We landed in Barcelona around noon and immediately hit the city to explore.  I wanted to see Parc Guell and La Sagrada Familia, because I’ve been super curious about how one artist could legit take over an entire city.

La Sagrada Familia was particularly interesting, because it’s been under construction since 1882 or something, and it’s not going to be ready for a while either.  On top of that, apparently this building causes mad controversy because the construction materials being used aren’t what Gaudi himself would have selected.  That concept’s a bit farfetched to me, because if those materials were available during pre-design, who really knows what Gaudi would’ve picked.

You can see the top of the building from pretty far away, so it was deceptively farther than we thought.  I don’t know a lot about architecture, but the building didn’t seem to fit around the city.  Barcelona is more modern than I expected, and then right in the middle is some massive stone construction with all this gothic influence and dark corners and extravagant colors randomly thrown against the columns and awkwardly angled piers.  The whole building’s a canvas of random imagination, from murals of the Holy Family to Neo-Gothic arrangements of lights and flowers to sculptures in random nooks and crannies.

It didn’t make sense to me.  The randomness of the building and the location looked like what I would imagine could happen if you threw a bunch of artists into a small room and said, “Go wild.  No graffiti art.”  I guess that’s why it was so cool though.  In someone’s imagination, that place existed and was real enough to recreate.  I can’t imagine what the final product will look like, but I hope I can see it one day.