Barcelona: Food, Sights, Green Pigeons

We flew to Barcelona on Thursday, arriving at our hotel around 8 pm. We were quite hungry and asked the hotel receptionist for a nearby recommendation. I had looked up one restaurant, and it was at the top of her list! So, we walked the ½ km there where I had three tapas that the receptionist had also recommended: bread with tomato (my favorite of the three), Spanish omelet (full of potatoes), and roasted potatoes with sauce.

Phillip ordered a paella, but with chicken, not seafood. The lady seated next to us had one with seafood and the shrimp were unpeeled and whole (with heads). Phillip prefers his shrimp more processed, so he went with the chicken. What he forgot was that a chicken dish has bones, so he did have to pull the chicken bones out of his paella. He did say it was flavorful.

We walked almost seven miles on Friday, making up for the skimpy walking day because of the flight on Thursday. Getting out of the area where our hotel was took us thru what we would consider alleys, but which are actually main streets in the center of old town Barcelona.

Barcelona, just like Vientiane, Laos, and other cities, has its own version of the Arc d’Triumph, named Arc de Tromf.

As in other European cities, statues grace many of the traffic circles of Barcelona.

Modern art is also represented here.

Parks are also common. One of the central city parks is Ciutadella Park, lots of people, statues, and tents where people were sleeping. The area wasn’t smelly or nasty, so they may have been backpackers, not homeless, who were allowed to camp in this major park.

In this park was a pool surrounded by dragon statues and a memorial of some sort. Not sure as Google maps told me it’s Neptu, but Neptu is also a Neptune statue closer to the marina. Oh well, it was nice to look at, even though the pigeons never moved from the top of the dragons.

The south end of Ciutadella Park contains Barcelona’s Zoo. Although we could have visited for just 10 euros (the senior rate!), we wanted to see more of the city. About 100 feet outside the zoo gate, we saw ten green parakeets. One of them was wearing a necklace, probably for tracking. Zoo escapes, most likely. Thankfully, they were parakeets, not monkeys, that escaped their enclosure.

We walked around the zoo, between its exterior wall and the train station. Sounds kind of boring, but it wasn’t because of all of the graffiti on the zoo wall.

Hundreds of feet of this art, to be expected as Pablo Picasso was from Spain and lived in Barcelona for a while as a child.

Phillip and I did not go on the sand of Barcelona beach, but we did walk along the malecon.

We made our way back to the Las Rambla area of the city where our hotel is located, passing another striking piece of art.

Las Rambla is a set of five streets that run parallel to each other, full of shops and the cross and diagonal alleys. The original use of Las Rambla was somewhat of a sewer system, giving a path for wastewater to run from the city to the sea. In the 15th century, the area was turned into roads, making room for markets and squares. The buildings in Las Rambla are very similar to French buildings, and much better looking than the Communist area buildings we saw in parts of Warsaw and Krakow.

Today, Saturday, we walked again around Barcelona. While researching locations near the hotel, I clicked on a park a few km away and saw pictures of green birds. That park became our destination today as it is where a colony, informally called “green pigeons” but actually Monk parakeets, have nests. Green pigeons were first seen in the parks in 1985 and now there are an estimated 2000 of them in Barcelona. They were probably released from local bird markets and found Barcelona to their liking. They live peaceably with the regular pigeons and doves. The nests were huge, and the birds were noisy, but it was fascinating to watch them work on the nests. These green birds were bigger than the parakeet-sized birds we saw near the zoo.

A local man, apparently known to the birds, brought food and water for them and the three varieties of birds politely came to him. It was a totally different scene than when tourists feed pigeons and all the pigeons for 20 meters crowd in to get their morsel.  

Tomorrow: boarding the Symphony of the Seas for our 14-night cruise to Fort Lauderdale. One night in Florida, then we fly back to Texas.