Travel With Kristiina Vahvaselkä: Barcelona

"Barcelona es mucho más!" True, so true. Viva la Catalunya!

Architecturally Antoni Gaudí's Casa Milà (or La Pedrera) is an innovative work for its steel structure and curtain walls – the façade is self-supporting. Other innovative elements were the construction of underground car parking and separate lifts and stairs for the owners and their servants.

On the rooftop there are six skylights/staircase exits (four of which were covered with broken pottery and some that ended in a double cross typical of Gaudí) and twenty-eight chimneys in several groupings, twisted so that the smoke came out better.

The Basilica of the Sagrada Família was the inspiration of a Catalan bookseller, Josep Maria Bocabella. After a visit to the Vatican in 1872, Bocabella returned from Italy with the intention of building a church inspired by the one at Loreto. Antoni Gaudí began work on the project in 1883.

Lunch at Placa de Santa Maria.

The European Museum of Modern Art, MEAM, exhibits the finest Contemporary Figurative Art. The purpose of MEAM is to promote and diffuse Figurative Art of the 20th and 21st Centuries.

Loewe is known around the world as being one of the very best when it comes to luxury leather goods. In 1872 Enrique Roessberg Loewe, a German craftsman specialized in leather working, arrived in Spain and decided to join forces with the leather workshop owners and establish the brand.

Freixenet headquarters in Sant Sadurní d'Anoia.

"Fine, delicate aromas, combining tones of green apple and pear, with light resonances of Mediterranean fruits – peach, melon and pineapple, over a base of citrus, all beautifully balanced by light toasty aromas from bottle maturation." Sip with your pinkie pointing up :)