BARCELONA
With a climate almost exactly like San Diego's, Barcelona is a great city to visit any time of the year. What can you say about the city? It's Gaudi...Antoni Gaudi! The photo above, taken from the deck of "Millennium," includes the monument to Christopher Columbus (pointing in the wrong direction), the gothic Barcelona Cathedral, and Sagrada Familia Cathedral. A question someone might have asked more than a hundred years ago when Antoni Gaudi traipsed around Barcelona insisting on building a new cathedral was "Why?" After more than a hundred years (since 1882), with the main center of the cathedral yet to be built, some people are still asking "Why?" But regardless of the naysayers, The Holy Family Cathedral is still a magnificient idea very slowly turning into a reality. Go see it.

Barcelona Cathedral is a treasure. By A.D. 343 there was already a basilica on the site of the current cathedral. In 985 the basilica was destroyed by the Moors. It was later replaced by a Roman cathedral, built between 1046 and 1058. In 1298 construction of the gothic cathedral started. The only thing remaining today of the old Roman cathedral is the Santa Llucia Chapel. This 13th Century Bacilica, fullname the Cathedral de la Santa Creu i Santa Eulalia, dominates a small plaza in the middle of the oldest section of the city. Everybody comes to Barcelona to see Sagrada Familia, and people whose focus is too narrow sometimes miss this great old gothic church.

There is a lot of Gaudi stuff to see in Barcelona.

























Even after Gaudi changed the face of Barcelona, it remains a thoroughly European city. La Rambla, with its mimes and kiosks; and the waterfront, with some of the best buildings, come together at the Columbus Monument to define the beginning of city.




Like San Diego, Barcelona is a magnet for the homeless. It is easy to find poverty here. Conditions which promote suffering seem not to change much from age to age and place to place. Misery is a universal human condition.