We took one of the “Hop-on, Hop-off” tourist buses in Barcelona. We don’t usually do that when we explore a new city, but this time around, it seemed like the perfect way to see a lot of the city in a short time. 

Since I took hundreds of photos from the bus that still need to be culled down to a manageable amount, today I just want to focus on my personal “Brigadoon” in Barcelona. For those of you who were familiar with my blog about Bolzano, you may recall my posts about the castle Chris and I called “Brigadoon” near Bolzano.  It was a castle we initially never saw when we travelled south by train from Bolzano; we’d only spy it nestled in the rocky cliffs when we returned north to Bolzano. In the musical Brigadoon, there is a town called Brigadoon that only appears once every 100 years. Unless you believe in it … then you can see it at other times. That’s a critical plot point in the musical, since the hero is ultimately able to get back to Brigadoon and the heroine,  since he believes that the town will appear to him.  Chris and I would joke that the castle near Bolzano would only appear to people who believed it was there — after the first few times, we believed it was there, and therefore could always see it.

But I digress.

Anyway, there we were on the upper-deck of the tourist bus in Barcelona, and I’m looking off to the right, and Chris isn’t.  Suddenly, between the buildings, off in the distance and up a hill, I spy a huge, fairy-tale like building. (It’s a Roman Catholic church,  the Temple Expiatori del Sagrat Cor (Catalan), Expiatory Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus (English), on the top of Mount Tibidabo. Chris, however, didn’t happen to see it  as we zoomed by — it was only visible for an instant between the  buildings, and he wasn’t looking the right way.

We go further along the road (still on the bus), and I spy it again. Chris, however, still hasn’t seen it.  So, I suggest we “hop off” the bus at the next stop so that he can see it and I can take a photo of it.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should also add that according to the recorded information spiel on the bus, that particular area of Barcelona where we happened to be at the time was noted for its numerous cafes and bakeries. The fact that we also stopped in a bakery during our “hop-off” stop is purely coincidental. Really.

Anyway, the problem was that while we were on the top level of the double-decker bus, we were fairly high up in relation to the buildings. While wandering around on the ground-level, we had a hard time finding a vantage point from which to find my mystery “Brigadoon” building. We wandered back down the main street the bus had taken, and then along some side streets, searching for a place where there were shorter buildings between us and the hill. When we did finally spot that building on the hill, it was seen through a fence and not on its own on the hill, as I had originally seen it. But at least I could take a photo, and prove to Chris that I really did see a spectacular building on the top of the hill. I’ve included a highly cropped version of that “first” photo, to eliminate the shadows from the fence that are in the original picture. But we really did have trouble finding it when we got off the bus, which added to the mystic of the church being “Brigadoon”-like.

Then, a couple of days later, we’re wandering around a different part of Barcelona, down in the middle of town near the hotel. And it turned out that from that vantage point we could see it again, without too much trouble. Ah well, perhaps we just believed it in more that day, which made it easy to find? 😉 Anyway, even though it was easy to spot,  I still wasn’t getting my “perfect” shot of the church: streetlights, stop lights, and all kinds of things got in the way.

So, it became bit like a quest for me, trying to get the “perfect” shot of my Brigadoon, without the clutter of modern life creeping into the shot.

On our final full day in Barcelona, I did get a more satisfying shot from the rooftop level of a museum we visited. While I’m not completely convinced it’s the perfect shot, what you see  the last photo below what comes closest to capturing the essence of my Barcelona Brigadoon. See what you think.