Kristin's Photo Blog

CACTUS GARDEN!

Actually, it's called the Jardins de Mossen Costa i Llobera but I like to think that CACTUS GARDEN! with all caps and the exclamation point conveys the experience a little better. My horticultural knowledge doesn't go much further than planting a seed but I know what I like visually and this place is stunning. Supposedly it is the largest collection of cacti in Europe. I believe it. Just goes to show that there is always somewhere new to discover, no matter how well you think you know a place.

My parents decided to call their future daughter "Kristin" after seeing it written on a gravestone in Switzerland. I discovered the name of my future son today while walking in the cactus garden in Barcelona. I saw it and just knew...

A little further down the path, there are these clusters of really tall cacti that must have reached up thirty feet. You walk right through them, all the while very aware of the strange shadows they cast and curving shapes they take.

And my personal favorites:

After my visit, I hopped in one of those red cable cars that you can see in the distance in the photo below and took it all the way to Barceloneta Beach and walked the rest of the way home.

Montserrat

The legend goes that Montserrat was carved from slabs of sandstone by angels with gold saws. Current site of a Benedictine monastery, it was here that La Moreneta (or the "Black Virgin") was discovered in a cave in the 12th century. It is an hour long train ride from Barcelona, after which I pushed into a cable car with the other visitors and was whisked up into the mountains. Angels or no angels, it is certainly an otherworldly sight to see.

The monastery itself is very uninteresting architecturally. I took this kind of blah photo of the blah plaza because it's one of those photos that you have to take. The site is an ancient one in terms of worship but the structure itself is fairly modern, dating back to the end of the 19th century.

After shuffling along a corridor, finally beholding the Black Virgin and rubbing her orb exposed through the protective glass, I made my way out of the basilica and back towards the plaza. This room caught my eye. Inside there are wedding dresses hanging on hooks along the wall, photos of babies lined up on the shelf and casts meant for broken legs or backs lined up along the floor. Supposedly, this is where people leave personal offerings to the Virgin in addition to prayer or in thanks for divine intervention.

It was the only rainy day since I've been here in Spain but inbetween the clouds, I caught a little bit of blue sky.

The monastery itself was fine but that's about as enthusiastic as I get about it. I took a little tram another 820 feet up into the mountains and hiked amongst the surreal scenery and abandoned hermitages. For that experience alone, I loved my trip to Montserrat, schlep and all. I made a lot of faces like this one up there.

Here's the sign pointing towards the rocky trail that I followed to a tiny chapel on a cliff.

A little further up is the hermitage itself. Should I ever write a murder mystery or ghost story, I would certainly set it here. There was graffiti scratched into all of the walls, gutted refridgerators lying on their sides and empty altars everywhere.

From the roof:

I wish I had had more time to follow the trails but I got a little nervous that I would miss the last train and be forced to spend the night up there (I think "Hocus Pocus" is scary so you can imagine what I would be like..) so I took some final photos of the vistas and made my way back down the mountain...

...in a little yellow cable car just like this one!