Castell Montjuic sits on top of Montjuic, a wide slowly-rising hill that sits up over the western side of Barcelona. Strategically, the hill and the castle dominate the landscape, but unfortunately, while it’s been used for defense, it wasn’t built for that purpose. It was a place from which the Spanish oppressed the citizens of Barcelona during the civil war. You can see the hill rising on the left in the picture above, next to the bizarre building that houses the Barcelona gasworks, called “the rocket.”
There are several ways to get there, but we decided to be adventurous and take the Funicular de Montjuic, a funicular railway or cable car, across the harbor and see the sights of the city from above in the process!
The first step is the hardest, and it’s not getting onto the slightly swaying cable car that sits a hundred feet over the water. It’s getting into the teeny tiny elevator that takes you up to the top. And you can see, it’s a long way up:
But once you get up there and in the cable car, the views are spectacular!
We first glimpsed Castell Montjuic while hiking up from the gardens. At first sight, it doesn’t seem like it’s going to be all that big…
Then you get up here…
And you see the expansiveness of the gardens…
And some of the armament left over from the Spanish Civil War and the World Wars…
And the tremendous view it gives you from the city, and you realize that the place is not only huge, but you can see everything. It’s small wonder that it was a major strategic site and now it’s a tremendous historical landmark and tourist spot.
Montjuic is also the site of most of the 1992 Olympic facilities as evidenced by this statue we found on the walk down. Across from it is the Olympic swimming pool and part of one of the stadiums. I wish we’d had more of a chance to see those, but we were walking down on a mission – we’d been walking everywhere that day and needed to find some dinner!
This is the final piece of my mini-Barcelona tour for you! I hope you’ve enjoyed it, and for those of you who feel like you’ve been subjected to travel slides of someone’s vacation…I’m sorry but I’m not sorry. It’s my blog
KCS
If you want more posts on Barcelona:
Hola from Barcelona | The City Garden | The Waterfront | The Gothic Quarter | Gaudi’s Architecture | The Funicular Railway and Montjuic
