Montserrat Half or Full Day Tour from Barcelona

Overview

A half or full day from Barcelona up to Montserrat, the mountain monastery in the serrated peaks inland, taking in the basilica, the abbey precinct and the views back across Catalonia.

What to expect

• Departure from Barcelona and the drive inland to the massif.
• The ascent to the monastery terrace.
• The basilica and the abbey precinct.
• Time at the viewpoints and along the mountain paths.
• The return to the city.

The mountain is made of old riverbed

Montserrat does not look like other mountains, and the reason is that it is not really rock in the way granite is rock.

The whole massif is conglomerate: pebbles, gravel and boulders that were dumped by rivers into a delta, then buried, compressed and cemented together into a solid mass. Later it was lifted up, and rain and frost have been picking at it ever since.

Because the cement between the stones erodes faster than the stones themselves, the mountain weathers into rounded columns and lumpy fingers rather than clean cliffs and edges. That is where the name comes from — the serrated mountain — and if you look closely at any wall of it you can pick out the individual rounded pebbles, sitting in the matrix like fruit in a cake.

Boys have been singing here since the fourteenth century

The abbey keeps a choir school that is among the oldest in Europe, documented from the early thirteen hundreds and still running as a working school today.

That is close to seven hundred years of boys living on this mountain and being taught to sing, through wars, dissolution, the destruction of the buildings in the Napoleonic period, and everything since. The line has been broken remarkably little.

They sing in the basilica on most days, briefly, at a fixed hour. It is the single thing most worth timing a visit around — and equally the single thing most visitors miss, because they arrive an hour late and never know it was scheduled. Check the day's timing before you commit to a departure, and note that the school takes holidays like any other.

The dark figure above the altar

The monastery's focus is a small seated Romanesque carving of the Virgin, of a type found across medieval Europe but unusually revered here, and unusually dark.

The darkness is not original paintwork. Centuries of lamp smoke, candle soot and varnish altered the surface, and the colour became part of the identity rather than an accident to be cleaned off.

Practicalities

The mountain sits at altitude and makes its own weather. It can be bright in Barcelona and cold, wet or fogged in at the monastery, sometimes within the same hour.

The precinct is on a slope, with steps and steep ramps between levels. There is considerably more walking here than a monastery visit sounds like.

If you have the full day rather than the half, the surplus is best spent on the paths above the abbey, where the crowds thin quickly and the rock formations are the whole point.