Alquezar in Aragon must be a candidate for the prettiest town in Spain, if not Europe. It is cut into the hillside and every aspect is gorgeous. It is named for the old fortress that began life as a Muslim fortification and then became a Catholic monastery. We just loved the old cobbled streets and the views. Every time we turned a corner there was another magnificent vista. It was a perfect choice for an overnight stop as the town is also pretty by night with key buildings floodlit. We ate dinner at one of the sidewalk cafés with a fantastic outlook. We took our time getting here. Before we left Catalonia we had a beautiful walk along a lovely lake to an old monastery in the Garrotxa National Park. We ate a delicious lunch of ... read more

We left Barcelona this morning and headed north to the lovely medieval town of Girona. Walking around the old walls - the Passeig Archeologic - was delightful. It's not a complete circuit like the walls of Jerusalem but instead weaves through gardens of cypruses, olive trees and flowering shrubs, up towers and into tiny corners and plazas, all accompanied by the bells of multiple churches at regular intervals. After all the walking (not just today but over the past three weeks) it was great to stumble over 'Dr Fish', a spa that provides fish which nibble the dead skin off your feet. I've heard about them and always wanted to try it. It's a fabulous feeling, a little ticklish but very soothing. We should definitely have one at dance camps! Girona had one of the largest ... read more

One of the many things I love about travel is being in cities with layers of history through continuous occupation. Barcelona like Rome, Athens and Jerusalem, is a place where people live literally on top of history. Today we went to the Museum of the History of Barcelona, built on top of massive excavations of the original Roman city of Barcino, which we walked through with an excellent audio guide that explained the dyeing vats, wine presses, fish sauce factory, bath house and early church that had been excavated. It was a great tour. There was also a section on Medieval Barcelona and a special exhibition on the world in 1700. I found the latter really helpful to understanding the importance of the Spanish War of Succession and the balance of power in the 18thC. If ... read more

Another absolutely awesome day! One of the major attractions of Barcelona is the architecture of Antonio Gaudi, leading light of the Modernista movement whose fanciful, decorative and often symbolic work is emblematic of Barcelona. Although my own architectural taste is usually for clean simple lines, there's something about his fairy tale fantasies and organic forms that is just gorgeous. Gaudi's most important work is the Sagrada Familia, the church he started work on in the late 19th century and which is still being built. It is an astonishing structure and a massive undertaking, both from an engineering and an artistic viewpoint (I've learned rather a lot about structural engineering on this trip!) The church is incredibly detailed and every detail has symbolic, physical and aesthetic reasoning behind it. We spent a couple of hours there with ... read more

We have made the most of our last couple of days in England with a number of unplanned bonus activities. We spent our last morning in the Lakes district exploring the evocative Castlerigg Stone Circle, a Bronze Age circle of about 40 stones, set on a flat grassy area surrounded by gorgeous peaks. There were huge drifts of Turneresque cloud over the fells and it was not difficult to imagine the sense of awe this place may have engendered for ancient people. Archeologists believe it marks a stone-axe trading area from around 2500 BCE and may have been the scene of some kind of ritual - some points have astronomical significance. From one point of view it is just a bunch of stones but there is something amazing about being somewhere that was of human significance ... read more