BARCELONA
Barcelona is Spain's second largest city, with a population of 1.5 million people, and the capital of Catalonia.The city is on the Mediterranean coast, and has a wealth of unique historic architecture. Barcelona emerged as one of the most popular tourist destinations in Europe during the 1990s.
It’s a beautiful city, full of markets, shops, museums and churches, and great for walking around. There’s an area called “Rambles” where people like walking. It’s very tourist because there are flowers, paintings and restaurants. However, you can go to the beach, which is near, or you can walk around.
In 1992 Barcelona hosted the Olympics and the Games were very well organized. However, some time before the city was prepared for that, and the transformation was very important; new areas were made and the city was opened to the sea. This transformation and the games made the city known all over the world, and tourists began to come and a lot of ships dock here, because they like it. But concerning international businesses it’s not very important because companies are in Madrid; 17 years ago, there were in Barcelona, but they have moved to Madrid.
Barcelona
Barcelona is a city where architecture and urbanism are one. Everyone knows the Antoni Gaudí, the brilliant Catalan whose passion, at once religious and aesthetic, yielded buildings of extraordinary sensuousness, a kind of melted, lyrical art nouveau with hints of Gothic. Gaudí set the tone for the city, for the way its physical forms, too strong to be backdrops, influence your emotions. First thing to visit was the Sagrada Família church, surely the most extraordinary personal interpretation of since the Middle Ages. Gaudí started it in 1884, designing as he went until killed when struck by a tram in 1926; the place should have been left as a dazzling ruin, but instead work continues a pseudo-Gaudí architecture rising in mistaken homage to the master. Most of what is there is still Gaudí’s own, but that may not be true in another generation.
The original post here: www.travel.nationalgeographic.com
