Last updated at 15:45, Friday, 12 June 2009

Paul Turner on La Pedrera Roof Terrace

SOMETIMES when you go on holiday you just know you’re going to have a song stuck in your head the entire time you’re there.

It happened when I went to New York (thanks Frank) and again when I went to Chicago (The Blues Brothers in case you were wondering), but this time it started as soon as we’d booked the tickets.

For the entire three weeks between deciding to go to Catalonia and actually getting on the plane, Freddie Mercury and Montserrat Caballe were busy belting out Barcelona without the aid of a personal stereo, iPod, radio or any such thing.

I don’t suppose it’s their fault, but I do wish singers would be more considerate of us travellers when they release their songs (I imagine the people of Tijuana have a distinct dislike of Herb Alpert).

So it seemed my entire knowledge of Barcelona was based around the fact I was going to bump into moustachioed minstrels and booming opera singers at every turn.

It should go without saying that during my entire time there I saw neither, unless you count the busker on La Rambla who may well have been auditioning to stand as a statue of Mr Mercury should one be commissioned by the city to recognise his work in promoting the area.

What I found instead was a vibrant city, alive with a culture and a style all its own, and with enough to satisfy the most insatiable traveller.

That style and culture are greatly shaped by the Catalan people, distinctly proud of their individual identity within the Spanish nation, and by the modernism movement led by Antoni Gaudi in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. That modernism was something outside the norm and that it was adopted so much by the artists and architects in Barcelona no doubt had much to do with their desire for an independent state and a split from the Castilians.

All that combined means that you can be walking down any street in Barcelona and suddenly come across a building of such stupendous grandeur as to make you rub your eyes in disbelief.

The most obvious examples of this are the work of Gaudi himself and the grandest representation of his work is Sagrada Familia. Describing it as a church, a temple, a cathedral, trying to describe it at all in fact will fail to do it justice.

This was Gaudi’s final project, a great religious project to celebrate Christ, the Virgin Mary and God – and though it is still now, more than 120 years after work was started, nowhere near completed it is truly staggering.

If one building is used to represent Barcelona as a worldwide symbol, this is it.

It’s towering spires, arranged in a seemingly chaotic but in fact excruciating planned design, the glorious facades depicting the nativity and passion (eventually there will be a façade for the glory of Christ as well) the little details in the carving of the stone on the pillars and columns – all combine to leave visitors open-mouthed in astonishment.

Sagrada Familia is no doubt the crown in the Gaudi world, but Barcelona is replete with his works.

Park Guell offers an insight into what the world might have been like if everyone thought as he did. Originally meant as a housing estate, no-one wanted to move in to the strange world of gingerbread houses and ceramic dragons, so now it is a public park where you can walk beneath the trees taking in the views both within and without over the city.

If no-one wanted to live in a fairytale land at Parc Guell, they at least moved into La Pedrera, an apartment block in central Barcelona where it was said the only pet you could keep was a snake, such is the undulating nature of its façade.

The roof terrace here is a world unto itself, all ceramic chimneypots shaped like warriors’ heads and staircase covers rising from the roof like swirls of ice-cream – a place that is truly magical.

Add to this Palau Guell with its unique chimneys each with their own design and Casa Battlo with its mind-bogglingly colourful exterior and you could spend your entire time in Barcelona enjoying nothing but Gaudi and living in a world entirely parallel to our own.

Gaudi’s inspiration is everywhere in the city. In the 83 years since his death, the city has learnt to use him as an advert and from Roy Lichtenstein’s pop art Barcelona Head to the Gaudi Museum there is enough to make you realise just what an impact he had.

It can be hard to tear yourself away from Gaudi, but to do so would be to miss out on the many other delights.

There is La Rambla, the universally-known main pedestrian thoroughfare where you walk among street artists, flower stalls and hundreds of other tourists and locals, all soaking up the atmosphere – and the torrential downpours at the time of this visit.

Beyond the centre, the hill of Montjuic contains the Olympic sites from the 1992 games – the cause of my Mercury/Caballe problems thanks to the BBC – the cable cars that lift you over the docks and a medieval fortress which offer magnificent views back down on the city below.

From the Barri Gothic to El Raval, the ports to the Camp Nou and Barcelona FC, there is so much more as well – far too much for me to have sampled it all on one visit.

I was just happy to have stepped into that weird and wonderful world of Gaudi for a little while – even if Freddie Mercury was accompanying me every step of the way.

First published at 11:37, Friday, 12 June 2009
Published by http://www.nwemail.co.uk