Wow, what an awesome day! Montserrat is a mountain range not far from Barcelona and is part of the Catalan Ranges. It’s well known as the site of the Benedictine Abbey, Santa Maria de Montserrat and the Virgin of Montserrat sanctuary.

Montserrat means “serrated” and that is exactly how the mountain ranges look

We’d read a little bit about how difficult it no was to get out to Montserrat and that the options are tricky to decipher. This wasn’t our experience at all. There are a few combinations on how you get into the mountains from the train station at the base. They are by road (this would have meant a tour for us so no), the Montserrat Rack Railway, the Montserrat cable car or of course you could walk or ride a bike.

First stop was the information centre where the wonderful person provided us with a map as well as tickets to the 1.00pm performance of L’Escolania de Montserrat in the magnificent Montserrat Basilica. The first reference to this world famous choir in writing is in 1307 but they had been performing for about twenty years before this time, so they’ve been around a little while. You can see the choir here every weekday and at Mass on Sundays with performances not confined to this Basilica. The choir has traveled around the world to perform and they’ve even recorded albums over the years.

I would describe listening to them as 15 minutes of pure joy, I felt very privileged to have had the opportunity to be part of the audience (even though I know that they perform every day) it was so wonderful to be in the right place at the right time. The only time that they have been unable to perform was during the Spanish Civil War when the monastery was evacuated, sadly 23 monks were later executed one of them was the director of the choir.

What about school? Well the kids (all young boys) attend school up here starting at 9.15am, they sing in the Basilica at 1.00pm and then have lunch. Classes resume at 2.30pm and go until 5.45pm (with a break at 4.00pm). It’s a long day.

Of course as well as having the opportunities to hear the choir in the Basilica you can also visit the most famous of the 51 black Madonna’s that take residence here in Spain. This Madonna is often called the “Virgin of Montserrat” or “La Moreneta” and is believed to have been carved in Jerusalem at the beginning of religion. The statue sits behind a sheet of glass with one of her hands that is holding a sphere (which symbolises the universe) able to be touched. The tradition is to kiss or touch the Virgins hand while opening out your other hand to Jesus.

We then visited the fantastic Museum of Montserrat, it is so good. There are more than 1,300 pieces exhibited across six very different collections.

This is the oldest exhibit an Egyptian sarcophagus from the 13th century BC.

Here are just some of the beautiful pieces of art that are exhibited here, it was very difficult to pick out a few as I loved so many. I have continued to discover some amazing Spanish artists during this trip and feel like a brand new world has been opened up to me. It was also really interesting to see some of Pablo Picasso’s early work as well.

El Generalife, Santiago Rusinol. (Granada 1898) Granada looks the same now as it did in 1898, how amazing is that 😀

And now it’s time to get an even closer look at these mountains and so we purchased return tickets to take a funicular from the Montserrat Monastery on the Sant Joan Funicular railway. The funicular was built in 1918 to take monks up to the peak of the mountain so that they could pray at the Chapel of Sant Joan. The funicular goes up on a 65 percent gradient to 1,000 metres above sea level and takes seven minutes.

From the funicular stop we walked another 15 minutes up the mountain to get some beautiful photos and to have a look at the tiny chapel of Sant Joan and the remains of the hermitage embedded in a crack in the rock at Sant Onofre.

Dave who is always up for a challenge decided to keep on the trail up to Sant Magdalena. I took this photo just in case it was a “Picnic at Hanging Rock moment”.

We had such a beautiful day today in Montserrat. Tomorrow we are saying adios to Barcelona after spending the morning at Basilica de la Sagrada Familia.