This post is part of a series. It starts with Barcelona in Black and White, Barcelona in Black and White Again, Barcelona in Stunning Colour, Barcelona in Colour II and Barcelona in Colour III: Gaudi’s Revenge.
Thank you for sticking with me so far. The Barcelona trip was not especially long but a lot happened. Today we are on another trip out of town to tour Mrs Sachie’s Jerusalem, the Frexinex factory.
See you later train. After you pass, what’s the view from the platform?
Ah, here we are. Mrs Sachie and I are proud consumers of the product of this vineyard/factory. This is where Freixenet sparking wine originates, yes all of it. They are Spain’s biggest cava producer and one of the biggest in the world, and claim to be the biggest, so they have a truly massive cellar.
Most of it looks like this. Naturally, it’s in limestone which is easy to dig. Theirs has four or five levels at different elevations dug into the side of a hill. We took the tour but got to see only a fraction. Apparently the total volume is staggering. Our guide was mum as to whether they play hide and seek after hours.
Here she is pointing to the dry end of the boozy spectrum.
Technically these are called ‘drives’ and the wine undergoes its second fermentation inside the bottles. These must be ‘riddled’, or turned, once every month or two and slowly inverted to get all the nasty yeast waste up in the neck. They have machines to do this these days but there are still some old ladies doing the job — master riddlers.
Here’s the chap who is (erroneously) credited with inventing the process, monk Dom Perignon. Previously bottle-fermentation was seen as a fault but the Brits liked a bit of fizz in their chardonnay and, since they had all the money back then, the practice caught on. Spain used to call their sparkling wine champagne but they had to change back in the 90s and named it cava, after the caves it is fermented in.
Being a sunny place, Spanish champagne cava is made from sweeter fruit than rainy old Northeast France so they don’t need as much bottle fermentation to get a good result. That’s why your cava has a fresh and light taste compared to their northern cousins, which undergo a more elaborate fermentation process, giving a yeasty, bready flavour.
Well, I could go on about cava all day, and probably will. This is at the end of the tour and we were treated to taste two types of cava at the little café at the front, facing the train station. This suited me as I like trains and a high speed one would go past every 15 minutes or so. It was such a nice day we decided to pay full price and sample the whole menu.
Early afternoon finds us hungry so we walked over the bridge into the little cava-town behind the winery. Judging by the bollards, this place knows which side it’s bread is buttered on.
Charming little town that was quite deserted during siesta. Not many chow-houses but we did find a tiny but stylish lunch place with a 25-Euro set menu.
And I was deeply impressed, they had an excellent collection of local cavas from which I selected the cheapest (€22), a short-run father and son operation that was excellent.
Here it is, fresh out of its ice-bath. Joan Colet Rius, I shall have to come back from another bottle one day.
Here’s my fig salad.
Next, my plate of snails, while Mrs Sachie got a fish or something.
Fish for me, for mains.
I got the cheesecake for dessert to irritate Mrs Sachie because the one she makes is exceptional.
Here’s the place. Ticus is a two-brother operation, one at the front of house, one in the kitchen. A truly great restaurant. I think we walked out about €50 lighter but worth all of it.
OK, that’s weird. Men with drums and, big bees? No, this is a scene from the annual Phylloxera Festival, which celebrates the defeat of the phyloxera pest which would destroy grape vines and wine industries in the early 20th-century. They have huge… I guess, puppet? insects that spew fireworks that are paraded down the street and general mayhem. It looks completely off-tap and immediately shot to the top of my bucket-list. We had missed it by a week. Anyway, time to get the train back to Barça. Then I noticed a wine shop over the road. A man exited carrying what appeared to be a six-litre plastic bottle full of a deep red fluid.
Yep, they have wine on-tap, cheap too. The glasses are just there for tasting, you buy by the litre and bring your own bottle.
These tanks are full of wine, made by students studying winemaking at the local university. Pretty amazing course to do as a young student. When I did my degree we made homebrew beer, but that was for fun, not a requirement.
It’s wine, vermouth and vinegars. Try not to spill too much into the floor grating. Bloody hell.
And here is our modest purchase, we bought the (empty) plastic bottles too, which cost half as much as their contents. It turns out that the shop was excellently stocked with local wines and cavas, they even had the one we drank over lunch. So 30 minutes later, here is muggins-me wrestling a cardboard box he can barely lift, full of clinking bottles onto the train. The locals didn’t even glance.
It’s the next day and we are up early, for people on holiday. It’s our second-last day and we are finally doing the touristy things. Below is Fuente de Canaletas, a must-see. They say that if you drink from this fountain that you will come back to Barcelona.
Mrs Sachie was a little more elegant. You can look up the history if you like but I was too busy.
Some nice old buildings, I do like a photo of a door.
Lovely stuff. We are on La Rambla, which is tourist-central and where Catalonia’s finest fingersmiths practice their trade. But we were in a bit of a hurry so didn’t tarry to sample the delights, like this place:
I was tickled to see a business called Dick Waffle. “Old Richard’s waffle house should have done a bit of market research,” I chortled. But it’s just a place selling cock-shaped waffles, which is a bit disappointing. If they had called it Richard’s Waffles that could have been clever, but no.
There’s a famous market by the road that’s huge and very impressive. We both wanted to linger but there was no time to lose.
I mean this place has everything!
Back out on the street, it looks like Mr Gaudi has done his work here too.
It was a brilliant sunny day and as we approached the Gothic Quarter we passed through a number of attractive squares. Mrs Sachie has sorted out her hat.
And this really is old-town. ‘Modern’ Barcelona hails from the early 20th century and is carefully thought out and made of handsome apartment buildings. Old Barça is narrow streets and paving stones. I love it.
We stopped for a look in this church.
Catholic, naturally, and Christ is suffering for our sins again.
They had a list of those sins on the other window, for reference. This one is virtues.
And here is Mrs Sachie under the eye of God. Does he see sin, or virtue? We will never know.
There’s also an innovative donation system that kindly caters to those of us who don’t carry cash. You know, in case you feel guilty or something.
What I don’t understand is why they are promoting the 2016 Martin Scorsese film. I mean, it’s about the absence of God.
Here’s another one of those pretty squares. Glorious day.
Moving on…
This is one of the city’s main attractions, the Bishop’s Bridge. This Gothic span (based on its equally admired brother in Venice) is a massive tourist pull.
And that’s exactly what it was designed to do. Yes, it’s Gothic, but it’s not very old. It was built in 1928 as part of a general jazzing-up of old-town for the Barcelona International Exposition. Apparently a lot of the neighbourhood was renovated and its current form established as a tourist-pull and it remains just as effective today.
You can see a lot of other, frankly, better photos at Barcelona in Black and White, Again, including this little walled garden.
I guess the fountain isn’t running, but it’s still a charming space.
On the way out, I took a photograph of the letterbox.
Not a lot of teens wearing black in Goth-town but there are a lot of old churches. This is the view from next to the palm tree, looking at the wall of the city cathedral.
It’s a bloody big one too.
Finally, some black-costumed Goth kids. No? It’s a seminary. You can understand my confusion though.
Below is a section of the original Roman city wall, which is apparently the oldest part of town.
What you looking at Sachie?
Oh Christ, some adolescent shit has defaced a building facade with their immature scribb… What’s that? Picasso you say?
This is more typical. Being a vibrant city, there’s plenty of self-expression applied with spraypaint. This defacement is applied by the city but I’m confused firstly that it is in English but then they spell graffiti with a Y.
There are a ton of cool tourist shops around. The one above had some kind of Christmas theme and the guardsman here wanted me to put my nuts in his mouth.
They say that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure but I reckon it’s mostly women buying this stuff.
This is more my speed. The entire store, probably on very valuable real-estate, sells nothing but rubber ducks.
We were very pressed for time so I didn’t get to go into the old-man hat shop but there’s always next visit.
Here we are at George Orwell Square again. I don’t know if it has the sketchiest playground in Barcelona but it’s a good candidate.
By now we were running out of time so had to kiss the Gothic quarter goodbye and head to our lunch date.
Not Spanish, or even Catalan. Ecuadorian. Mrs Sachie’s old Spanish teacher now lives in Barcelona and he invited us to try some of his native culture, which was delicious. After lunch we had to pack up and move to a different hotel in the suburbs. It’s in the newer part of town so there’s not much but big roads and big buildings but it does have a big supermarket.
Suits me. This place has a ton of wine, salami and the most pig’s legs I have seen in my life. That’s what’s in those black bags above.
Welcome to the meatverse.
We were pretty tired so I didn’t buy any ham legs and not even much wine before retiring to our new hotel in the ‘burbs.
The next day finds us at the gate of another Gaudi feature. I swear that this visit wasn’t a Gaudi-trip but he does pop up a lot. This is Guell mansion, or house. The bloke in the ticket office said that the house is shut for renovation but we could go into the park for a look, but it wasn’t very good. I like the honesty.
The night before I had spotted a monastery on Google Maps, not far up the road so I thought we could have a look at that first and if it was rubbish, go walk in the park.
It appears that we are in a nice neighbourhood. Almost all apartments, but very nice ones.
I would love to live in one of these ones and fill it with, what, 60’s furniture?
Up the hill and at the end of the road is one building that looks a bit older than its 60s counterparts. The Monastery of Santa Maria isn’t a monastery in my book, it’s a nunnery.
Work got started on the place in 1327, which makes it proper-old and there’s been plenty of changes since then. It’s remarkably well-preserved because it only stopped being a nunnery in 1975. In fact, the last nuns only moved out of the complex in early 2025. It operated up to 1983 or so, with a short break for the civil war.
The entry fee is remarkably fair, a bit over five Euros and we almost had the place to ourselves. The first stop is this little chapel covered in paintings. If you have forgotten some detail of Christ’s torment you can pop in here, the Chapel of St Michael, and feel terrible all over again.
The various buildings are arranged around a central courtyard, where the well is, with inward-facing galleries on each floor. There’s probably a name to describe this arrangement of features but I don’t know it.
Down the hall a bit from the chapel we meet the lady responsible for all this, at least what’s left of her.
Queen Elisenda was the founder of this nunnery, along with her husband James II, and she moved here after he died for the remaining 37 years of her life. She’s here still.
This is where they keep the monster.
Upstairs is the old dormitory which was once filled with horrible little wooden cells but is now a spacious and tasteful exhibition space for artistic treasures and relics.
Here is the overdecorated lunchbox.
It’s actually much too big to be a lunch pail but it does look like a lunchbox that some kid has covered it in stickers and drawn all over.
Yep, my lunchbox had skull and crossbones all over.
And doesn’t this look like some metal or prog-rock album cover? It’s actually a little door and you can see a keyhole on Christ’s thigh.
For the life of me I can’t remember what this was. There’s a man hunting a pig, a deer has an arrow in its neck and is being chased by a dog and in the middle somebody is taking down a dragon. There’s a card there but I can’t read it.
Outside in the little square there’s this little statue that looks to be in a fountain but it was dry on our visit.
I found out that this arrangement of buildings and galleries is called a cloister. This panorama gives some idea of the place.
There is a lovely pond with ducks and fish. The fish all clustered to us when we approached so I guess they’re used to being fed.
Speaking of food, back inside is the refractory, or dining room, where the nuns took their meals. That’s Mrs Sachie in the foreground, not a nun. There are no more nuns. None.
It’s a great space and I have some excellent pictures in black and white.
Meals were apparently taken in silence, although I expect they said grace, but I reckon whoever stood in this box could talk all they like.
Now this is the real treat of the visit, the kitchen. A kitchen is a facinating place and says a lot about how the people of the house or institution live the rest of their lives.
This one has parts dating back to 1520, just like the kitchen in my old apartment, but has been renovated over the years to include modern gas-hobs and the like. No microwave as it stopped feeding nuns in 1983.
We puzzled over these massive stone baths and decided that this was/is probably the laundry.
These look hand-made to me.
Out back is the kitchen garden, which is maintained to this day. We were there a bit late in the year so there wasn’t much excitement.
This place is just called the Abbey Room. It’s one of the oldest remaining spaces that hasn’t been updated over the years. They say the stairs lead to the abbess’s cell. I think it’s a kind of common room and it looks like it’s still used by the chairs for important meetings.
The Chapter House is another kind of meeting room and is a bit more decorative.
And that’s enough of that place. I will say that this is the best ten Euros we spent on the trip. I didn’t even know the place existed and was impressed as I have ever been by a bit of living history. It’s expertly run and presented yet we virtually had it to ourselves.
Time to go. Mrs Sachie has a very important appointment.
Off she scurries for…
…squid-ink paella.
And that’s the end of the trip. We had a late dinner (they all are in Spain) with our friends and were up early for the airport the next day. If you have made it this far, thanks for reading. It was a great trip and we will be back again some day.
