Yesterday, Anaïs was four. This meant that she got crowned at school and got to be Class Queen for the day. Celebrations at home were muted, what with swimming lessons and so on. But on Sunday, she’ll have a party. The centrepiece of course has to be the cake: and for Emily and me, it’s a joint effort. I have made three different sized cakes. Emily has erected them, and chopped them about into a vaguely symmmetrical bell shape. I have just iced the undercoat, and tinkered with a very important prop, bought for £1 in a Ripon charity shop, to be added later. What do you think the cake will represent, once completed? Answers tomorrow, or possibly Sunday.
Yesterday, returning from Ciutadella Park on the tram, we broke our journey at Glòries. This is an area that is being re-invented and opened up to the pedestrian in a big way, though it IS a work in progress. Here’s where you come for the huge flea market that is Mercat dels Encants (The Market of Charms), which is indeed an astonishing place to visit. Hundreds of stalls selling cheap clothing, fabrics, electrical goods, and the fag-end of a thousand house clearances and jumble sales have been re-homed into an astonishing building, the underside of whose roof has been plated with thousands of rectangular mirrors reflecting the teeming activity going on underneath.
Here’s the actual scene:
The roof also reflects the building and excavating and walkway-making going on below.
Or your eyes can look further, and see the distant Sagrada Familia …
… or the much nearer Torre Glòries, which we really need to climb one day to see the views.
An engaging way to spend an hour or two, and once the work on the area has been completed, it’ll be a wonderful addition to the Barcelona experience.
Last time I stayed with my Spanish Family, in May, I happened upon a National Treasure in Ciutadella Park. This green lung in the centre of Barcelona has a bit of everything: playgrounds, palm trees, ponds, picnic areas. It’s even home to Barcelona Zoo.
But what took my eye on that hot day were two Victorian era glasshouses, one closed for restoration. I determined that Malcolm and I would check it out to see if the work was complete. It is. And what a glorious place the Hivernacleis in which to spend a relaxing morning. This vast iron structure with glass sides was built from 1883-1887 and designed by Josep Amargós in the Modernista style. He looked to England, to Chatsworth and to Bicton, as well as other places for his inspiration. Now modern restorers have looked to The Eden Project to guide them, and the greenhouse is once more home to over 100 plants, and forms the nucleus of the park’s educational and research programmes. We simply enjoyed the calm green space, with its restrained decoration and exuberant plant life. And the geometry evident in the greenhouse itself, and in the plants which populate it.
Besides this though, there is the Umbracle – the wood and brick (and glass!) construction designed by Josep Amargós at the same time as the Hivernacle, but for large shade-loving tropical plants. Seating is dotted about so that visitors can relax as they quietly contemplate immense and unfamiliar plant life. This building needs a bit of TLC, but still had the power to impress us as we slowly toured round it.
If you go to Barcelona, don’t miss out on this oasis of calm.
There’s a school here in Premià de Mar that I always enjoy walking past. It’s a handsome Modernista building that’s next to impossible to photograph, set as it is in narrow streets and surrounded by a high wall. It wasn’t always a school.
It was built in 1898 as a textile factory, dealing with almost every process: spinning, weaving and finishing. But here, as in England, and in the Ariège where we once lived, this once-thriving industry declined rapidly during the twentieth century. The factory closed in 1928, but re-opened in a last gasp attempt to make it work, as a silk-sceen printing works, the first of its kind in Spain. The owner was a man from Lyon, a M. Badoy, and locals came to call the factory La Lyon. The factory was forced to close its doors for good in 1979, but everyone saw that this important building must be saved, for historic and artistic reasons. So it reopened as a school in 1984. And it’s now called La Lió, and is quite the local landmark, with its tall – and entirely unused these days – factory chimney.
We’ve just spent an hour or two in Cabrils. It’s a rather desirable little town near here that’s got itself a bit of a reputation as a gastronomes’ haven. The cafe we chose for a mid-morning break didn’t bear that out, but it was good enough. We were more struck by a clutch of fine buildings: the church with its glazed tile bell-tower; the original town school, now repurposed as a School of Music, ordinary houses with handsome windows; and especially , round and about in the surrounding countryside, castle after castle. The one at the edge of town, which had probably never been defensive and is now abandoned seemed a bit sad. It looked ripe for conversion into fine flats or a luxury hotel.
Sorry about the TV ariel by the church. I couldn’t find a view, in those narrow winding streets that avoided it, Here, below, is that castle I mentioned, and one outside town too. All with geometry firmly employed in their contruction.
So many homes in urban Spain come without gardens, that public playgrounds are two-a-penny anywhere you care to look. And geometric shapes form part of any play space. Here’s one that Anaïs enjoys – even though the family has a garden.
Premiá de Mar, like most towns round here, has its share of Modernist architecture. Today I’m showing you a splendid door from 1918. Originally a cinema, this building known as El Patronat became a parish hall, before returning to its roots and becoming a local arts centre for performances and film screenings. I always enjoy its exuberant doorways when I pass by.
Here in Catalonia, the thing to do before a Sunday meal or when out meeting friends, is to visit a vermuteria, and sit down for a chat and a vermouth, negro o blanco. And if you’re on this part of the Maresme coast, you may very well choose to go to Espinaler in our next door town, Vilassar de Mar. It’s been part of the local scenery since 1896.
While it started as a simple bar, it’s gone on to bigger and better things: producing its own vermut; developing a piquant sauce, also called Espinaler that brings a little spice and je ne sais quoi to whatever you’re eating; preserving seafoods; and finally developing, in 2012, a gourmet store-tavern-warehouse in Vilassar. That’s where Malcolm and I went today – to window-shop ahead of buying a few treats to take home with us. Here are a few of the things we spotted. Before of course sitting down for a vermut and a tapa or two.
You might notice they even have the odd item from England. I haven’t any photos from the appetising cheese and charcuterie counters, because – well – they weren’t very geometrically-packed products.
I thought it was about time I showed some geometry from the natural world. This fellow is from Premià de Mar, but from last summer, when he was taking a rest in Emily’s front garden. He’s beautifully symetrical, and his limbs show off angles to great advantage. Google Lens says he’s an Egyptian Grasshopper. Does anybody either agree or disagree?
Today, Malcolm and I took ourselves off to Premià’s Museu Romà. It’s a museum brought into being because of a discovery during the development of new buildings in the 1990s of an important Roman site. It proved to have been what we might consider a conference and exhibition centre, built in the 5th century CE and an important place to promote the greatly appreciated wine grown on the estate. As the Roman Empire fell, so did the building’s fortunes. But after a few years, it re-invented itself, finding a new use as a home and wine-producing business. And later still, as a graveyard.
Star of the show is a wonderful floor mosaic, incredibly detailed and beautiful by any standards, and employing a full range of geometric idioms. It was hard to photograph satisfactorily, but here are a few shots – square of course.
From Pyrenees to Pennines 
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