Madrid
Madrid is just a short 1.5 hours away from Toledo by car; probably a day by carriage. A walk through the Plaza Mayor brought back a lot old memories. We’ve been to this great city a number of times. We even stopped at our favorite fast food joint “Las Bravas” for a plate of pulpo a la gallega (broiled octopus), camerones (calmari) and their specialty, patatas bravas (potatoes with the secret las bravas sauce, patent #357942). They are so proud of this secret sauce that they emblaze the patent number throughout the restaurant. In fact, Las Bravas is so popular, there are three of them in the city, all within a five minute walk. As we popped the pulpo into our mouths, the waiter brought a plate of some weird looking things to the man to our left. “What are they?” we asked. He wiggled his ear at us and smiled. “Oreja” he replied. They were pigs ears in bravas sauce. Another of the house specialties. Yes, there they were a plate full of thirty or more little piggy ears drenched in the spicy rust colored sauce. I think the only part of the pig not consumed in Spain is the “oink”.

The Prado museum is one of the greatest art collection in the world, especially for the Spanish artists like Velasquez and Goya. But the collection of Italian and Flemish masterpieces is astounding. And yes, on Sundays, admission is free. We’ve been trying to avoid the camera crazy Japanese tourist for years.  What do they do with all those photos? And now with the advent of digital photography, they can now look at what they just snapped, and you guessed it, snap off 3 or 4 more of the same thing.  Their favorite  traveling pastime seems to be putting their family members in front of any great old piece of architecture or in fact any structure, road side restaurants, toilets, rocks. Well, for some stupidly naïve reason, the Prado allows people to use cameras to shoot the masterpieces inside; supposedly the tourists will not use their flash. And so it was Sunday. What a treat, we get to go to the Prado for free. And then, what a drag, there are Japanese camera nuts everywhere. Strobe flashes are going off like it’s a rock concert. The guards can’t do a thing about it. Irreversible light damage is attacking the 400 year old canvases and the worse thing about it all is that these tourists will probably throw away all the shots as soon as they get home. Afterall, why would want to see your son grinning like an idiot in front of Goya’s depressing May 3rd firing squad.

María del Carmen Cervera Fernández de la Guerra was a former Miss Spain and former wife to Lex Barker, the only Tarzan who wore shoes, and a husband of Lana Turner. Then in 1985, she married Hans Heinrich “Heinie” Thyssen-Bornemisza and eventually became the owner of the second most important personal art collection in the world. The first still belongs to Queen Elizabeth II. As Carmen says, “Heinie taught me all about art”. In 1992, Spain purchased a large amount of the “Heinie” collection and the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum is conveniently placed right across the street from the Prado. It’s a really impressive collection ranging from medieval to the 1960’s. There’s even a Gilbert Scott portrait of George Washington’s black cook. Heinie died in 2002, but Carmen has continued his love of art acquisition, although her eye is not as good as his was.

The Reina Sofia rounds out the big 3 of Madrid’s great museums. We made our visit on a Monday which wasn’t free, but it was free of the photo freaks. The jewel of the collection is Picasso’s “Guernica”, one of the most powerful anti-war paintings ever created. It was created for the Spanish Pavilion of the 1937 World’s Fair. Picasso was devastated when the German Army used this small basque village for target practice. The town was pounded with incendiary bombs for three hours and then burned for 3 days. 1600 innocent people were killed or wounded. There are rooms of sketches associated with the painting. In these days of stupid wars and senseless killings, Guenica still makes a lot of sense.
But the Reina Sofia is so much more than Guernica. It’s choc-o-bloc with 20th century Spanish artists ranging from Picasso and Dali to Juan Gris, Miro and sculptor, Julio Gonzalez. There’s also a screening room showing two early films by Louis Bunuel. What a treat…

La Rioja
It was a 3.5 hour drive to Brinas, a small village north of Haro, the wine capital city of La Rioja. It was our second visit to La Rioja. This time I was going to try and get a small education in these wonderful tempranillo wines. When I was seaching for hotel accommodations a while back, I discovered the website the Hopederia Senora Brinas. This is one of the best hotel websites I’ve ever visited. Check it out for yourself. Here’s the website: http://www.hotelesconencanto.org/default_eng.htm. The photos make the place look like a Relais and Chateaux 5 star luxury resort in the midst of Spain’s most famous wine region.
OK, so the highway was a mere 100meters from the hotel. We could live with that. And we totally understood why the horrible 1960’s apartment houses that flanked either side of the old hotel never showed up in their website. There was no parking. Odd for a hotel, but the manager told us we could probably park by the cemetery nearby and it would be all right. That should have been the first sign. As we entered the lobby, the hotel was a hodgepodge of bric a brac posing as antiques, including a spinet piano with candelabras growing from the harp; kind of a Liberace nightmare. Our room was clean but really hot. It was a toasty 34° C (88°F) and although there was a thermostat on the wall with instruction on how to adjust the temperature, we soon found out that our luxury room had no air conditioning. We found this out right about the same time as the manager was telling us that the festival of the Assumption would happen in the old church square that night, culminating with the burning Toro at 12:45am (this was a local townsperson dressed in a bull costume waving torches). The burning toro sound great, but then we noticed 4 really young and very noisy children checking into the room next door to us.

A few hours later, we checked into the Parador in Calahorra. The room was cool and quiet. No festivities in the town but we did have an incredible meal at nearby restaurant.

I've always wanted to visit a winery in La Rioja but with every other time we were in the region, they were closed or only open by special appointment. But the simpatico people at the Parador recommended the Bodegas Ontanon near Logrono in baja Rioja. This was another 90 minute drive through a small town; up and own the mountains, in and out of the same streets. evenutally we were asking the same people for the same directions and each time they were telling us something different. Was this some kind of spanish joke played on visiting tourists? And just as it should be, just as we decided to qui the search and get out of town, there was the sign that read Bodegas Ontanon. And there was a parking place right in front. The tour guide was charming, the storage cave was huge, the ar was impressive but they only way we could sample the wine was to buy a minimum of 3 bottles. Lucky for us they were selling their famous 1996 vintage. Oh well, one more bax to bring home to San Francisco.

Tarragona
After 6 days in the midriff of Spain we were exhausted from the desert. We needed to head for the coast and in less than 4 hours, the scenery changed and we were south of Tarragona at a Modernista country home originally designed by Domenech I Montaner and now restored to the beautiful Mas Passamaner modernista hotel. It’s way the fuck out in the country about 25 km north of Tarragona but, with the exception of the flies, it was a good place to relax for a couple of days.
We took a day trip to Taragonna. When I lived in New Orleans, there was a fruit called an uglyfruit, a hybrid between an orange and grapefruit. It had a gnarly dense skin that was pretty ugly but the fruit inside was sweet and delicious. Tarragona is a lot like an ugly fruit. The Romans settled in around 133 BC and there are some pretty good size ruins of an amphitheatre over looking the Mediterranean and a couple of villas. The emperor Hadrian supposedly lived here and rumor has it that Poncius Pilot was born in Tarrigona.  The medieval fortress city sprung out of the roman ruins and it is still a pretty wonderful place. Even the ramblas nuova outside of the city walls is beautiful avenue with stately homes and a few modernista buildings. But then Spain decided, “hey let’s really fuck up this place. Let’s ruin one of the most beautiful beaches in the country by running the railroad right though it. But let’s not stop there. Let’s build a lot of really ugly buildings. Who cares about harmonious architecture. Let’s just build lots of them and build them really fast.” And so they did.
On our way out of town we stopped off to visit the roman aqueduct that once brought fresh water to the city. About 230 meters of it still exist and unlike other aqueducts we’ve seen, we were able to actually walk across this one. Brigitte Puig, our Parisian caretaker told us that her family was originally from Catalan Spain and as it turned out, we were walking across an aqueduct on the property owned by the Puig family. We were sure we’d stumbled into the roots of Brigitte’s family tree.

Costa Brava
This is the holiday destination for the rich and famous of Barcelona. There are lots of beautiful, small medieval villages with narrow streets filled with ceramic shops, Porsches and Maseratis. Golf courses and grand resort hotels lay out about 10 km apart. It’s a beautiful landscape of farms, vineyards and rolling hills. There are small cove beaches for the intimate seaside experience or large beaches for the family adventure. By the way, why is it with these European nude beaches that the people who should be nude are wearing clothing and the ones who really should be wearing clothing are always nude?
We booked two nights at the Mas Salvi Hotel, another beautiful old farm house near Pals, the best medieval village we visited in the Costa Brava. The hotel was very much into self service, which was fine with us. Sometimes the formality of a hotel can be a bit too much.
The food was delicious but the most amazing discovery was the wines from Costa Brava. I’d known that the Cava (champagnoise style wine) came from the Catalan, but the cabernet, merlot, syrah, granache and carinia blends were fabulous. These are big, dark reds with up to 15% alcohol content. Our favorites were the Priorat. The Catalan reds are very “new world” in flavor and color, similar to California and Australia.

Barcelona
It’s a short 1.5 hour drive to Barcelona from Costa Brava. Our car rental agreement had us dropping the car off at the Estacio-Sants (train station) by 1:30pm. No problem finding the train station, but finding the ATESA car rental return always seemed to take a really long time. Still, we parked the car in the proper place by 1:15pm. Guess what? No-one there. After a few calls, we learned that all we had to do was leave the car in the parking garage and give the key to the garage attendant. The ATESA office was closed during the 3 hour lunch break but they’d return at 4pm and pick up the papers. Ah yes, the 3 hour siesta. How civilized.

In previous visits we booked hotel rooms near the Ramblas, one of the world’s best streets for people watching and street entertainment. It’s probably a 15 walk from the Plaza Catyluna to the statue of Columbus pointing east across the Mediterranean to his birthplace in Genoa, that is if you don’t stop and look at all the eye candy on the way down.

The promenade of the Ramblas is in the center of the street, but there are so many people crammed into this quarter, day and night, it usually spills into the car lanes. Aside from looking at all walks of life from around the world, the local street artists are lots of fun. We’ve all seen the usually annoying grease painted living statues dotting historic street corners all over the world, but in Barcelona they’re more interactive, they’ve got better costumes, and they’re just a lot more fun. There was the invisible man sitting on his black throne, enticing beautiful young women to sit on his lap. A little further down the Ramblas was a small plate sitting on top of a big black box Put a coin into the plate and a devil will pop out of the box and scare the hell out you. How about getting your photo taken with a really good Che Guevara look-alike. There was a Marilyn Monroe who looked more like Gloria Swanson, a very funny Charlie Chaplin, and a human (british) head in a bowl of spaghetti pattering funny insults at people who wouldn’t throw a coin onto his table. 
At night the ramblas attracts an older crowd. This party goes on all night long. After around 10pm, the beer hawkers hit the street. These guys are amazing. They actually go into a grocery store and buy a six-pack and then walk down the ramblas and sell individual cans to anyone. We saw lots of them, waving their six-packs and shouting the Spanish version of “beer here” as if they were at a sporting event. Actually, walking the Ramblas is a lot like a sporting event.

Adjacent to the Ramblas is the Barrio Gothic, the old medieval quarter, a mixture of roman ruins, 14tth and 15th century squares, early 19th century modernista and occasionally an architectural nightmare from the 1960’s. Although the residents of the old quarter probably tried to keep these architectural barbarians out, the old city walls came down years ago and they lost the fight against the city planners. By the time they realized what they’d done to this beautiful of quarter, the damage had been done and people just learned to live with it. If you squint your eyes enough, it does disappear.  In time, the city finally realized what a gem that had in the Barrio Gothic and designated it ah historical landmark which included giving it “Pedestrian zone only” status; a no car zone. There’s a rumor circulating around Paris that the Marais (our neighborhood) is designated to be a pedestrian zone and all we could think of is that this is what the Marais will look like. Yes there were lots of tourists, but the absence of cars and motorcycles was a relief. As I sit here looking out the windows over rue des Tournelles, a motorcycle races by and the noise reverberates down the street. Yes, I’m all in favor of an historic pedestrian zone in the Marais.
Wandering through the Barrio Gothic is like wandering through any old medieval city; every turn, a different treasure, an interesting shop window, a talented street musician playing under the porticos, a great coffee shop or a refreshing gelato stand. Hours go by very quickly.

In this visit to Barcelona we decided to stay along the Passeig de Gracia, the wide boulevard filled with cafes, tapas bars and modernista architecture.
Our first stop was to see the progress at the Sagrada Familia. Originally designated as a Roman Catholic Basilica, Antoni Gaudi began work on it in 1884 and by 1911, he gave up all other projects and devoted his work only to the church. In his spare time, he set up a school directly outside the church where he taught children the concepts of geometry. In his last years, he’d become more or less a recluse and in June 1926 he was run over by a tram. He was delivered to a public hospital and treated as an indigent. No-one recognized him; no identification and no money in his pockets, old worn clothing. He lasted three days and then died.
But Gaudi’s death didn’t stop the work on the church. There were his students and other architects who adapted his style. Then, during the Spanish Civil War, Gaudi’s workshop was burned down and what few architectural plans that existed went up in smoke. Few is the key word because the old master didn’t really draw many plans. He pretty much directed everything as it was being built. And so from about 1940, the task of completing the church has to a lot of different people. With the advent of computer technology, things started to move at a quicker pace. Our first visit to the Sagrada Familia was in 1994. Granted the work is still moving at a slow pace, but it’s remarkable. The church is supposed to be finished in 2026, just about the time, they’ll have to start restoring the original towers that were built in 1900.
I guess it’s not such a big deal. Some old churches took over 400 years to build. This one will take around 130.

For us though, the masterpiece of Gaudi’s work in Barcelona is the Casa Batllo on the Passeig de Gracia. This underwater fantasy looks like the interior of Captain Nemo’s Nautilus. Actually, Gaudi and Jules Verne were contemporaries and given the fact that Jules Vern was one of the most translated authors of his time, I wouldn’t be surprised if he was an influence on Gaudi’s work.
Casa Battlo is situated in a block right next to a house by Joseph Puig I Cadafalch and a few door down from a house by Louis Domenech I Montaner. You get the big three in one block.
By the way, here’s an interesting note. There is a rumor that Gaudi was color blind and depended on his assistant Joseph Maria Jujol to choose the color scheme. This is an amazing rumor since the basis of Gaudi work is in the bright beautiful colors.

The English definition of the word “Gaudy” is tasteless, conspicuously ornate, tacky, cheap, garish and lots of other synonyms. Supposedly it has its roots in middle English. It’s kind of ironic that during Antoni Gaudi’s life, these were the adjectives used to describe his work. His buildings were all given sarcastic nicknames like “The House of Bones” for Casa Battlo and “The Quarry” for his apartment house, Casa Mila. Like a lot of new thinking artists, it took a long time for people to appreciate their genius.

We bought a walking guide to the modernista buildings and strolled along the grand avenues of the Eixample zone. These are grand avenues filled with great shopping, large cafes, tapas bars and of course, some of the most inspirational architecture we’ve ever seen. Barcelona’s Moderista art and architecture emerged in the early 20th century, around the same time Art Deco and Art Nouveau was hitting other parts of the world.  The walking tour book gave us addresses and descriptions. It was like a treasure hunt. We lucked out on a few of them when the guardienne saw us peeking through the door glass and opened up the front door so we could enter and look around.
The  main contributors to the modernista architecture school were Louis Domenich I Montaner, Joseph Puig I Cadafalch, Joseph Maria Jujol and Antoni Gaudi. Gaudi is the most famous but the others are just as wonderful. Just think of it, Picasso, Dali, Miro, the Modernistas, Pablo Casals all together in the same city at the same time. By the way, we were really excited to see another member of the Puig family (pronounced Poozh in Catalan). We now thought our Parisian manager Brigitte Puig was part of artistic royalty. However, when we got back to Paris, Brigitte informed us that Puig in the Catalan was like Smith in the US or Durant in France; a very common name. Oh well..
By the way, for those of you interested in staying in a totally restored grand Hotel designed by Louis Domenich I Montaner, check out the Casa Fuster. This is an amazing 5star hotel that just opened in 2005. All of the common rooms, restaurants and bars and exteriors have been restored to the original Montaner design. The rooms are very contemporary, ultra-comfortable and unfortunately really expensive. But if you search the web, you can probably find a good price.