As I mentioned yesterday, we decided to take the Barcelona Bus Touristic double-decker tourist bus. It was the hop-on, hop-off kind, where you get a set of headphones, and get on and off to explore a site, before getting back on to continue along the route.

We got a two-day pass, which allowed us to travel some of both of the routes twice. (Each route lasts several hours if you stay on it from beginning to end).  I’d say we got our money’s worth – the tickets gave us discounts in a couple of museums as well, and we didn’t have to figure out the Barcelona public transit system, since other than the two days we rode the bus, the other Barcelona site-seeing we did was within walking distance of our hotel.

Below you’ll find a series of photos that I selected to give you a feel for what it’s like to see Barcelona from the top deck of the tourist bus. That means that I’ve included photos that show the difficulties of photographing from a bus, too. 😉 We were lucky and most often got the front seats on the top deck, which meant we had an unobstructed view; however, that view came with the problems of a windshield that wasn’t always perfectly clean. 😉 The brief captions below each photo will either point out the major site to be seen in the photo, or why I included it as memorable from the tour.

On the bus the recorded information did a pretty good job explaining buildings that you were passing by; since I didn’t take notes, I can’t duplicate the kind of detail here. However, every 3rd picture, just imagine hearing “… and this building is now a UNESCO heritage site.” I don’t know that it’s really true for any of the buildings in these photos, but if we are to believe the recording (and I have no reason not to), it really seemed like almost every slightly decorated building in Barcelona has been designated as a UNESCO world heritage site. Apparently  UNESCO isn’t quite as selective about picking buildings for that list as I once thought, at least that’s the impression I was left with by the end of the tour.

Not that there weren’t lots of interesting buildings, though. At the end of the photo series below,  I give you a preview of the building that is the pride, joy and symbol of Barcelona: Gaudì’s Sagrada Família Cathedral. We’ll talk more about that another day. In the meantime, sit back and enjoy today’s ride on the bus.