Travel Tips

Posts Tagged ‘Gothic District’

The Picasso Museum in Barcelona includes one of the most large collections of artworks by the 20th century Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. This is one of the mainly popular and most visited museums in Barcelona. The museum is housed in 5 adjoining ancient palaces in Barcelona’s Barri Gotic.

The innovative idea for the museum came from Picasso’s friend, Jamie Sabartés. Picasso had given Sabartés great many paintings, drawings and prints during the course of their friendship. Firstly Sabartés had planned to set up a museum based on his collection in Málaga, Picasso’s birthplace. It was Picasso himself who suggested that Barcelona would be more suitable, given his long standing relations with the town. You can visit this museum with a Visites guidées Barcelone.

The collection doesn’t directly strike you as being a very extensive one. Among the early painting, there are a couple of unusual paintings of the beach at Barceloneta like it was hundred years ago, complete with donkeys and none of the landmarks to be seen there today…

The Barcelona Picasso Museum doesn’t include his most important painting – Guernica, for example is in Madrid’s Reina Sofía Art Centre and you’ve got the Paris collections in addition to a new Picasso museum in Malaga.

After Sabartés decease in 1968, Picasso himself donated a significant amount of items to the museum, including approximately one thousand items of his early work which his family had been keeping for him ever since the time he first settled in France. This included school publications, academic pieces and paintings from Picasso’s Blue Period. There are now more than 3,500 works making up the permanent collection of the museum. To go there, you can arrived at Aeroport Barcelone.

The Museu Picasso reveals Picasso’s connection with the town of Barcelona, a relationship that has been shaped in his youth and adolescence, and continued till his death.

The Museum has undergone successive renovations and expansions, and it’s now starting to develop new programmes, activities and services to become a reference place, envisaged to spreading knowledge and to fostering the visitor’s participation and critical views. The Museum wishes to be a dialogue place, exploring original approaches to Picasso’s painting and influence and offering new views on the Museum Collection. We invite you to see the audiovisual Welcome of the Museum director.

Barcelona has several fantastic neighbourhoods, however the oldest, with maybe most beautiful for it’s architecture and history is the gothic district, or “Barri Gotic”. Barcelona was structured by the Romans atop the hill Mont Taber and was originally called Barcino. Las Ramblas, which runs through the aged town, used to be a river, furthermore the area which is now the Raval used to be countryside. Indeed the oldest church in Barcelona is in El Raval, Sant Pau del Camp (Saint Paul of the countryside).

Half way along the river that is now Ramblas, stood the old city gates – made from Iron and with the watering troughs for the thirsty horses. This can still be seen today at Calle Portaferrissa (literally “Iron door”) one of the city’s main shopping streets. You can also get there with Bus Touristique Barcelone

The Gothic Quarter has some fantastic examples of Gothic architecture including the Santa Maria del Mar Cathedral, The Palau de la Generalitat with it’s impressive chapel of Sant Jordi, and of course the city’s main cathedral.

Many walking tours will take you along the old streets of the gothic quarter, where Roman ruins sit alongside brand new shops and some of the best and oldest eating places in Barcelona. No visit to the gothic Quarter is complete without a trip into the Plaça Reial, with it’s palm trees and fountain, as well as some of the initial works to be comissioned by the legendary Antonin Gaudi – the lamp posts. This is a favourite spot at any time of day or night to people watch and has an old antiques marketplace on a Sunday, too, with coin collectors, stamps and other such collectables making you feel like you’re back in the time of the “shadow of the wind”. Don’t hesitate come in Barcelona and do a Visites guidées Barcelone.