Camino Barcelona Blog

Hello everybody!!

Today I’m going to talk to you about Montserrat!
I went there last week with some friends of mine and if you are here in Barcelona I highly recommend you to spend a day there!
Montserrat (the name “Montserrat” means in Spanish “Montaña Cortada”) is located more or less at 40 km from Barcelona and it’s a very important place for all the Catalans. Besides being a natural reservation, Montserrat is also a monastery visited every year by thousands tourists and pilgrims from all over the world.

But in particular for the people of Barcelona it has double importance. Did you know that when the Barça (the football team) gains the Champions League or the Spanish league, they go there and make some offers to the Virgin of Montserrat?
I know…it sounds a bit strange but for the “Barceloneses” (people from Barcelona) it’s a big deal!
Our trip started early in the morning, first of all because none of us knew exactly where to go and secondly because of the some works that were affecting the public transportation down town.
To go to Montserrat, we took the train line R5 (destination: Manresa) from the stop in Plaza España.
After that, there is the “Funicular de Sant Joan” (cable train) that took us to the Monastery of Montserrat, where you can enjoy a 360º view that reaches Barcelona too! It was like we were watching the entire world from above!
Around midday we decided to get in the cathedral because at that time the concert of the “Escolania” started. The “Escolania” is the chorus of the monastery, with children between 10 and 14 years old playing every day between 12:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m., except on Saturdays.
The cathedral, dedicated to the Virgin of Monteserrat, the Virgin of Cataluña, is a typical example of gothic style, whose front façade is decorated with the statues of the 12 apostles.
Later on, after the concert of the “Escolania”, we decided to go upstairs to see the statue of the Virgin of Montserrat, a statue made of black wood encaged in a glass window. Only one part of it was outside the window and everybody was touching it, like the statue of St.Peter in Rome.
The trial then took us to the outside to the “Virgin’s trial”, where you can see all the candles and all the lights put there by all the visitors of the monastery.
After that, we entered the “Espai Audiovisual”(Audiovisual Room), a kind of small museum that tries to represent the monks’ every day life in the monastery.
But the most magical moment of the day was to see the sun go down there, when the sun was still shining on the mountaings, and everything was so peaceful and quiet!Don’t miss the chance to visit Montserrat!
Stef

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 13th, 2007 at 5:38 pm and is filed under Actividades, What to do in Barcelona, Spanish Culture - Cultura española, Stefania's posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.