We spent much of our final day in Barcelona at elevation. We started our morning with a trip to Park Guell, which I had also visited once before on my prior trip to Spain, but this is such an iconic site in the city that I wanted Mr. Chuckles to see it as well.
I mapped out a route on Google Maps and unwittingly had us go on a gruelling 20 minute uphill walk, which caused some grumpiness, but we eventually made it up there. Luckily, we had booked tickets in advance because I quickly saw a sign indicating that they were already sold out for the day by 11 am.
Park Guell is a private park set on Carmel Hill, part of the mountain range of Collserola. Built and designed by Antoni Gaudi from 1900 to 1914, it was initially intended as a residential park for a housing complex of single-family residences. This project was ultimately unsuccessful, so it was eventually converted to city property in 1923.
From the park’s main entrance, we passed through the terrace with its famous undulating continuous bench.
Underneath is a covered area supported by a series of fluted columns, originally intended to become a covered market.
Past the entrance is a smiling dragon stretching across the middle of a divided stairway. We also lined up to go inside the porter’s residence, Casa del Guarda, which currently houses a small exhibit on the history of Park Guell.
Fancy lunch at Disfrutar
After a couple hours of wandering around, the park was quickly becoming too crowded for our liking, so we headed out. We had procured highly coveted lunch reservations at Michelin starred Disfrutar. This restaurant made it to #5 on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants List in 2021 and features an experimental tasting menu emphasizing Mediterranean seafood.
It was an amazing meal. I had my menu slightly modified to accommodate my “condition” but the substitutes were very delicious.
Up the funicular to Mount Tibidabo
We finished our meal in time to add one more stop on our Barcelona itinerary. We took a taxi over to the Mount Tibidabo funicular and rode the cable car up to the top of the hill. At 512 feet, Mount Tibidabo is the tallest hill in the Serra de Collserola and offers views overlooking the city and coastline.
The summit of the hill features a theme park which didn’t appear very busy when we came through.
We also saw the Sagrat Cor church, which is crowned by an enormous bronze status of Jesus.
We strolled around admiring the views for a few minutes and then took the funicular down. We were pretty exhausted from our day and tried to get an Uber back to the hotel but there were no cars available. Luckily, a bus came by just as I thought we were going to have to walk all the way back to the main road.
We spent another quiet evening at the hotel and ordered room service again, which I should mention was quite good and reasonably priced! We called it an early night, getting ready to move onto the next leg of our trip in San Sebastián.
I've Bean Travelling 
Leave a Reply