The Rough Guide to Barcelona 8 (Rough Guide Travel Guides)

contemporary art in grand, echoing galleries – the current programme is

detailed outside the building and on the website. There’s also a city events

information office at the centre, and a café-bar upstairs with a finely sited

terrassa

above the Ramblas. Pavement artists, caricaturists and palm readers set

up stalls outside here on the Ramblas, augmented on weekend afternoons by

a street market selling jewellery, beads, bags and ornaments.

Final stop on the Ramblas is the city’s wax museum, the

Museu de Cera

(July–Sept daily 10am–10pm; Oct–June Mon–Fri 10am–1.30pm & 4–7.30pm,

Sat & Sun 11am–2pm & 4.30–8.30pm; €6.65;

933 172 649,

www

, located at nos. 4–6, in an impressive nineteenth-century

bank building; the entrance is along Passatge. de Banca.This presents an ever

more ludicrous series of tableaux in the building’s cavernous salons and

gloomy corridors, depicting recitals, meetings and parlour gatherings attended

by an anachronistic – not to say perverse – collection of personalities, film

characters, public figures, heroes, villains, artists and musicians. Thus Yasser

Arafat lectures Churchill, Hitler and Bill Clinton, while a concert by Catalan

cellist Pau Casals numbers Princess Diana and Mother Theresa among the

audience. Needless to say, it’s extremely ropey and enormously amusing,

culminating in cheesy underwater tunnels and space capsules and an

unpleasant “Terror” room.You also won’t want to miss the museum’s extraor-

dinary grotto-bar, the

Bosc de les Fades

By now, you’ve almost reached the foot of the Ramblas, passing Drassanes

metro station to be confronted by the column at the very bottom of the avenue

that’s topped by a statue of Columbus. For this, the neighbouring maritime

museum and the rest of the harbour area, see Chapter 5.

THE RAMBLAS

Rambla de Santa Mònica