Barcelona guided walking tours - Gracia, Spain's second city

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Basic data

grade	easy
base	Barcelona
location tags	Barcelona, Barcelonès, Casa Vicens, Catalonia, Catalunya, Cataluña, Gracia, Gràcia,
theme tags	Gaudí­, ecclesiastical, gypsy, hippy, radical, social history,
walking distance	3.85 km / 2.39 miles
walking time, excluding breaks	2 hr
total return travel time from base to walk	0 hr
total time from "hello" to "goodbye"	2.70 hr
fiestas and markets on the way	week in mid-August (fiesta mayor) first weekend in September (fiesta mayor in one street) Note that there are also events in most places on January 6 (Three Kings), Carnival, Easter, April 23 (St George), June 23 (St John), and September 11 (Catalan regional/national day)
comments, pingbacks, trackbacks	Show/hide kalebeul » Esta quer siñela de undibel: a selection of Romani religious video says: September 23 2008 at 07:30 [...] Similar phrases using the Caló vocabularly of Iberian Romani dialect are to be found on and in many other houses in the gypsy quarter of Gracia, Barcelona (on a variant of this walk). [...] Town and country walking and study tours in Barcelona and the Western Med says: September 6 2010 at 19:53 [...] to witnesses of the following incursion from this walk on the Collserola hills behind Barcelona to this Gracia walk, near Plaza Lesseps, presumably making use of the 2-mile on-the-way-to-being-a-green-corridor [...]

Description of the walk

In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee. ¡Hail Mary, full of grace! he quoth. And thus, via the order of Shoeless Carmelites and a host of other cunning plot devices which will be fully explained during this walk, did Gracia acquire its name and its shield: an iris, purity incarnate, airborne on a blue sky.

Still viewed by some of its older and less coherent residents as Spain’s second metropolis (after Madrid, of course), Gracia lies at the strategic crossroads of the north-south Roman highway with the riverbed-road connecting the insignificant port of Barcino/Barcelona with the province’s mountain wilds. Thrice in the nineteenth century an independent municipality, it was one of half a dozen villages finally swallowed up by Barcelona in Cánovas' 1897 municipal reforms.

However, in the Town of Gracia you'll still find a strong sense of a separate identity, the result of a number of factors including:

• the comparative lack of immigration from other parts of Spain and the world;
• its traditional role as a focus for intellectual innovation–for example, romantic federalism and workers' movements;
• the maintenance nowadays of strange and anachronistic beliefs--forgotten Protestant sects rub shoulders with jackbooted separatists, trendy anarchists, tree-huggers, stone-worshippers, esperantists and theosophists;
• thriving associations.

Some highlights: Gaudí­'s first major commission, his other church and his house when he still dressed like a gentleman; the baker and the beanie saint; the speculative jeweller and the girl who found freedom and love amid the Civil War; other remnants of revolution and republic, cows and cats, palaces and farms, secret tunnels and underground hideaways; for those of a thirsty bent, brief interludes in Catholic-regionalist, Trotskyite-internationalist, leery-local and/or various other types of bar.

Book this walk

1. Fill in your details and submit the form below.
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4. If after you have paid you change your mind about the day or the walk, or if the weather is really bad, then we'll try out best to offer you another option. Our cancellation and refund policy is here.

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