Highlights of 10 days in Spain, from city streets to sunny seaside - The Straits Times

Nestled atop its peak is Santa Maria de Montserrat, an 11th-century Benedictine monastery still active today. Many make the pilgrimage up the mountain to see the Black Madonna, a wooden statue of the Virgin Mary believed to have darkened over time.

Montserrat also has a tiny museum which, despite its size, houses masterpieces such as Caravaggio’s Saint Jerome Penitent (1605).

Fascinating flamenco

Flamenco is traditionally from southern Spain, not the north, but the Insight tour offers an optional evening at the Tablao Flamenco Cordobes, a performance hall in central Barcelona.

A dancer in a mustard-yellow mantilla and a figure-hugging floral dress sweeps about the stage, an enormous train of ruffles swishing behind her. She is engaged in a lithe call-and-response exchange with the cantaores, male singers in polka-dot scarves.

The Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca wrote of “duende”, a word which in Spanish means “elf” or “goblin”. A flamenco artiste can, in the heat of the performance, enter into duende, a heightened state of intense emotion that she could almost be said to be possessed by.

As I watch, entranced, the dancer begins to drum her heels faster than a construction drill as the cantaor’s voice throbs with emotion. Tears start in her eyes.

Wander in the supergrid city

Barcelona is one of the most delightful cities I have ever had the pleasure to walk in. Much of this is owed to the revolutionary supergrid plan designed by little-known Catalan engineer Ildefons Cerda in 1859.

In the early 19th century, Barcelona was suffocating from overcrowding due to the mediaeval city wall that girdled it.

After the government finally agreed to remove the wall, Cerda embarked on his plan, dubbed the Eixample (“expansion” in Catalan), which involved merging the city with nearby villages into a supergrid.

The Eixample featured wide streets, green spaces and octagonal blocks with the corners shaved off in a technique called chamfering, which increased the visibility of traffic junctions decades before the invention of the motor car.

Recent pushes to further pedestrianise the city make wandering it a lovely experience, be it the wide, leafy avenues of the Eixample or the narrow, twisting maze of the old Gothic Quarter, where tiny shops mushroom in the walls.

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