We said goodbye to Gandia and headed north to Barcelona. Even though we lived in Catalonia for 21 months, we put off doing some tourist stuff until we had visitors, then COVID came along and scuppered those plans. We spent the first day touring on the open top bus, and as is the norm for us , it rained in the afternoon so we got a little soggy.
The second day we used the tickets to hop off and take a closer look at some of the sites.
We walked up to Park Güell, another of Gaudi's creations, but unfortunately couldn't see inside as all the tickets were sold out. We'll have to visit another time. The park has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1984.
From there, we walked down the hill to Sant Pau Art Nouveau world heritage site. Built between 1902 and 1930, this hospital was originally conceived as a city within a city.
We had a later start to day 3 and headed for the Sagrada Familia , Gaudi's masterpiece. The Basílica i Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família (full title) is the largest unfinished Catholic church in the world and is part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site. On 7 November 2010, Pope Benedict XVI consecrated the church and proclaimed it a minor basilica.
Construction began in March 1882 and Gaudi took over in 1883, when the original architect Villar resigned. He devoted the remainder of his life to the project, and he was buried in the church in 1926. The plan was to finish construction in 2026 on the centenary of Gaudi's death, however Covid has had an impact on these dates.
The inside of the Basilica is quite subdued when you compare it to the outside
After Barcelona, we headed to Millau in France. The Millau Viaduct is a multispan cable-stayed bridge completed in 2004 across the gorge valley of the river Tarn. According to Wikipedia as of September 2020, it was the tallest bridge in the world, having a structural height of just over 336 metres.
On Friday we crossed into Switzerland and visited CERN.
The European Organization for Nuclear Research, is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world and was established in 1954. A number of experiments have been constructed at CERN and it is the site of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest and highest-energy particle collider. It is also the birthplace of the World Wide Web.
We spent the weekend catching up with our friends James and Steph and their two boys. On Saturday night, we all went into the city to watch as 1,350 drones took the skies above Lake Geneva (Lac Leman) to perform the largest synchronised drone show ever seen in Europe. It was part of the Feu ô Lac Festival.
Tomorrow we leave Geneva and head for Lausanne, Basel, Bern and Interlaken.
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