Weather: sunny till 4pm then intermittent showers 18º C

Got back on the hop-on/hop-off bus to go to “the Rambla”. It is a promenade consisting of market stalls (on the weekend only we think), flower stalls, restaurants and street performers. The promenade had bricks laid in a very unusual design that played with your head and made you think you were walking on an undulating surface when in fact it was not.

From there it was back on the bus to Passeig de Gracia road that has a few of the Gaudi houses on it in addition to others of notable architects of Spain. The road also has some very ornate benches each with its own similarly ornate street light. The first Gaudi house was Casa Batlo built in 1905. We chose not to visit this one and instead continued on to Casa Mila built around 1910. It was this last one that we went into as we were allowed to visit the courtyards, the ornate roof and one of the flats which was set up with period furniture. At the time its architecture was innovative and controversial with the unusual façade being self supporting.

We then looked for tapas for lunch and ended up in place which had pictures of the food. We have typically avoid places with pictures of the food as it is much more exciting to not know what you are about to get, although to be honest most places we have been to in the larger cities do have English versions of their menus.

Back on the bus to the Basilica Sagrada Familia. Likely to be the number one tourist site in Barcelona, this place is probably on everyone’s list. We were very pleased when the bus came round the corner as there were no great queues to get in as we had seen the previous day. Off to the ticket office to be advised that the church was closed to the public for the day due to a special event. Would have been nice if there had been something to tell us about this as we had been past the site the other day. Even today there were no obvious notices until you got to the gate.

We came back to the hotel and drowned our sorrows before realising that it was after 9pm and weneeded to eat. No problem, this was Spain. Not so, it was Sunday night and we had problems finding anything around our hotel. Eventually we found a restaurant at 10pm which we were not sure was even open. It was as it started to fill up after we sat down. We were the last to leave however.