This title presents dynamic new two-color layout for easy navigation. New magazine style, combining stunning photography, tailored itineraries and a personal take on the country. It features clear, newly designed two-color maps throughout for increased ease of use. This is the only guides with full-color touring maps of the whole region. It contains extensive listings of hotels and restaurants - all personally recommended for a really local flavor. It includes Top Don't Miss sights for each regional chapter, plus Author Choices of personal favorite places to stay and eat. This book: takes you on a tour of Gaudi's revolutionary architecture in Barcelona; strolls down Las Ramblas and stops off for a drink and some tapas; wanders the streets of Barri Gotic, the largest Gothic neighborhood in existence, and admires Gaudi's fantastical Sagrada Familia; takes a trip to the famous Dali museum in Figueres; enjoys a trip to the beaches of the Costa Brava or takes in a football match; visits mountains shaped like pipe organs; plays in Sitges, one of the Med's hottest resorts; marvels at the magnificent monastery of Montserrat; discovers Modernista wine bodegas hidden in sleepy villages; dances the sardana at lively festivals; and, skis down the Pyrenees in the tiny province of Andorra.
Extract: Cap de Creus
On the map it protrudes from the coast like a nipple on a frosty day, and up close Cap de Creus is just as fascinating. Its fabric is 450 million year old rock, shattered and upended when the Iberian peninsula collided with Europe to form the Pyrenees, then scoured and eroded into strange shapes by the tramuntana that blows so fiercely- Joan Maragell famously called Empordà the ‘palace of winds’. Terraces laboriously carved over the ages are now abandoned: the phylloxera epidemic in the 1880s killed the vines, a devastating frost in 1956 killed the olives and wildfires over the past couple of decades have left the rock prey to the elements. Dalí spent much of his life amid this ‘grandiose geological delirium’; its brilliant light, coves and weirdly-shaped rocks appear repeatedly in his paintings. ...click here to read the rest
Dana Facaros and Michael Pauls can be reached at: michel.pauls@wanadoo.fr