1. The Basilica of Sagrada Familia
2.The historic Gothic Quarter
3.The Maritime Façade
4.Montjuic (the hill that overlooks the city with most of the Oympic facilities).
BARCELONA HIGHLIGHTS TOUR
Barcelona private tour guide Highlights tour
We begin the tour contemplating the exterior of the “Sagrada Familia”, a church dedicated to the Holy Family whose construction began in 1882 and still continues today. On the tour your private guide will explain to you why it was built and the chronology of its construction including details of what has already been built and what has yet to be completed. We can visit its interior too and be admired by its organic shapes. Their columns in the inside resemble like big tree trunks from where “branches” come out than then get divided into more branches and that support the “canopy” of the “forest”. With a Barcelona licensed tour guide you can skip the line to go inside the church.
We leave Sagrada Familia and cross the ‘modern’ city, designed in a grid, and go towards the historical centre of Barcelona where Romans first settled about 2,000 years ago. We stroll along the narrow labyrinth of streets taking in the Gothic style of the cathedral and other beautiful religious and civil buildings. A few minutes from the Gothic Quarter we come to the most famous street in Barcelona, Las Ramblas, with its Opera House, and walk down to the Christopher Columbus monument and the old port.
The old port was radically transformed by the 1992 Olympic Games, in the past it was the only port of the city, a port for merchandise and fishing boats, now is a leisure port, with yachts of different sizes, even there is a big shopping center in the middle of it, called Maremagnum. Although, for local people, the really big improvement that brought the Olympic Games was the beach: before the Olympic Games we only had about 500 yards of beach that we could use, today we have 3 miles. In the past a long extension of the beach to the north of the city was completely abandoned, we had a lot of old warehouses, abandoned factories, the train passing by the sea and people could not even access the beach, all this area was cleaned up, the Olympic village was built and the beaches were also arranged with parks along it, additionally the train was taken out, so now we have a long extension of nice beaches and parks along them.
We finish the guided tour at Montjuic hill. Home to most of the facilities for the Barcelona 1992 Olympic Games, together with buildings and attractions from an International Exhibition held in 1929. The most visited attraction of this International Exhibition is the “Pueblo Español” (Spanish Village) where, with the explanations of your private tour guide, one can admire houses and other constructions from all the different regions of Spain (except the Canary Islands). This enclosure of 15 hectares is designed in the shape, and with all the elements, of a typical Spanish village. Montjuic also provides us with amazing panoramic views over the port and the whole city.
