Camino Barcelona Blog

El origen de esta tradicional fiesta se remonta a la antigüedad. En los pueblos del Mediterráneo en donde siempre hubo un intercamino de culturas se celebra esta fiesta mágica.

¡Todo es posible en la noche más corta del año! Por eso hay música, baile y alegría allá donde vayamos.

Esta celebración tan típica y arraigada se celebra especialmente en la ciudad de Barcelona. No es la única, también en Valencia y otras ciudades costeras, y con especial intensidad en las Islas Baleares.

¡Para disfrutar al máximo, sigue leyendo! (more…)

Hi all!

As you already know (most of you anyway if you had me as your teacher) I am not from Barcelona but from Málaga in the south of Spain; what you maybe do not know, it’s that Picasso comes from Málaga too!!!

Pablo Ruíz Picasso was born on the 25th of October of 1881 in Malaga as the son of an art and drawing teacher, José Ruíz y María Picasso, from whom he took his artistic name. Pablo lived all his childhood in the central “Plaza de la Merced” in Málaga, a famous square in the city, not only for being the market-place since the medieval times, but also for being a square where parents, nannies and children used to gather especially in the spring/summer-time to play and feed the pigeons, as it is full of them.

Pablo’s family lived in a nice building in the left corner of the square, I think on the second floor, in a nice flat of around 100m2. A big flat considering how families in those times lived all together in one room. My mother’s aunt worked there as “portera” (porter) and she used to tell my mum stories about Pablo and her sisters, Concepción y Lola, when she was a child. Stories like how Picasso’s father had pigeons kept in a big cage on the terrace of the building and loved painting them or how later Pablo, imitating his father, started painting the pigeons flocking in the square that he could see from his terrace.

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Hi all! The good weather is coming and Barcelona is one of the best places to be! You can go to the beach, you can visit the parks, you can have a drink outside in a nice “terraza” or you can enjoy just walking by, shopping or having an ice-cream admiring one of the Gaudí’s houses… but you can also go to Poble Espanyol in Plaza España and for a few Euros have a drink, admire the beautiful buildings and even buy some crafts, paintings or even a pair of earrings or a colourful candle!

This “village” with a surface of 49,000 m2 was built in 1929 for the Barcelona International Exhibition as the pavilion dedicated to art. It is one of the few monuments built for an International Exhibition that can still be visited. It is a real model of a Spanish village containing all the main characteristics of our arquitecture in the 117 buildings all reproduced to scale.

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As Monday was Sant Jordi and thousands of books and roses were sold in Barcelona, I thought it could be a good idea to recommend you to read, in Spanish of course!!!, two very good books that are very popular and read in Spain.

In the first place a beautiful book based in Barcelona, La sombra del viento by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. Based in the Barcelona of 1945, Semper, the owner of a library in the center of the city, takes his son one morning to the “cemetery of the forgotten books” a place where people take old books in order to be preserved from destruction. Daniel, his son, feels attracted to a book called La sombra del viento… Next day many people wants to get this book… I really love this book, once you start reading it, you can not stop because you want to know the end. The way it is written it is so real, that you really feel inside the story and I promise you, the end will surprise you.

Another good book based in Barcelona is La Catedral del Mar by Idelfonso Falcones. (more…)

No sé si lo sabíais pero el viernes pasado, viernes santo, según la tradición católica no se podía comer carne.

I do not know if you knew but last Friday, Good Friday, according to the Catholic tradition, we could not eat meat.

En muchos restaurantes, en el mercado y en el supermercado, probablemente habéis visto la palabra “bacalao”.

Probably you have seen the word “bacalao” (cod) in many restaurants, in the market and in the supermarket.

El bacalao es un pescado blanco que aquí en España se come de una manera diferente.

Cod is a white fish that here in Spain is eaten in a different way.

El bacalao se seca y se sala durante un periodo de tiempo y se come curado en ensaladas y con diferentes tipos de salsa.

The cod is dried and salted during a period of time and you eat it cured in salads and with different types of sauces.

Como sabéis, yo soy del sur y en Málaga hay un plato típico de la región que se come mucho especialmente en primavera y verano porque es muy refrescante y además no engorda nada de nada : La ensalada malagueña.

As you know, I come from the south and in Málaga there is a tipic plate of the region that it is eaten specially in Spring and Summer because it is very refreshing and has no calories at all : La ensalada Malagueña.

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So what are you going to do this long weekend???? Kate gave you yesterday advice about the wide range of museums to visit and the cool IMAX in Port Vell. I will inform you about other activities such as: Which movies to go to and where, which exhibitions are interesting to see, new restaurants to go and different bars to enjoy.

Do you prefer independent movies o big American productions?? Would you go for an original version with subtitles???? Go to cinema VERDI in Carrer Verdi, Gracia. It is a very cousy cinema with independent movies. Last weekend I watched a French film : Paris, je táime, a collection of different short love stories in different parts of Paris, very good and different, you will see Paris from a completely point of view. You can also see in Verdi the new film of the handsome Gael García Bernal: La ciencia del sueño, a funny film in English: Stephane goes back to France to accept a job that he thinks will help to develop his huge creativity, however… It is a surrealist film full of fantasy and completely different to everything you have seen by this young actor. Very funny indeed.

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Si no sabes muy bien qué hacer en el largo fín de semana de Semana Santa, te puedo recomendar diferentes lugares en España para visitar y ver diferentes formas de interpretar la pasión de Cristo. / If you do not know very well what to do this long Easter weekend, I can recommend you different places in Spain to visit and observe the different ways we have to interpretate the Passion of Christ.

España, país de larga tradición católica, celebra la Semana Santa de manera muy diferente a otros paises de Europa. / Spain, country of a long catholic tradition, celebrates Easter in a very diferent way to other countries in Europe.

Se celebra de una manera u otra, en casi todas las ciudades de España pero puedo destacar como más interesantes a las siguientes ciudades:/ It is celebrated in a way or in another in all the nation, however I can point out some cities where Easter is celebrated in a very interesting way:

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Everybody thinks that we, the Spanish people, drink lots of wine, at lunch time, with the dinner, eating tapas and so on… the reality is that we do drink wine, yes, but not so much, I would say that beer is the most common drink, specially if you are out. However we do produce wonderful wine, red (tinto), white (blanco), pink (rosado)… and many times students ask me which wine they can buy as a present for their parents or for themselves.

I like wine, I am not an expert at all but I have learned to appreciate its taste in the last years. So today I want to teach you a bit about the different kinds of Spanish wine, so you have some kind of idea about what to buy and what to try.

A wine to have before lunch time and in the Summer, a wine from the South, el Moscatel, a delicious sweet wine, perfect to have as aperitive with a bit of ham and cheese. The best of all, Pedro Ximenez, if you can not find it, look for Cartojal o Málaga virgen and serve them always cold. The perfect present for your grandmother!!!

A perfect wine to enjoy with your dinner and the most famous, the Rioja. A beautiful red wine from northern Spain. This wine is labeled according to the amount of aging the wine has received, these are the categories:

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Last Saturday it was very sunny, so some friends and me decided to go to have some tapas in my local bar and enjoy the sun. The “tortilla de patatas” looked good so we decided to have a “pincho” (a triangle) with a cold beer (nothing better in a sunny day) and started talking about how easy it is to cook and how good it tastes.

It is interesting but everybody had some, but no everybody knows exactly how and what it is made of. La tortilla de patatas is the perfect dish to prepare for inviting friends to a party, to enjoy on the beach or to have for lunch or dinner, it tastes also good cold or hot, in a sandwich or with some salad, with ketchup, mayonaise or on its own.

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I do not know if you have realised, but here in Spain, if we had to name a horror movie with a man killing people with a white mask and a chain-saw it would not be called Friday the 13th but Tuesday the 13th… why?

It seems that the Spanish tradition is different, in the Anglo countries like Great Britain or United States, Friday is considered a bad luck day because Jesus died on a Friday, however in Spain, although we are considered a catholic country, it is Tuesday the bad day as it is the day related to the god Mars, the god of war and therefore, the god that represents death. 

The number 13 is in any case in many cultures, a bad number; and there are many reasons for this, the most popular are: during the Last Supper the twelve disciples and Jesus made 13 and in the Tarot cards 13 is the number that represents Death.

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