu: beef stewed in wine for 24 hours and served with cauliflower couscous; grilled chicken with green mustard mousse and caramelised onions; grilled cuttlefish with green beans and aioli; and a tomato salad with spring onions on a bed of cod purée. At around £10 a dish they went down a treat.
On the first morning we walked La Rambla, the pedestrianised central street with its endless stalls and entertainers, and dutifully stopped in the covered Mercat de La Boqueteria with its beautifully laid out fish and meat, to sample the market’s tiny tapas bars. Then it was time for a bit of culture. Everybody, but everybody, does the Picasso Museum. So we didn’t. Instead we took a taxi (cheap and reliable) out to the Miró Foundation, perched on the Montjuïc hills. The huge building is a rambling masterpiece, glaring creamy-white in the harsh sunlight, like a reinterpretation of a North African townhouse. Of course I had known Miró’s cheerful paintings and prints, all blues and reds — and there are knocking on 10,000 of them here. But do you know his ceramics and found objects, and the massive tapestries? Or his large, playful, brightly painted metal sculptures? I didn’t. Children love Miró, and I was delighted to see classes of toddlers carefully clambering all over the great metal constructs. Finally I settled down to write up my notes in the foundation’s restaurant while George snapped away happily.
We did a bit of compare and contrast. Barcelona’s most famous son is the architect Antoni Gaudí, who died (unglamorously, run over by a tram) in 1926, leaving his art nouveau masterwork uncompleted. The Metro is user-friendly, so we took it out to his bizarrely beautiful Temple of the Sacred Family. George has long adored it, and I was quickly converted. Work started in 1882 and is ongoing in what is one of the world’s biggest and most appealing contemporary Christian constructs. Giant cranes and bustling stonemasons fill the immense nave which is supported by treelike concrete columns, with branch es spreading across the ceiling like some stone forest. Eight of the 12 ridiculously ornate bell towers, (lift up, stairs down) 100 metres high, are now complete. The great, grey building is decorated with bright ceramic fruits and flowers and gold tiles, and the whole effect is certainly otherworldly.
Even so, I preferred the cathedral. But its wonderful mix of gothic and baroque, with heavily ornamented side chapels and masses of large, red, flickering votive candles worked for both of us. I was taken with the mediaeval chaos of the cloisters, where a dozen geese honk around a small, rather scruffy green pond complete with fountain and a very large stone frog spewing water. There were several palms, a very fertile orange tree and a spring dedicated to St George, where little old ladies in black shawls and punk-haired girls drank the curative waters. We concluded that Barcelona does indeed bridge the generation gap, just as it says on the packet.
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