Barcelona Day 2 - Hop On/Off Bus Tour

Travel

Jan 5

We were only in Barcelona for a few days so we wanted to make the most of it. We started the day early with an excellent breakfast from our hotel. We really loved our hotel. It was modern, high tech, and had a great breakfast selection for a European hotel. Large breakfasts are not very common in most European countries.

After breakfast we went to a tourist stand and signed up for a hop on/hop off tourist buss. The only problem with this is how many of the sites were closed. It was a Sunday holiday and poor planning on our part.

Despite the bad timing we enjoyed a lot of the stops. One of the first was La Sagrada Familia. If you are not familiar, the church was designed by famous architect Antoni Gaudi. His work is all over Barcelona and if you take the bus tour you will hear alllll about Gaudi. He started working on La Sagrada Familiar a year after they broke ground in 1883. This church is so architecturally detailed it is still in construction. The cathedral is not expected to be finished until 2026. The outside is very busy with carvings of Jesus, Mary, disciples, and any other biblical reference you can think imagine. If you would like to enter the church you have to buy tickets. Which we didn’t know and they were all booked for the day. We purchased some online for the following morning.

We got back on the bus and headed towards Park Guell. A park that was designed by that very same architect, Antoni Gaudi…told ya he came up a lot. Like La Sagrada Familia you needed tickets for a specific time, which we did not have. The park was pretty out of the way and we did not want to spend the money so we just looked in though the gate and carried on.

Our next stop was Temple of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. This Cathedral is very popular, due to the fact that from many places in Barcelona you can see the Temple resting at the top of a giant hill. Once we arrived at the gondola to take us to the top we were disappointed to find out that it was closed due to the holiday. We decided to visit the next day and grabbed some fancy coffee.

As it was starting to get late and there was still so much we wanted to see, we boarded the bus and decided just to ride it around the whole two routes. Sitting on the upper deck in the very front we enjoyed the guided tour around Barcelona.