Valencia to Zaragoza

Valencia was looking beautiful in the early morning ... I'd saved up going to see the Church of San Nicolás for this morning, with frescoes by Antonio Palomino (designed 1694 and actually painted by his pupil Dionis Vidal in 1704).  They've recently been restored, and are magnificent, and exhausting.

The inquiries room at Valencia Nord train station is rather impressive, too!  Not that I had any inquiries to make, but I went to admire them - like the whole of the station, oranges are everywhere in the decoration, and the landscape was the one that I visited yesterday evening.

Then a five hour train ride, through countryside that was rather like I-40 through parts of California and Arizona and New Mexico, making me wonder, though, why we don't see more olive groves in the southwest.  The conquistadores must have felt very much at home.  And here's the view from my room in Zaragoza - a large, sprawling, apparently business-dominated city; not that many tourists - at least, ones who aren't Spanish - and this is very much a business person's hotel (but cheap, and very well appointed).

Somehow the city is full of strange things - here are some ants crawling up the side of a building;

and yes, those are some legs belonging to a girl doing gymnastics in the long plaza in front of the cathedral.  More of that tomorrow - the light was very much in the wrong place this evening, golden though this looks.  And, I suspect, more baroque.

 

more Valencia

Valencia continues to delight at every turn, even in apparently insignificant streets.  First up today, the Art Nouveau market,

which strongly made me wish I was in an AirBnB and could buy lots of fun things to cook with (as it was, I came back to it later, and bought a slice of tortilla and a freshly squeezed orange and peach juice for lunch).

Then to La Lonja - a commercial/political center for the city for centuries (and, in a strange story, was replicated, or at least its tower was, in the Spanish Pavilion at the Columbian Exposition in 1893, where it was looked at somewhat askance because its architecture didn't fir with the prevailing neoclassicism).

I'll spare you the Silk Museum, where I learned a lot about silkworms (and about silk's importance to Valencian history, to be sure); and then onto the Church of Santos Juanes, which is just hugely under restoration to restore all its baroque glory.  I'll confess I hadn't realized how much destructive burning of churches was done by Franco in the 1930s.

Also - imagine, in this heat (it was around 84 today), what it's like trying to make a living dancing around inside a 10 foot tall polar bear costume.

This evening, a tour of the nature reserve of Albufera, and then a boat trip on the lagoon to see the sunset. I learned a lot about eel fishing (these are eel traps);

saw a particularly fine heron;

and indeed, a particularly fine sunset;

and old fishing village houses (ok, now reimagined as restaurants, but pretty, all the same).

We weren't back into town until 10.30: thank goodness it's Spain, and tapas bars are still in full swing.

My night owl wings are flapping nicely on this trip.

 

Barcelona to Valencia

This morning, in a very, very wet and thunderstormy Barcelona, to Casa Batlló, (of course) by Gaudí - and indeed fascinating to see how he worked as an interior designer, and how his signature curves and wave and shell and turtle shapes pervaded even the smallest detail.  But what a strange place!  It seemed designed to squeeze every last tourist dollar out of each one of its visitors. It provided no information anywhere, except on the audio tour on one's hang-round-the-neck iPad-like things - mine stopped working after a couple of rooms.  So did everyone else's.  In any case, it quickly became apparent that its real raison d'être was to act as a backdrop for Instagrammy photos and selfies - in every corner other than its two - two! gift shops.

It was very wet on the roof.

The folding chains on the back stairs weren't by Gaudí, but by the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, and were really striking.

At the end, one was thrust into an installation called Inside the Mind of Gaudí - er - more photo opps ...

I wasn't sorry to splash through the thunderstorms, and get on a train to Valencia.

Why didn't I know about Valencia before??  It's wonderful!!  Rather like Sicily, but cleaner ...

and with some stunning gardens -

with occupants.

Pretty corners everywhere.

Outside the cathedral - inexplicable - I think they'd escaped from a C19th genre picture.

Inside the cathedral.

And on the way to eating a lot of fish for dinner: yet more baroque,

and a stunning bank building.