Wednesday 22 May 2013

Museum Nights and Fiesta Days, Barcelona...

Last weekend saw the return of two annual events here in Barcelona. 'La Nits dels Museus' on Saturday night where all the major museums open for free from 7pm till 1am (yes, past midnight!) and 'Los Coros de la Barceloneta' which is an annual parade that happens on the Saturday and Monday for Pentecost, which is also known as 'Segunda Pascua' (second easter) here and Whitsun in the UK. I'm not religious but I enjoyed the holiday from work on Monday and the music, dancing, drinking and street fireworks were great fun too.

It's very difficult to find information on Los Coros, it doesn't really get a lot of publicity in the city. I think this may be because it tends to get a bit raucous as the day progresses on Monday. The parade consists of marching bands who belong to various local workers' associations. They all march through Barceloneta all day making stops at various points, finally finishing beneath fireworks at midnight. Saturday is a bit of a practice run, they all take off somewhere for a jolly on coaches on the Sunday, then back to go at it full pelt on the Monday. Check out the video of one of the bands this year. I've also taken some photos to give you a bit of a taster. They're not great but that's what happens when you're wandering around drinking beers, dancing and generally forgetting that you have your camera with you ;-)




Band in St. Miquel's Square

Fireworks

Dancing in the streets

The museum night was obviously a lot more subdued but it was good to have the contrast otherwise the whole weekend may have ended up a bit too lively. We decided to visit MNAC, the national art museum of Catalunya. I did hear of huge queues at some of the others but we waltzed straight in to MNAC. The building is massive so was well able to cope with the hordes of extra visitors. My favourite part is the Romanesque collection. The murals have to be seen to be fully appreciated but you can get an idea here of how beautiful they are.



I was too busy looking to take a lot of photos and I don't think they would have done the art much justice but I did get a few of the main auditorium to give you an idea of how big the building is.

Pillars in auditorium of MNAC

Free jazz concert

Main auditorium

Roof of central hall at MNAC




Primavera Sound is this weekend and even though I'm not going to the main event there are also some smaller gigs being arranged by the organisers to coincide with the big festival, so I may pop along to some of those. After that we have Sonar and Sant Joan to look forward to so there'll be no rest for a while yet.

3 comments:

Vix said...

You're firing up my wanderlust terribly! A couple of our friends are off to Primavera today! xxx

Zoelee said...

The band sound great :)

YvonneSedition said...

All the bands were great, though a bit knackered by the end of Monday.

Vix, your friends will love it, the line-up is amazing. I'm saving my pennies for stuff later in the summer but I know I'll be regretting that once the reports start coming in over the next few days. It would be absolutely amazing if you came to Barcelona, I'd be curious to find out how much you think has changed from when you were here before xx