Day 49 – 27 August 2023 – San Sebastian to Barcelona, Spain

An early start as we have a long distance to travel today to Barcelona. The rain was heavy last night & thankfully has eased a little for us to board the bus. We drive through the tall mountains of the Pyrenees with deep valleys & small towns & farms tucked away in them. The vegetation is lush & everything is so green, it is still raining as we drive through the mountains & as we drive down towards Pamplona there are less mountains & it looks so dry.

Pamplona has a large light industrial area as we drive in & the traffic is very light, it is Sunday & it is early. We stop in the old town area near a very impressive group statue of men & bulls running together, most of the men are on the ground getting trampled. It is not the time for the bull runs, that is in July each year. The Bullring in Pamplona is very large & there is a concrete chute that guides the bulls into the bullring from the street. We walk the length of the bull run, it is 800 metres long & follows some of the streets in the old town. The streets are narrow & it is easy to understand how so many people get injured each year. Sonia, our guide, tells us that balcony windows overlooking the street of the bull run are rented for 200 Euros per day.

The rain is light, we hardly need our umbrellas, there is hardly a person around as we walk the deserted streets of the bull run. The Pamplona Town Hall is the square where the bulls are released from & it takes the bulls a little over 2 minutes to run the 800 metres. We walk a little further to the main town square, on one corner is Hotel La Perla where the writer Ernest Hemingway stayed in the early 1900s. A little further on is Café Iruna, a beautiful old café that was also frequented by Ernest Hemingway. Inside is absolutely beautiful, old charm, stepping into Agatha Christie’s stories, with mirrors on the walls & wonderful ornate decorations, so we sit down & order hot chocolate & coffee. Really good coffee & chocolate like it really originally used to be made.  The atmosphere is amazing & in the bar next door is a life-size bronze statue of Hemingway standing at the bar.

Back on the bus & the weather starts to clear as we travel through the dry plains of central Spain. The wind is now really strong & we feel the bus shake as it gets hit by very strong wind gusts. There are hundreds & hundreds of wind turbines as we travel, we turn our head & there are even more wind turbines. There is also the occasional solar panel farm. We stop for lunch at a roadhouse, it is absolutely packed as Europeans are travelling back home from school holidays after spending time in Spain or Portugal. The range of food is fairly broad & we order a seafood paella, yum.

The land gets dryer & flatter the closer we get to Barcelona, then it starts to rain again. There is not that much traffic as we drive into the big city of Barcelona & check in to our hotel. There is time for a short rest before we are back on the bus for the drive to the Guell Park on the inland mountain side of Barcelona. This park was designed & built by Antoni Gaudi, an absolutely amazing Spanish architect. Our local guide walks us around the park in the rain, explaining all of the facets of the park that Gaudi built into the design & why he did it that way. After seeing all this & the reasons for the design, I now understand why so many consider him as a brilliant designer. In the distance we see the towering spires of the church he designed.

Back to the hotel for a little while then at 6 pm we are taken down to the harbour for dinner at the Marina Bay Restaurant. We order seafood paella again & what a feast it is, prawns, mussel, squid, langoustines, all delicious. Plus a glass of red wine for me & a Sangria for Tereza. Before we know it is 10 pm & back to the hotel. A long & tiring, but good day.