I have 10 minutes to write this post!

Experienced Montserrat (the serrated mountains), had a subpar tour guide (which I had to watch my attitude over all day because a quality tour guide is a thing of beauty), and learned the most interesting things on the way to Montserrat when a different tour guide was speaking.

I will share a total of one for now: Barcelona is the only city I’ve ever heard of that actually capitalized financially from hosting the Olympics. I’ve always heard this is such a financial loss! Not for Barcelona. They took their opportunity, in 1992, to simply refurbish old stadiums and the like and then (with the leftover money!) they built up various parts of Barcelona. Example, they took some of the money and imported sand from the Sahara and palm trees from the Caribbean to create the excellent beaches they have now!

I learned fascinating things about Franco and the Moors and will be pondering these things much longer. (Am starting to wonder about “culture wars” and how common the need is to “control culture” throughout human history and exactly how this has tended to play out. What I learned about Franco triggered this thought. The Moors, fascinatingly, seemed to display the opposite tendency.)

Below is the view from the monastery of Montserrat, and a distant view of Montserrat.