Spain — A Barcelona Christmas
We took a quick weekend trip to Barcelona in December, escaping our temporary rental living situation and chasing a little Christmas spirit before the holidays actually began. With minimal heating in our home (yes, Valencia gets COLD), and electricity constantly going out, we were having some pretty low spirits. Barcelona delivered on letting us forget for a couple days.
Arriving Into Match-Day Chaos
We landed mid day, with time to drop our bags off at our Airbnb (purposefully chosen near the Sagrada Familia), we headed towards town for some dinner and a little sightseeing before heading to bed. Wouldn't you know we'd find ourselves in a bit of a surreal situation on day one. We heard some chanting and yelling, saw people gathering, and ahead of us, flames! It was then we realized we were right in the middle of match day celebrations, and the city looked completely wild, crowds everywhere, noise, and energy. It looked scary at first glance, honestly, but it wasn't at all, just everyone out celebrating together. That kind of shared, chaotic joy in the streets seems to be such a Spanish thing. We were watching everyone come together to celebrate the World Cup in Qatar, between Morocco and Spain, where Morocco took the win.
Park Güell, Twenty-Three Years Later
It's funny what you remember, and don't, of a place you visited over two decades earlier. Walking through Park Güell again felt like stepping into Candyland (the way I described it in college), the rippling mosaic benches, the tiled roofs, all of it. Gaudí originally designed this space in 1900 as an exclusive garden city for the businessman Eusebi Güell, though the project only ever got two structures built before it was scrapped fourteen years in. What was left behind became one of Barcelona's most beloved public parks instead, curved stone pillars, colorful trencadís tilework, and views straight out over the whole city. Gaudí actually lived in a house within the park for years while he worked on his other Barcelona projects, it's a small museum today.
There are many ways to get there, as the actual park it's in is quite large and there's more to see if you walk the trails. We wandered and climbed and found ourselves almost at the backside of the park. From there, we could see Mount Tibidabo in the distance (FRIENDS anyone?), Barcelona's highest peak, crowned by both a church and one of the oldest amusement parks in the world, the two sharing the same mountaintop since the early 1900s. We didn't make it up there this trip, but it's on the list for next time.
Sagrada Família
The towers were open when we visited, and we climbed for the view over the Nativity Tower (book this one, everyone says so), one of the most incredible perspectives on this building you can get. Gaudí spent 43 years of his life on this basilica, and only saw one facade, the Nativity Facade, completed in his own lifetime before his death in 1926. Construction is still ongoing today, genuinely still unfinished more than a century after it began, with the current target for full completion sometime around 2030. Standing underneath it, knowing generations of builders have worked on the exact same structure, is a strange and moving thing to take in.
Passing Gaudí's Other Buildings
We also walked past several of Gaudí's buildings along the way during our exploration, without going inside, though they're worth knowing about if you're ever tempted to. Palau Güell sits just off Las Ramblas itself, an ornate mansion Gaudí designed for his patron Eusebi Güell, completed in 1888, its facade deliberately understated by his standards, hiding a genuinely lavish interior with a soaring central hall inside. A bit further along, on Passeig de Gràcia, sit two more of his most famous works: Casa Batlló, with its rippling, almost skeletal facade and rooftop resembling a dragon's back, and Casa Milà, better known as La Pedrera, "the quarry," named for its wavy, stone-quarried facade with not a single straight line in it. Both are still full-time apartment buildings today, with sections open to paid visitors, and both are UNESCO World Heritage Sites, part of the same designation covering Park Güell and Sagrada Família. Even from the outside, without paying to go in, they're genuinely worth slowing down for as you pass, Gaudí's fingerprints are honestly all over this city, sometimes in places you don't expect to stumble onto them.
Proper Christmas Markets
We found 3 Christmas markets here, complete with bratwurst and glühwein at one down at the port! The market outside Sagrada familia had so many cute stalls of artwork and nick-nacks, such as the pooping figurines called The Caganer. It is a small figurine, traditionally a peasant in a red barretina cap, depicted mid-squat, doing exactly what you think, tucked into nativity scenes right alongside Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus. It's been part of Catalan nativity displays since at least the 18th century, and the belief behind it is actually about fertility and good fortune, feces fertilizing the earth, prosperity for the year ahead. These days you'll find Caganers shaped like celebrities, athletes, and politicians too, alongside the traditional peasant version, it's become something of a running joke to add a new public figure to the lineup each year.
Another market we stumbled across near the Barcelona Cathedral, has a lot of fresh pine wreaths, some fresh Christmas trees, more artwork, and the best of all, Caga Tió! He's a wooden log with a painted smiling face, tiny stick legs, and its own little red hat, brought into Catalan homes starting December 8th. Children "feed" it a little each night and tuck it under a blanket to keep it warm, and then on Christmas Eve, the log gets beaten with sticks while everyone sings a traditional song urging it to "poop" out presents and sweets from underneath its blanket. Santa Claus takes a back seat to a pooping log here, and honestly, once you've seen it in person, it makes a strange kind of sense why locals love it so much. We bought one and bring him out every year. Funny story, I lost a leg one year, so when my husband was there for a business trip, he went to the place and asked them for a leg, and they graciously gave him a whole stick in case we lose one again. We love him.
Mission very much accomplished on the Christmas spirit front.
A short trip, but exactly what we needed, chaos and calm, ancient and unfinished, all wrapped into a few days in Barcelona.