Montserrat: The Best Day Trip out of Barcelona

I stand by that title. Montserrat is among the coolest places I've ever been. If you are going to be in Barcelona, it is worth sacrificing a day in town, an hour on the train (one way), and bringing some reliable hiking shoes just to visit this amazing place.

Accessible by aerial tram, Montserrat encompasses the serrated mountains plus the monastery. There has been a monastery here for centuries, it feels quite remote, at one time it was, now it is well connected but being so high in the mountains it still retains some of it's isolation.

We started out with a fantastic ride up in the tram, and then got right to exploring the monastery first. Well, views first, then monastery.

Yeah, hop right in the tiny yellow tram and let it carry you a hundreds of feet into the air...

Our first view of the monastery, half way through the tram ride.

We visited the pilgrimage site of the statue of Mary holding Jesus. The story goes that this statue was discovered here in a cave, now called Santa Cova, and she resides at the head of the chapel in a tiny room covered in gold leaf and mosaics.

There is a world renown boys choir here, and they do a short sung service everyday. We were able to snag seats and enjoy the music. Take a listen if you'd like to:

After the choir, we took the funicular up even higher to the hiking trail that leads to Sant Joan: a tiny chapel on a mountain top. We had ourselves a picnic and enjoyed the views before starting our hike.

Sant Joan Chapel

Once you get to Sant Joan, you can keep going...so we did. We kept following the trail. It actually got to rough enough climbing that my Mom just turned around and decided to wait for us at the funicular.

You can see the main monastery below me, the funicular helped us cover a lot of that altitude, but we climbed a fair amount too. Maybe it was 50/50.

We continued to the highest peak we could get to. While others were up there meditating and contemplating, we were sharing jamon flavored Ruffles and being obnoxious. To be fair, we weren't up there for that long. I'm sure they got back to their peaceful reverie in no time!

There was one more place to visit: the aforementioned Santa Cova! There is generally a funicular that would take you down part way but it was closed for maintenance at the time. So we got to do even more hiking. It was a paved trail but steep. So steep. I'm so glad I didn't have a stroller on that trail.

you can actually see the trail we're heading towards in the bottom left  along the mountain face.

Once we got to the base of the funicular, the trail was marked with statuary scenes of the life of Christ.

Just a reminder of how much hill we'll have to climb up in half an hour or so...

If you think I didn't use some of my precious breath for a bad rendition of "Climb Ev'ry Mountain" Then you don't know me very well.

and how far away this cave was from the actual monastery...

When we finally arrived at Santa Cova, they were getting ready to close for the evening. We were let into the chapel--because of course they built a chapel around the miraculous cave--for a few minutes before lock up. I thought that was quite considerate of the caretaker. I mean, we had been hiking for 20 or 30 minutes but he didn't have to let us in. He was just nice.

The legendary cave, the Santa Cova itself

Santa Cova chapel on the right behind us.

We said good-bye to the cave and prepared to hike back up. My asthma loved it...
But being able to look back at the path we just hiked was incredible. It looks epic, doesn't it? It feels epic to have made the pilgrimage.

Santa Cova from a distance. It looks pretty magical, doesn't it?

So if I had to pick one thing to do around Barcelona that isn't in Barcelona, hands down this is the winner. A truly remarkable place, though you might want to get some practice hiking in first...