Travel with Indigo

MONACO

Thanks to its reputation as a playground of jet setters, I was fully prepared not to like this city country, but I did. From the sea, it is not a handsome place. Its concrete box high-rise condos and clumsy looking hotels and public buildings, many dated from the 70s and 80s, give it the appearance of a quotidian seaside resort town of faded aspect. Up close, it improves quite a lot.

We docked right in the heart of the city’s main yacht marina, the Port de Monaco on John F. Kennedy Avenue, from where we could walk just about anywhere. Docked near us was the enormous yacht, Lady Moira, owned by a notable Saudi, which for some reason flew the University of Texas Longhorns’ burgee. Maybe he was a graduate.

Steep hills deterred excessive wandering, but Kitty and I overcame this by using the public elevators and outdoor escalators helpfully placed at convenient locations throughout the town. It was the first city either of us had seen with these public devices, especially the outdoor escalator. I visited the Jardin Exotique (Exotic Garden), which I found after an exhausting uphill hike, and loved its enormous collection of cacti and succulents from all over the world. Plastered, like the entire city, against a nearly vertical cliff, the garden offers stunning views out over the Mediterranean from every shaded park bench.

We lunched at the obligatory Café de Paris and one night listened to live music in the bar of the Hotel de Paris. We passed up the opportunity to visit the famed Belle Époque Grand Casino in Monte Carlo, a neighborhood of Monaco, but did stroll in its lovely formal gardens overlooking the sea. The Royal Palace and its surrounding old town, both sited high atop a dramatic headland, made for an enjoyable walk and offered pleasant views across the sun-dappled Med.

Most of the offices in town are the wealth management branches of the world’s major banks and their associated accountants and lawyers. These functionaries, dressed smartly in the dark suits of the professional class, dot the cafes and bars during the lunch and cocktail hours. Those rare locals not employed as bankers, lawyers or accountants seem to be mostly in their retirement years and are seen, along with indolent tourists like us, sitting on tidy benches among the manicured greenery of the city’s lush parks. Nearly every person in Monaco is smartly turned out and its cityscape is crisply manicured, freshly painted, lush, and above all, tidy. Though I looked carefully, I could spot not a single piece of litter on the streets, and even in the hallways and stairwells of parking garages there was not a hint of graffiti, maybe because of the arrays of security cameras sprinkled generously throughout the city.

To sum up the place, Monaco is an astoundingly wealthy city, glued onto the steep face of a coastal escarpment, with many fine restaurants, smart shops, a few less than notable museums, a world famous casino if you like that sort of thing, impeccably clean streets and no crime at all. Its tree-shaded parks and its immaculately restored old town invite idle strolls. But neither Kitty nor I liked it enough to warrant our return. It doesn’t have much personality and there’s just not enough there to justify the long journey to reach it, unless your interests run in the direction of offshore tax shelters.

VILLAGE OF EZE

Just up the hillside from Monaco, off the Moyene Corniche, is the medieval walled town of Eze, perched 1,400 feet above the sea. It’s a tiny old town thoughtfully restored and now filled with fine shops and restaurants, including the five-star hotel and restaurant, the Chateau de la Chevre d’Or (Chateau of the Golden Goat). There, Kitty and I lunched on an outdoor terrace with breathtaking views over the sea and equally breathtaking prices, like $50 for a small bowl of risotto. The French Riviera has many attractions, to be sure, but budget friendly it is not.

While dining, my mind wandered to an event that had taken place just ten minutes before. As we walked along the village steps, we passed by a small group of tourists chatting away about something. Unable to avoid it, I overheard brief snippets of the conversation, more the noise than the content, and it somehow stuck in my mind that the lone male in the group had a distinctive voice like somebody I knew but could not place. While seated at lunch, without really focusing on the matter, the name of the person popped to mind. It was Dr. George Trotter from Jacksonville, and as I recalled the group we passed by, it hit me that indeed it was George. I ran outside and searched the parking lot far below and the nearby streets to no avail. He had gone before I could say hello, but I know it was George.

By car, Kitty and I toured along the seafront of the Cote d’Azur, passing through village after village, and found most of them too densely developed for our taste. We very much liked the Cap Ferrat peninsula and, gracing its southern extremity, the Grand Hotel du Cap Ferrat, with fabulous gardens spilling across a low hill down to the sea. The hotel is the only place along the French Riviera to which either of us would return.

ST. TROPEZ

We spent a couple of nights at this miniature old town, where I half expected to see Brigitte Bardot walking along the harbor front. It was she who made it famous. The village’s diminutive size makes it appealing; you can walk anywhere you might like to go. There is the usual collection of waterfront outdoor restaurants and bars, all crowded because our visit coincided with the few days set aside (that is to say permitted by the ever-intrusive French government) for end-of-the-year sales. It was a nice enough stop, with fine mansions on the hillside above town and a pleasant climate, but that’s about it. During the season, or anytime near the season, it’s far too jammed with tourists and, like the entire north coast of the Med, should be avoided.

CANNES

The only reason for anybody reading this blog to visit Cannes is to pick up an award at the annual International Film Festival. If there’s not one waiting for you, I’d avoid the place. It’s a small, slightly tatty city on the Med waterfront, with a fine corniche and pedestrian promenade along the shore, a couple of historic hotels, casinos, nightlife, swanky shops and excellent restaurants, and not much else. Its beaches are unremarkable and densely packed with people paying $50 per day for the privilege of sitting on them.

BARCELONA

One of the world’s great cities, Barcelona was a memorable stopover and a place to which I would eagerly return. As the capital of Catalonia, the city’s 3.2 million people speak Catalan, a unique language derived from the Latin Vulgate, similar to Spanish, closer to Italian but different enough from both to cause confusion. Most inhabitants speak both Spanish and Catalan, though few speak English except in the better hotels and restaurants.

Catalans consider themselves somehow special and apart from their fellow Spaniards. They claim to be individualists and wear the label as if it were their signature quality. As we shall see, this has had its effects most notably among the region’s artists and architects. A long simmering separatist movement finds most of its support on the far left but thus far has had little serious effect.

Sprawled across the Catalan seashore, the city at close range exhibits an utterly modern aspect. Abstract sculptures grace its plentiful and commodious public parks, strikingly modern buildings line its tree-shaded wide boulevards and the waterfront, recently renovated, is a busy collection of outdoor cafes, bars, nightclubs, hotels and apartments all tastefully designed in modern style.

Yet with all this modernity, the true heart of the city is the Gothic Quarter or old town. Masterfully preserved and appearing as though it just recently stepped out of its past, it is a labyrinth of winding, narrow alleyways and hidden plazas, shops, restaurants and museums, all kept impressively clean. At its center is the imposing Barcelona Cathedral, where in 1492, Columbus, having sailed the ocean blue, was welcomed home by Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic monarchs of the time. Though begun in 1298, it was completed only in the late 19^th century, quite a bit tardy but in plenty of time for my visit. Apart from its 85-foot high vaulted ceiling, its main attraction is its intricately ornate façade, about as far removed from modern as it’s possible to get.

Hidden deep in the old town is the Picasso Museum, one of the city’s most popular attractions. Housed within five adjoining former palaces–the term implying buildings far grander than they are– the museum holds some 3,000 pieces, mostly his early drawings and paintings. These early works, much like similar early studies by Salvador Dali that I had seen on display in Split, Croatia, bear none of the modernist characteristics for which the artist later became famous. Most are various sketches of the kind students turn out as exercises in the quest to develop their talent and find their signature style, but were fascinating to see nonetheless. By consensus of the world’s experts, Picasso ranks with the finest artists who ever lived, just below the incomparable Michelangelo but in the same company as Rembrandt and Caravaggio. Why his disjointed depictions of animals and humans, especially females, should deserve such acclaim, I am at a loss to understand.

I carried on my iPhone a travel app for the city (Luxe City Guides), which I consulted frequently and used together with Google Maps to find my way around. To the app’s discredit, however, it haughtily dismissed a place that I found endlessly fascinating and to which I returned several times. That place, Las Ramblas, is one of Spain’s most famous promenades and fills day and night with locals and tourists alike. No visit to Barcelona would be complete without an evening stroll there. Lined with street performers of every imaginable talent, and a few with no discernible talent at all, it is the longest pedestrian mall in Europe. Tarot card readers, mimes, musicians, magicians and caricaturists are there to entertain you and to serve as grateful recipients of your excess funds. If you want to make further contributions to the local economy, there are versions of three-card Monty and ubiquitous pickpockets there to accommodate you.

One note of caution is in order here. Our chef Ewan, a diminutive fellow given to late night prowling in places a wiser man would avoid, strolled on Las Ramblas at the inadvisable hour of 3:00am in a condition one drink shy of a tattoo. He was there “attacked” by a covey of five young women who jostled him until, as he later discovered, they managed to liberate his cell phone. That was the fourth phone he lost in similar fashion just in the past few months.

Along one side of Las Ramblas there is a nondescript building where I attended a performance of tango dancers and Spanish operatic singers. While the skills on display there may not have reached the highest levels of their respective arts, it was for the casual observer an easy hour and a half introduction to these and well worth the time. Just up the way is an enormous covered farmer’s market, formally named the Mercat de Sant Josep but locally known as La Boqueria, with about every edible object that Spain has to offer. It’s a fun, colorful, though crowded, place for a morning stroll.

Just on the edge of the city is an enormous public park, the 700-foot high promontory called Montjuic, on which are found an array of museums, nightclubs, art galleries and such that now occupy buildings erected for the 1992 Olympics and some newly built since then. Here there is also a 1929 pavilion designed by the German minimalist Mies van der Rohe that is still today a remarkable and stately structure. A strikingly modernist building houses a collection of paintings, sculpture and tapestries by the noted Catalan artist Joan Miro’ (1893-1983), which I visited and enjoyed immensely, though I find his work, much as I find all abstract art, utterly befuddling. Just as an example, the collection contains a fine tapestry by the artist in the center of which he had burned a large hole. I recall standing in front of this work for the longest time wondering to myself what meaning could there possibly be in such a desecration. Other of his works there are equally bizarre, grotesque, whimsical, comical or just plain whacky. None of it made any sense to me but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

In the park is also an archeological museum and another devoted to ethnology. At the hill’s summit is the Castell de Montjuic, a gigantic 18^th century castle built for the Bourbons containing an extensive collection of ancient weaponry. My favorite of the park’s structures is the National Museum of Catalan Art, otherwise known as the National Palace, an austere, grand and grandiose building, which houses, among much else, the world’s finest collection of Romanesque art, if you like that sort of thing. It also has an exceptional restaurant from which you can enjoy spectacular views of the city’s skyline.

In this most artful of the world’s cities, we come now to its central figure, a man for whom Barcelona is itself an enormous museum of sorts and a testament to his, in my judgment mildly deranged, or at least misarranged, talent. That man, Antoni Gaudi (1852-1926), and his disciples were the most important practitioners of a style that came to be known as Catalan Modernisme, also called Spanish or Catalan Art Nouveau, of which Gaudi’s was an especially idiosyncratic version. Wikipedia has lengthy articles on him and his works and the style if you’re interested.

A pedestrian on the Passeig de Gracia passes by glittering modern office buildings and tres chic shops and for a time might think he was on Madison Avenue in Manhattan were it not for the odd language of the shop signs. Then he would come to a certain corner, look up and become dumbstruck by “La Pedrera”, a six-story apartment building designed by Gaudi and still very much in use today. The building looks as if it had been built of paraffin that partly melted forming wavy, bulging eyelids of molten wax over the windows and along the parapets. From it, the observer would easily conclude that Gaudi’s was a dark and troubled conscience.

The building’s rooftop is a thicket of vent stacks that are each a work of art, some resembling colorful mushrooms others clad in mosaics of ceramic tile. Inside, furniture, and such mundane pieces as door handles and drawer pulls, all of forged iron and designed by Gaudi, is on display.

With all those curvilinear surfaces on the exterior to contend with, he designed a structural skeleton to support them unlike anything I’ve seen before. Made mostly of glue laminated wood beams, some more than two-feet thick but just a few inches wide, they allowed him to bend and twist the frame to fit the curved surfaces of the cladding. As with the façade, there are few straight lines in the framing.

He also designed what is now a public park, called Parc Guell, a 50-acre site on the UNESCO World Heritage list that I was pleased to tour. These days, long lines wait to get in, but once inside the place is a wonderland of weirdness. One building is a giant canopy supported by 84 crooked pillars and others look like nothing so much as distorted gingerbread houses clad in intricate, undulating patterns of mosaic.

When you see Gaudi’s work, you wonder if the man as a child suffered nightmares that as an architect he brought to life. His designs are not inspiring to behold nor are they especially pleasing to the eye except insofar as you are pleased that none are in your neighborhood. Still, they provide a measure of wonderment, although one with a sinister cast, as if you are looking into the inner reaches of a tormented soul, which judging from his aberrant personality, his certainly was.

We come now to Gaudi’s crowning work, a building so audacious in style and enormous in dimension that even long before its completion it is already Barcelona’s iconic structure. As the Eiffel Tower is to Paris and the Flora Bama Bar is to the Redneck Riviera, so the Sagrada Familia is to Barcelona. Europe’s, if not the world’s, most unconventional structure was begun in 1883 and became the all-consuming passion and life’s work for Gaudi, who lived on its construction site as a recluse for 14 years before his death. Fittingly, he is buried there. Work on the structure stopped and started often, interrupted by the Spanish Civil War and shortages of funds, but continues today. Completion is expected—hoped, would be the more accurate word—sometime in the next thirty years, give or take a decade. You can see photos of it and learn more at sagradafamilia.org.

One night I attended a performance in the Palau de la Musica Catalana, a breathtakingly ornate art nouveau concert hall designed by Lluis Domenech, another practitioner of Catalan Art Nouveau, and opened in 1908. From my seat in the loge, I could look down upon a large Count Basie-style jazz orchestra playing what I guess were local tunes interrupted here and there by dramatic readings of something having to do with local history. Whatever it was, I couldn’t understand a word, even with my passable street Spanish. That’s just as well. It was the building I had come to see, and it was memorable.

As soon as you see it, you know this is the building you seek. Its exterior façade is one of the most remarkable and creative I have ever seen and, although riotously effusive, it remains tasteful to our modern eyes. When I got there, I stood outside and just gawked in amazement. It alone is worth a visit to Barcelona.

Every available surface of its interior is a riot of intricately detailed embellishment, even the interior of it’s thoughtfully included bar where I sat awaiting the start of the night’s performance. In the hall itself, there hangs from the high ceiling an enormous inverted stained glass dome set between walls of intricately ornamented stained glass. Here is what a notable architecture critic said: “The concert hall is one of the most beautiful in the world, without exaggeration. It is one of [the Palau’s] most important architectural treasures. Its pace simple, complex, mystical and paradoxical.” The vestibule, staircases and foyer, too, are extravagantly expressive spaces yet, unlike Gaudi’s works, pleasant to occupy and gaze upon. To see photos and learn more, see its Wikipedia article.

About an hour’s drive up the coast from Barcelona is what is widely reputed to be the world’s finest restaurant, called El Bulli, the creation of its owner and chef, one Ferran Adria. I tried to book a table there, only to discover that every table is sold out for the next two years. Ever the cynic, my reliable senses tell me this can only be the result of contrived scarcity orchestrated by some marketing genius rather than the gustatory delights of its offerings. The restaurant has announced that next year will be its last and that every table until then is fully booked. As they say in Spain, “I smell the sheet of the bool.”

From Barcelona, we headed up the coast to the forgettable city of Villanova, where we took refuge from a passing storm before going on to Palma on the Balearic island of Majorca.

PALMA, MAJORCA

The largest harbor in the Mediterranean, Palma is a city of two distinct halves, one appealing the other not. As seen from the sea, the entire left half is a dense cluster of mid-rise concrete blight while the right is an unusually large and wonderfully preserved medieval old town.

By a wide measure, the city’s most visually striking feature is its spectacular Gothic cathedral, known locally as the Sa Seu, sited on the harbor front in the old town. If it is not the largest such cathedral in the world, it is to me at least the most impressive, more so even than St. Peter’s in Rome. None other than Gaudi remodeled its interior, including in his work a bizarre canopy that still today hangs above the altar. There is also a large cove to the right of the altar designed by a student of Gaudi’s that looks as if it were a space in which Torquemada once extracted confessions of heresy in the Spanish Inquisition. Inspiring it is not. Despite the carbuncles and warts appended to the building by Gaudi and his disciple, illuminated at night, the cathedral is astonishingly beautiful and the finest example of Gothic architecture I have ever seen. It alone is worth a visit to Palma.

Ashore, I didn’t bother going into the left half of the city but spent all of my time wandering around in the old town, eating in its many exceptional restaurants, visiting several museums and strolling through the cathedral. Few old towns in Europe are as sleek or as polished as Palma’s and few exceed it for fine shops and restaurants. I liked the place very much and would be pleased to return there.

Although I did not get into the island’s hinterlands nor traverse its shoreline, these both have the deserved reputation for striking natural beauty. A man I got to know in Chile, Emilio Cousino, keeps his sailing yacht in Palma year around, and I had wondered why there. Now I understand his choice.

GIBRALTAR

Known to the ancient Greeks as the Pillars of Hercules, two enormous rocks, just 8.9 miles apart, one on the African side in Morocco the other on the European side in Gibraltar, define the Strait of Gibraltar. In all the years of seeing this famous strait on charts and maps, I never dreamed it was so narrow.

Approaching Gibraltar from the Med, the observer is apt to say something mindlessly obvious like, “Wow! That’s a really big rock.”A limestone blob 1,398 feet high, it is certainly that. With a population of 29,000 inhabitants and a land area of just 2.6 square miles, Gibraltar is hardly a country of consequence (it’s actually a British Overseas Territory). But when you note that its GDP per capita is nearly equal to that of the U.S., you begin to get the picture. It’s a wealthy tax haven and little else. For the Brits, the tax shelter requires they own property there, which they do in large numbers, thus explaining the forest of high-rise condos attached to the rock’s base, most of them empty most of the time.

Ashore, the town resembles a prototypical English village, complete with men sporting enormous bushy mustaches, menus featuring Sunday roast with Yorkshire pudding and pubs named the Rose and Crown or the Squat and Gobble. According to my tour guide, the cruise ships that visit here come for just one reason: the apes. At the top of the rock are several families of Barbary Apes, about the size of well-nourished chimps, which for some incomprehensible reason seem to fascinate visitors.

Its favorable tax status extends to bunker fuel sold at $3.00 per gallon compared to $5.70 everywhere else in the Med. Gibraltar’s harbor, not surprisingly, is a vast parking lot of ships waiting to fill up on the cut price fuel, a bargain we were pleased to accept ourselves.

SEVILLE

On our way to the historic city of Seville, Spain (What city in Spain, indeed in all of Europe, is not historic?) we were pleased to pass through the Strait on a nearly perfect morning when the seas, blessedly calm, shown luminous in the early light.

I knew that there was an important event known as the Battle of Trafalgar and that it was an epic engagement during the Napoleonic Wars between the British Royal Navy under Admiral Nelson and the combined forces of France and Spain. I also knew which side prevailed (hint: the event is celebrated in England), but I had not the slightest idea where Trafalgar might be. Now I know. It’s the name of a cape in southwest Spain off whose coast the battle was fought and past which we cruised on our way to the equally famous (to the Spanish) city of Seville.

To get to Seville by boat, it is necessary to travel 50 miles up the languid, silt-laden Quadlquiver River, the same river from which the Spanish crown launched many ships in its explorations and exploitations of the New World. Thanks to hurricanes, pirates and reefs, it recovered fewer than it launched. Surrounding the river’s channel is a vast and verdant delta of cattle ranches and crop farms, and along the channel’s edges are hundreds of eel traps from which the slimy creatures are hoisted later to appear on the plates of diners less discriminating about what they eat than I.

In the city center, we tied up to a quay along the right bank and from there I began my explorations. The first stunningly obvious, and pleasantly redolent, feature of the city’s landscape is that nearly every one of its major streets is lined with rows of orange trees, which when I was there were fully laden, although with a fruit so sour as to be inedible. They provide an agreeable softening and a dash of cheerful color to the cityscape.

In the old town’s center is the obligatory Gothic cathedral without which no Spanish city is complete, although this one is unique in that attached to it is the Patio do los Naranjos, or patio of oranges. From the cathedral, the visitor can take fascinating strolls through the maze of narrow streets and picturesque laneways that make up the Barrio de Santa Cruz, once the Jewish Ghetto. Here are flower festooned patios, hidden plazas, boutique hotels, fine restaurants, bars and upscale homes. There are also the ubiquitous tapas bars where you can sip sherry (from the Spanish region of Jerez, whence the name) and eat gazpacho.

I managed to visit most of the notable tourist destinations, like the former Royal Palace, called the Real Alcazar, the Hospital de los Venerables with its splendidly restored and sumptuous Baroque chapel, and most visually stunning of all, the dazzling Plaza de Espana set in the midst of the cool, leafy Parque Maria Luisa. The Museo de Bellas Artes, Spain’s second finest art museum, exceeded in its eminence only by Madrid’s Prado, was worth the visit, more for the exceptional building than the collection of Spanish art and sculpture.

The city’s active nightlife would have been fun had it begun before midnight. But, in the Latin tradition, it didn’t, so instead, I sampled various sleekly modern bar/restaurants and a few traditional places too, and always managed to return to Indigo early enough to enjoy a full night’s rest and be prepared for the following day’s jaunts.

I liked Seville and would return there if it were part of a longer itinerary, but it’s just not large enough, nor sufficiently compelling, to justify a visit to it alone. As with all Spanish coastal cities, it shuts down in the sultry heat of August.

Seville was the last city we would visit in Europe. Next stop, Morocco.