We have been to Barcelona previously and have always enjoyed this city. Today the ship docked at the Muelle de Adosado, which on first appeared to be an easy walking distance to Las Ramblas, but required a port shuttle bus due to the port traffic.
The bus dropped us off by the Christopher Columbus statute. We leisurely walked the distance of Las Ramblas, which was full of tourists and buskers, but enjoyable none the less.
With 16 hours in port we decided to spend the day in the country. We headed to the train station at the Playa de Catalunya and bought two tickets from the automated kiosks to Vilafranca, the heart of the Penedés wine region (tickets cost €3.10 person each way). The train station has both Metro and regional trains which can be confusing. If you want to go to Vilafranca look a red “C” symbol (Ceranias) and follow the signs. There are train employees walking about to help at the ticket kiosks, who are very helpful despite their limited English.
The trip to Vilafranca takes about one hour. From the train station, we walked a few blocks to the center of town to the tourist information office. They had volumes of information on the various wineries. We earlier had called the Torres Winery (34 93 817 75 68 www.torreswines.com) and scheduled a tour for 3:00pm. With more than an hour to kill, we decided to have lunch. In typical Spanish fashion Vilafranca completely shuts down for siesta, so we wandered the quiet streets and found a small local restaurant (Cal Bruna), which was full of the local work crowd and offered a fixed menu of the day. For the main course we just pointed to what others were having and ended up with some of the best meatballs we’ve ever had. We finished with the standard crema de catalan and coffee. (the 3-course lunch also included a bottle of wine and cost €8.90 per person). It was getting close to our tour time so we dashed back to the train station, and luckily found a cab as the winery is about a 10 minute cab ride from town. We were lucky as the cabbie joked that there are normally 25 cabs in Vilafranca but he is the only one during siesta.
We had a one hour tour of the winery by Lars Thomas, our knowledgeable guide, including a ride through the vineyards. We ended with a sampling of wines and a walk though the gift shop.
We took a cab back to the train station and ended back in Barcelona by 7:00pm. Even though it was early for dinner (at least by Barcelona standards) we headed up the Rambla Catalunya took a left at Carrer de Mallorca to our favorite Tapas restaurant Cerveceria Catalana . The food was every bit as good as we remembered. Reluctantly, we headed back to the ship.
Note: We drank Torres wines on board the Prinsendam on the transatlantic cruise, and collected the plastic bulls on the bottles. At the winery, we learned the bulls are added to the bottles destined for the US only. Normally, Holland America offers a shore excursion to Torres – but it was canceled on our cruise.