Yesterday, we went to Montserrat, a Benedictine monastery on a sacred mountain for the Catalan people (in the middle of a national park). It was an amazing mountain with incredibly jagged rocky peaks, and it was a lot cooler up there which was a nice break from the hot weather in Sitges. (The online weather for Sitges has had it in the low to mid 80's this whole week, but all I can say is that if that has been true, it has been the absolute hottest week of mid-80s temperatures that I've ever experienced.)
The monastery at Montserrat started in the 9th century, but even before it began there were already hermits living in the caves in the mountains around it. The monastery is still active, and is a popular tourist and pilgrimage site, though the hermitages were all abandoned in the early 1800s (I think during Napoleon's invasion).
One of the biggest attractions at Montserrat is "the black Virgin" a Romanesque statue dated to the 12th century that has been venerated by pilgrims for so long (and surrounded by candle smoke continuously) that its face has turned black. The line to get to the statue was so long that we were content to look at it from afar and skip a needless line. Other than that, Austin, Tucker and I went to a midday prayer service that must've been in four different languages, toured the basilica, heard a kids choir, and took a railcar up part of the way from the monastery to the true top of the mountain from where we walked to see some of the old hermitages in caves. It was pretty neat.
Here are a bunch more pics, including some from Sitges and Barcelona still. (Last entry I had trouble uploading pics, so hopefully they will upload better today.)
