Barcelona Day 3-1 – Maritime Museum

Time to do some touring round the city on our own. We made our way down to Las Ramblas, this is the main street where people/ tourists gather, its 1.2kms  of tree lined pedestrian shops and stalls and set off on a hop on, hop off bus. Sitting up on top in the sun was a great way to drive around the streets of Barcelona.

One place I wanted to visit was the Maritime museum and the area around it. This is the beautiful old port building..

Opposite the building, in the middle of the roundabout is the Columbus monument – it is quite impressive and had a lot of detailed statues and lions around the base. Much more impressive than it looks in this photo!

The old port building from the front..

After a few phone calls we stopped for coffee while we waited till 10 am for the museum to open. The coffee is very strong and very bitter compared to what we’re used to.

The Maritime museum is built in the shipyards which date back to the 13th Century – its huge!  The history of the actual building we were in interesting and you can read more about it here:

Barcelona Royal Shipyard

This is the coffee shop area..

This is a reproduction of the Royal Galley of John of Austria, built in the 1500’s. You can get some idea of the size of it…

In this model you can see how huge it would have looked with the sails up… they would be well and truly above the ceiling of the building – you can easily imagine how impressive an armada of these ships would have been out on the ocean.

There were some beautiful handmade original maps of the city

Sailors often made carvings and models to donate to the church in thanks for their lives being spared at sea.

A replica of the first submarine made in 1859, launched in Barcelona Harbour –
More information about the submarine here.

And this commission by King George the third..

The Maritime museum and port area was well worth the visit given Spains history on the seas.

We left the museum and ended up taking a much longer than planned walk, getting on the wrong bus and learning that when a young person giving you directions says ‘its just over there”  they could mean a good half hours walk away. But it was all good, back on the bus eventually for a few more hours sightseeing and then next stop the Gothic Cathedral of Barcelona!