Montserrat and Cava Tasting

Fridays are field trip days and today's excursion was probably my favorite so far. We took a bus about an hour outside of the city of Barcelona to Montserrat -- which translates to "serrated mountain," and accurately describes the jagged top of this mountain. The views along the highway were amazing, but then when we turned to drive 20km along a winding road up the mountain, it kept getting more and more beautiful. You could see all the way to the snow-capped Pyrenees Mountains. 

Here's the inside of the Santa Maria de Montserrat church (wikipedia). About three minutes after I took this picture, a voice came on over the loudspeaker telling everyone to be quiet because morning mass was beginning.

 This is the view from across the street from the church. There are many dusty hiking trails up the mountain, but the guy in the information booth told us it would take 2 hours to hike to the top and we only had 45 minutes before we had to be back on the bus. So instead, we took the funicular!

This is the view out of the front windshield of the funicular car. It was SO steep. At points it felt like we were in a huge outdoor elevator. Turns out it is the steepest funicular in Spain! You can read about it here: wikipedia. Going down was even scarier!

Here's a photo of the view from the top of the mountain. You could see for miles in every direction. Absolutely amazing.

After a picnic lunch on a outdoor patio at Montserrat, we got back on the bus and drove for about half an hour to this famous sparkling wine factory called Freixenet (wikipedia). Catalunians take their sparkling wine very seriously. Here it's called "cava." From the outside, it looked like a small museum and factory and I figured the tour would be interesting. The building was deceiving and the factory extents for like half a mile underground! According to our tour guide, the factory produces 30 million bottles of cava each year. Underground, we saw walls and walls of bottles from floor to ceiling in special holders. The factory is so large that we were driven around in a little wagon/golf-cart/tourist mobile. It was pretty cool to see all the stages in the process and the amount of care they devote to each bottle of cava.

At the end, we all tasted the sparkling wine and enjoyed the birthday cake that our professor had bought to celebrate the birthdays this past week. So far, four kids on my trip have had birthdays in Spain, and we haven't even been here a month!