Barcelona, Spain

I first visited Barcelona for my 21st birthday with a bunch of friends from university. It was a whirlwind trip and I don’t remember much thanks to the heroic quantities of sangria consumed at the city’s tapas bars. So ten years later I decided to revisit the city and explore it properly, learning a little Spanish along the way.

My husband and I set out on the trip in early May in an old-school Mercedes campervan - top speed a heart-stopping 50mph. We drove through France in torrential rain but when we arrived in Spain the clouds cleared and the sun shone through. Thankfully it stayed sunny and warm throughout our visit to the city.

A friend who runs a Spanish school in Barcelona recommended that we leave our van at the airport as parking can be problematic - especially in a large and temperamental vehicle! It was great advice and we booked ourselves into a studio apartment near the Arc de Triomf for a couple of days.

One of the main highlights of Barcelona for me was the architecture - Gaudi’s buildings in particular never fail to impress. I got to revisit his Sagrada Familia which has come a long way in ten years and is truly awe-inspiring. The whole building is an incredible twisted forest of stone pillars and the views from the top take your breath away. It’s a good idea to arrive first thing in the morning though to avoid the crowds. We also visited Casa Batllo which is a giant, wedding-cake of a building and looks particularly beautiful when it’s lit-up at night.

The city market off La Rambla is another of my favourite places, where you sit eating seafood among stalls crammed high with mind-boggling varieties of fresh Spanish produce. Having picked-up a few Catalan phrases, we hit the tapas bars at night and tried to order food, much to the waiters’ collective amusement. Learning Spanish is hard enough but Catalan takes much more practice!

It’s hard to sum-up what makes Barcelona so fantastic in a few words. It really is a city with everything – history, culture, atmosphere, great weather, friendly people, incredible food and beautiful architecture everywhere you look. I’ll definitely return but this time I won’t leave it ten years!

28 November 2007 16:36

Posted by Lucy Brandt

Arriving in the city of Barcelona these days is quite different to how it was when I first moved there, more years ago than I care to tell. Now you swan from the super modern airport (check out the beautiful marble floor in browns, beiges, fawns and blacks) through the huge non-smoking baggage claim and sally out of the revolving doors into one of a thousand yellow and black taxis or on to one of the super frequent single decker city center buses. This is a huge change from years ago, when the terminal was a dark, smokey hangar filled with threatening brown-clad officers of the policia nacional armed with guns and ready to stop you entering the country if you so much as hinted at fun and frolics.

The only way in to the city without a car – most of which were Seat 500s or 850s and were cramped and boiling hot, even with all their windows down - was the over-heated grimy train, which chugged through wasteland, past factories, scrubland and run-down smallholdings before arriving at the centre. The Barrio Gotico, close to where the bus leaves you, was once awash with dark dingy bars, ankle deep in cigarette butts and screwed up serviettes, unprotected piles of tapas coughed over by old men throwing back their third carajillo (brandy and black coffee) of the morning. This is a far cry from today’s designer spaces comfortably furnished with state of the art glass and chrome, and definitely no smoking. Once settled at a pavement table on the Ramblas, clutching an ice-cold Estrella or a Cuba Libre, however, you’ll find that life on the street has hardly changed at all. Mime artists and human statues are still interspersed with pavement artists and con-men, the birds still screech and chatter from their roadside cages, the newspaper stands still sell football memorabilia, foreign newspapers and tacky postcards, and the sun still dapples faces under sun umbrellas or awnings. There is an indefinable scent and aura of the place, which, once you experience it, you will never forget. And if you drink from the fountain at the top of the Ramblas, you will never really leave.

26 November 2007 12:51

Posted by Jenny Johnson

Barcelona what a wonderful place to study Spanish! If you are familiar with this region of Spain, I can imagine a sarcastic look on your face thinking … but they speak Catalan! Which is true, but if you look further into it you will find, that everybody is bilingual, and in addition to this, the majority of Catalans have families that come from other areas of Spain, therefore Spanish is spoken and heard as much as Catalan, especially in Barcelona. The cultural wonders and cosmopolitan feeling of Barcelona are so well known nowadays that it has become one of the top destinations for foreign students attending Spanish schools. At Cactus we choose our language schools by the quality of their Spanish courses, facilities and have visited them personally. We work with four of them in order to offer a choice to match the different needs for students!

I love Barcelona and not because I was born there!

I have visited many cities but every time I come back it surprises me again and again with their array of different cultural sights, museums, leisure activities, its energy, cuisine and culture! You can indulge yourself with the well known ‘’pà amd tomàquet i pernil’’ but also savour many tapas from all around Spain thanks to the wide variety offered including restaurants: Pinchos from the Basque country, Caldo Gallego from Galicia, and many, many more. Then stroll along the harbour all the way to La Barceloneta , (small Barcelona), where the new Barcelona merges with the old times and you can smell fried fish and paella as you admire the new architecture whilst contemplating having a swim or just chilling in one of the many bars having a drink… and other hundreds of things to do that I would not fit in this page! On the down side, yes, it has become quite touristy and for example the fresh markets of La Boqueria where I used to go shopping every Saturday with my grandmother, has become more expensive and flashy, however they have made it look so much nicer and now you can even buy fresh juices straight from the shop that sells the fruit! It might be more expensive but it cannot get any fresher than that!

There are so many connections to reach Barcelona easily that it makes it really hard not to find an excuse to go and find out by yourself if this is the place for you. I would say that it is definitely worth a try so you can tell us what you think about the city and learning Spanish under the Catalan sun!

26 November 2007 12:51

Posted by Elvira Rodriguez

I'm not a huge fan of cities, but my day trip to Barcelona a couple of years ago with my partner and our young daughter was a real treat.

Highlights of the day for me were many and varied:

-the uniquely uplifting experience of walking down La Rambla - the buzz of people milling and equally enjoying themselves. The stunning architecture, the sense of presence the place has.

- ducking out of a torrential rain to grab a hot chocolate and catch up with my ex-colleague Jeannette who was teaching English there.

- wandering down to the port area, hanging in out the shops before meandering back over the bridge at dusk with the yacht's masts clanking below.

- Trying to get my head around the superlative building which is the Sagrada Familia

For me though, confirmed tree hugger, the trip up to Park Gueil conjured up the crescendo to my day. We got up there on one of the tourist buses which offer a couple of hop on hop off circuits around Barcelona.

This beautiful work of art dreamed up by the city's architectural spiritual leader, Gaudi, weaves nature and art together in spectacular fashion. Seeing and interacting with so much of his work provides unique sensory stimulation.

The most unbelievable point in the day was actually recovering our rucksack from the man who stole it whilst we were absorbed in showing our daughter the geese in the pond inside the cathedral's cloisters. I grabbed back the purloined item in a dramatic scene of mismatched linguistic confrontation which certainly drew a crowd! Barcelona is infamous for the theft of bags and personal effects. We'll know to be more careful next time. The next time I'm there it will be to attend one of the Spanish language schools Cactus works with to brush up my spoken Spanish.

We only work with top schools in Barcelona and Cactus has been working with them for many years. They are selected after countless visits by Cactus staff. Spanish schools are ten a penny in Barcelona, but our staff know what they're looking for when they select a partner school. In my case, I'll be after a course which teaches me the Spanish for "Stop thief!" and "Give me my bag back, you varmit!"

Barcelona – a city where you cannot fail to have a great time! Gaudí, tapas, las ramblas, cava, more cava, carajillo…. It is both chill out and exciting depending on how you want to spend your time. Narrow streets, balaconies with birds in cages, washing hanging to dry, an oversized plant, a chair… look up to see real lives, homes & people become artwork to the outsider’s eye. And for the real thing you cannot fail to be astonished by the gothic melting madness of Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia & more… And something I have never done but would love to do… go see a floodlit match FC Barcelona vs. anyone for passion and frenzy, followed by a night on the cava, a morning on the carajillo and an afternoon asleep on the beach. Vivelo!

What springs to mind when I think of Barcelona is the towering beauty of the Sagrada Familia, the gothic, gargoyled porticoes of the churches, the boutique shops and maze-like streets of the Barrio Gottico and the abundance of tapas bars in which to rest those tired feet from a day of exploration. That’s not to mention catching a spontaneous tango dance in one of the bustling streets or watching the local Catalonians dance together in circles in the square on a Sunday.

All this can be discovered in the afternoons, having spent the mornings getting to grips with grammar, verbs and vocabulary in one of the many Spanish schools Barcelona has to offer. Learning Spanish in Barcelona will leave you with no time to spare and not a chance of wondering what to do next. And best of all, you get to put into practice the language you have learned in class.

Just stopping for a breather in Park Guell can still give your Spanish a work-out. Some of the most interesting conversations and opportunities to practise the language can come from a chat about the weather with a local. Whether you’re buying metro tickets, phoning up for Salsa lessons, filling up on fine food or debating the life of Gaudi, learning and speaking Spanish in Barcelona will always leave you hankering for more.

26 November 2007 12:28