Maritime Museum and La Boqueria Market on a Sunny Day in Barcelona

Anyone who knows me knows that when I travel, I am not a big fan of visiting the “must-see” attractions that are swarming with people. In fact, if I can avoid them, I will. Nevertheless, some of these cannot be avoided, and with good reason – everybody goes there because the attraction is deserving of the attention. So, if I have to wade in with the throng, I will try to make it work – for example, by adding some more manageable attractions in the same area. That was the case on our day in Barcelona when we lunched at the famous La Boqueria Market, sandwiched (did you see how I got that food metaphor in there? Did you?) by visits to Barcelona’s Maritime Museum and the Joan Miro Foundation.

We began our day by taking the Metro to the Drassanes station, which is just across the street from the Maritime Museum, at the southern end of the famous La Rambla street (more on that later). The Maritime Museum is very much geared toward schoolchildren, and in fact we saw some groups of kids with teachers while we were there. There were many models of ships, which I love to see (I was a big model-builder as a kid). Perhaps the most impressive thing there was the full-scale reconstruction of a 16th-century galley.

With your ticket to the museum, you also get admission to the Santa Eulalia, a ship that is moored to the dock in the bay, maybe a 5-minute walk from the museum.

Turning northward from the bay, the first thing we passed was the Mirador de Colom, a pedestal with a statue of Christopher Columbus atop it, gesturing and looking all exploratory. I am sure his mother would be proud.

From there, is was just a few blocks walking through the crowds on La Rambla to get to La Boqueria. You can wander through the market, and it really is extraordinary – the abundance of attractivc foods, seafood especially but many other things as well. However, if you are like me and the crowd gets on your nerves pretty quickly, it is good to have a goal of where you are going to eat. In our case, Therese had been to La Boqueria years ago and amazingly remembered where she had eaten the last time: Bar Central.

If you enter from La Rambla and walk straight through the middle of the market almost until you have reached the far limit, you will see Bar Central on the left. And sure, we had to wait a bit for a seat at the bar – we were in line for about 15 minutes, I think – but it wasn’t too bad. And the food was fresh and filling.

Feeling full and just a bit sleepy from our lunch, we headed toward our next destination of the day, the Joan Miro Foundation. I have long been a fan of this artist, so I was really looking forward to visiting this museum dedicated to his work. It is a tiny bit of a challenge to get there, since it is up on Barcelona’s Montjuic hill. But, if you take the L3 green line Metro train, as we did, two stops from La Boqueria to the Paral lel stop, you can transfer there to the Montjuic Funicular train, and then you don’t have to climb any steep hills to get there.

Sure enough, this museum had a wide range of Miro’s work, from the early Portrait of a Girl which is nearly realistic, to his surrealist and abstract works of his maturity and old age. And the building, on the side of the mountain, has a quite wonderful location, and the views from the upper floor, which also serves as a sculpture garden of Miro’s work, are spectacular.

Once we had had our fill of the museum and made our way back to La Rambla, the question became what we would want to have for dinner. There are numerous outdoor restaurants on La Rambla, but they are mostly pricey tourist-traps, and it’s anybody’s guess what the quality of the food might be. So we thought maybe a restaurant still in the old section of town, but just off the touristy avenue might work. We did a Google search and found Viana Restaurant. They were pretty well-booked on reservations, but on checking their book, they told us – mmmm, if you can eat in an hour, we have one table that is free until 8pm. That was plenty of time for us, and we had a very delicious and as I recall not too pricey dinner. A somewhat unexpected and thoroughly enjoyable conclusion to a very enjoyable day.

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