The park was built in the 1700s and was an area for the elite social class to gather and have festivals. It is one of the oldest parks in Barcelona. The park is laid out in a very cool design. It is built in three sections with each section leading you up higher and higher up the mountain. The Labyrinth garden is probably the coolest part of the gardens. It is a hedge maze! When we first saw it, we laughed at it thinking that it would be a breeze. It looked smaller than we pictured and not much of a challenge. Our friend from Iowa said that she had seen much more difficult corn mazes in her home town. However, it proved to be a worthy challenge. It took us about 20 minutes just to get to the center and at one point we thought we were going to have to go back out of the entrance and walk around. We eventually made it to the center, which had a marble statue of Eros, the Greek god of love. You then have to find yourself out of the center part which took another five minutes (for our group, the other group got lost and had to come out the entrance haha). We explored the rest of the park which has several fountains, a canal, and some neat side gardens. The park is made up of two gardens- the Neoclassical Garden (the one with the labyrinth) and the Romantic Garden.
Group shot with Krista (from Iowa), Rob, Erin, and Beate (from Germany).
Entrance to the Labyrinth
View of the Labyrinth from above
Fountain that comes from the natural flow of water down the mountain.
Inside the "easy" hedge maze.
View of the Labyrinth from the staircase leading further up the mountain to more gardens.
Canal that runs through the second level of the park.
Top tier garden with this sculpture dedicated to art and nature.
View from the entrance of the park.
We plan on making a return trip during the summer when there will be more flowers and color in the park. We had lots of fun from this unexpected visit to the gardens, but our day did not end there. We decided to go grab some tapas and a couple drinks with our friends. After walking around for about 30 minutes and not finding the bar and cafe that our new friend Peter wanted to take us, we found another one with an outside sitting area. Beers were only 1 euro and the tapas weren't more than 5 euros. We decided that it would be easiest to order a bunch of different types and pass them around to share. We are glad we did it this way, but I think if we knew what our friends were going to order, we may have thought differently. We ended up getting 4 plates of patates braves (which are the most common and delicious tapas), Russian potato salad, croquetas (which are usually deep fried bread balls filled with cheese and a type of meet or fish and you don't really know what it will be until they bring it out...ours had tuna) blood sausage on bread, mussels, and sardines (both pickled and fried). They brought all of it out in waves, which made it a lot of fun to see each one and gave us all a chance to try all of it.
We both liked almost everything. The seafood is so fresh and delicious that once we of got over the look of it, we enjoyed both the sardines and mussels. Rob loved the mussels and Erin really liked the deep fried sardines (skin, tail, head, bones and all). They eat these like french fries. We even liked the pickled sardines. It was so nice to have some friends around to try these new dishes because I am not sure we would have been brave enough to order them on our own. Sorry we do not have any pictures of any of the food, but I am sure we will be ordering more of everything we got!
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