Mind-boggling: Barcelona Day 3 (8 Sep 2013)

Today started our Modernism adventure proper, with two  pre-booked guided tours of two rather different examples of Modernism or Modernisme. This is the style – primarily architectural but also involving other arts such as painting, sculpture, poetry, design and decorative arts – which occurred around the turn of the 19th-20th centuries. It roughly equates with similar movements … Read more

More b****y cathedrals: Burgos (5 Sep 2013)

But what a cathedral. First though, the start of the day. It was an earlyish start with the taxis arriving at 8am to take us to the station for our first train trip of the tour – and it was a long one, some 6 hours, across the north of Spain. It was drizzling for … Read more

Yes, we are not pilgrims: Santiago de Compostela Day 2 (4 Sep 2013)

We did feel a little guilty at swanning into Santiago de Compostela relatively, given our various lurgies, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed without the dust of the camino on our shoes – but not so guilty that we weren’t happy to be there! Cathedral Santiago de Compostela The main business of the morning was to visit the … Read more

Back to Spain: Santiago de Compostela Day 1 (3 Sep 2013)

This post should also be a short one as we spent half the day on the bus from Porto to Santiago de Compostela. Our tour group was happy to discover that we first had the morning in Porto to explore it a little more, having only had a half day the day before, as we’d … Read more

We try the real stuff: Porto (2 Sep 2013)

After yesterday’s mammoth post, we’ll try to keep this a bit shorter. The travel gods frowned slightly on us for the trip to Porto when a highway accident slowed our exit from Lisbon. Hopefully it wasn’t a bad one … And in the end we didn’t arrive too late into Porto. As our rooms weren’t … Read more