Category: Street art

Out in the Streets of El Masnou

Take a trip northwards along the coast out of Barcelona, and you’ll enter a different world. You’ll trade Tourist Central for pleasant, ordinary towns where people can just get on with life. You’ll only hear Catalan and Spanish in the streets, and souvenir shops or restaurants with tourist menus and helpful pictures and translations into several languages are unknown.

The town just before our daughter-and-family’s is El Masnou, and we recently enjoyed a stroll around after a long lazy lunch there. Old and new, high-rise and low rise all live together in a congenial hotch-potch. There’s a harbour, as shown in the feature photo, and pleasant squares with Modernista villas once built for sea-captains.

And of course there’s street art … such as a series of images of women, whom I ought to recognise, but don’t …

… and any number of images with an axe to grind …

Or not ..

And then just a couple of others, near a disused factory, with a building site beyond …

… before finishing up in a square outside the church shown above, looking out at the Mediterranean, with Barcelona on the skyline at the right. And with an image of the winter, summer, autumn and winter painted on one of the walls.

Actually, I’m cheating. The photo at the bottom was taken on a January day when the sun was absent.

For John’s Lens-Artists Challenge #249

and Natalie’s Photographing Public Art

The Secret Street Cats of Troyes

Loyal readers may remember a post of mine from three weeks ago, when I shared my enthusiasm for half-timbered Troyes. It was impressive that so many houses were still, despite lurching at improbable angles in some cases, in excellent repair and condition.

Not all though. One of our walks, back from an early evening drink found us wandering down a narrow old street which wasn’t in good nick. It gave us the opportunity to study old building techniques: wattle and daub, and wooden nails.

But that wasn’t all. This street was filled with one obvious piece of street art – the header photo – then many others, mainly cats, which had to be hunted for by looking up, down, and all along.

Even that wasn’t all. An elderly dog walker, noticing our interest, urged us to nip back along to the square we’d just left and look at the wall to the side of the underground car park. So we did.

An early evening well-spent, I’d say.

For Natalie’s Photographing Public Art Challenge.

And Debbie’s Six Word Saturday.