This is the third in a four-part series. Part I | Part II

After seven days at sea, the cruise ship disgorges my 41 family members and me in Barcelona. While our inevitable dispersal brings a magical week to a close, I am glad to be free from Royal Caribbean’s controls on my movements. A little more space, wandering back at our own pace, ready to explore two more cities that have set themselves up well for me to like them.

Barcelona is both the capital of the Mediterranean basin and the standard-bearer for modern Europe. Though there is some graffiti around town trashing tourists, it is certifiably alive in ways that museum pieces like Venice or straining old metropolises like Rome are not. It has reinvented itself dramatically over the centuries: Roman roots, a Gothic core, a grand City Beautiful charge from the 1800s embellished by Gaudí’s ornamental flair, and a cosmopolitan boom in recent decades that has it pulsing with young life, beaches and clubs plus art and architecture, enough Catalan ingenuity to keep it from becoming a stale playground for the wealthy alone. The buildings are stunning and quirky but functional, the trains run on schedules to the second, and the food and drink have little competition. The three Duluthians in our party stay across from the old cathedral on two pedestrian Gothic Quarter streets, a maze that loses none of its luster even after a week of meandering cities with similar appeal.

Barcelona is not without its warts. There are pickpockets afoot, and I have a bizarre interaction with a man who tries to scam me with a Metro ticket before I rather unwittingly turn the tables on him by only having five Euros in cash in my possession. The Catalan separatist struggle, while invisible on this visit, drives at the heart of the European tension between lofty universal ideals and local tribal pride. Even FC Barcelona, after reaching new heights in fútbol achievement a decade ago, now flounders in debt and corruption after overreaching as it tried to keep up with the Gulf and Russian oligarch money that has besmirched the sport across Europe. Barcelona is also a very raunchy place, which is not in and of itself a defect, but any edginess does rather wear off when one passes a tenth little shop selling t-shirts with the same trashy slogans in English. Some bits of culture are, alas, universal.

Grumbling aside, Barcelona is still a special place, the city a whole continent wants to think it can be. It also has some reminders of home, as I have a quick rendezvous with friends from Duluth who are also passing through and then visit Black Lab, a brewery owned by a Duluthian who makes some of the best beer we find in our wanderings. My cousin Steph and her husband Kyle lead me on a sampling of vermut at a quiet neighborhood bar north of the city center. A rooftop tapas dinner is the last 10-plus person family gathering on the trip, and the desserts, including the beet ice cream with a cake and the very cheesy cheesecake and the ice cream dish featuring a tray with several vats of the stuff with cones and toppings, are the winners. The next morning we make a circuit of Parc Guell, Gaudí’s experiment in a meandering pleasure ground where visitors have no real agenda other than to stroll its pathways and lose themselves in a mix of naturalism and neo-Gothic design. Tapas lunch comes a few blocks from the Sagrada Familia, the magnum opus of the architect who gave this city its flair, slow but steady progress evident in the 19 years since my last visit.

The group slowly disperses from Barcelona: many straight back to the States, some to linger here or nearby on the Balearic coast, a few back to Italy or off on lengthy tours. For my mom, her partner Doug, my cousin Rob, and me, it’s a ride on the AVE high-speed train across the Spanish plain to Madrid. The train hums with power as we shoot over the meseta at 300 kilometers per hour, through small towns with hilltop castles and churches, olives and grapes, and a lot of windmills that look unlike anything Don Quixote would have encountered in his wanderings here half a millennium ago. At times the landscape is so barren as to evoke, say, eastern Montana, but before long we are edging into Atocha station in one of Europe’s great former seats of imperial power.

Madrid will never quite match Barcelona’s underlying cool, but it is a delightful place. Even though the kings based here dominated most of a hemisphere for centuries, it lacks the consistent grandiose scale of a London or a Paris or even a Rome. The Palacio Real sits starkly alone on the edge of the city center, surrounded by gardens; the Plaza Mayor is one of Europe’s more cloistered central squares, with no 19^th century grand avenues punched through its colonnades. The Parque del Retiro is sprawling, but its green cover likewise encloses a certain intimacy, and while there are other triumphant arches and plazas scattered about, they seem to blend with the city, opening up logically even when they may seem haphazard from a bird’s eye view. Quality urban form is, of course, one of Spain’s great triumphs and exports to its former colonies.

Spanish culture is, if not insular, decidedly peninsular. This will happen to a nation that mired itself in inquisitions and counter-reformations as liberalizing advances made their way across the rest of Europe, but the view from 2023 is one of a place distinctive in its flavor, a collection of fairly stable local cultures that share a political system out of Madrid but often little else. Modern Spain is much less unified than France or even Italy, the difference obvious enough even in simply visiting its two largest cities. Madrid and Barcelona feel like different countries, and then there are the Basques and the Galicians; our last dinner comes at an Asturian restaurant, a nod to the lush pocket of the northern coast where apples and cider reign supreme. And that’s all in the northern half of the country alone, skipping over the massive Moorish influence in sunbaked Andalucía.

We spend a chunk of our first full day in Madrid touring the Museo del Prado. The Prado, while massive, does not have the worldliness of the Met or the Louvre or the British Museum: here, Spanish masters like El Greco and Velázquez and Goya still reign, alongside some associated Venetians and a few Dutch masters who drifted through the Habsburg orbit. In the Prado, Spanish artists and imperial collectors gathered works of nobility and religious iconography, but little else. To tour the Prado is to view countless Assumptions and Immaculate Conceptions and Passions, alongside myriad temptations of saints and looming sin. And yet there is still incredible range on display, from the cluttered fever dreams of Hieronymus Bosch to the stark austerity of Velázquez’s Jesus on the cross, from the subtle mastery of Las Meñinas to the empathy in every Goya portrait. Another gallery stages El Greco next to Picasso, showing ties across generations between artists who, at first blush, have nothing in common. The Prado’s collection, more than any royal language academy or stuffy French defense of certain standards, is the epitome of a cultural patrimony.

Otherwise, most of our Madrid time is devoted to wandering, with stops in the Basilica de San Francisco, the cathedral, and in the Corte Inglés department store, where I buy a new suitcase. We find the statue of Cervantes in the Plaza de España and educate ourselves on the various Carloses, Felipes, and Alfonsos seated on horseback around the city. (I muse as to whether the Felipes could have prevented the decline of the Spanish Empire if they spent less time posing on horseback.) The streets of Madrid feel safer and better tended than Rome or Barcelona, though there is still an element of the absurd, with busking accordionists playing the same eight tunes or people dressed in giant panda or Mario costumes at nearly every attraction. (How they live in these things in 90-degree Spanish summer heat is beyond me.)

One could paint staid, imperial Madrid as a tired counterpoint to sexy Barcelona and its beachfront brethren, but when the sun goes down, Madrid shows out. The routine across three straight nights here is the same: after siesta, tapas and wine, with dinner extending through to midnight. Traveling with Rob means we have nonstop great food, and instead of sitting for dinner for hours as in Italy, here one can drift about for tapas, served almost immediately and savored slowly, a movable feast whose style I would gladly import across the pond. We continue our bold quest to find decent Mediterranean basin beer and have better luck here than anywhere else, including from a brewery named Oso whose bear-head-on-hops logo eerily resembles one in Duluth. My European culinary apogee comes at Juana la Loca, a tapas restaurant that was high on Rob’s list and turns out to be just one block from our Airbnb off the Plaza de Carros. The truffles, crab, and foie gras carry me away to a blissful place, and we walk off the meal with a stroll to a nightcap at a mezcal bar with the prettiest menu I’ve ever seen, with a detour for some people-watching at blocks-long line outside the one nightclub that apparently attracts every single Madrileño youth.

I am pleased to find my Spanish still perfectly functional once I kick off the rust, though plenty of Spaniards still open conversations with us in English, which I suppose is our blessing and curse as native speakers of tourism’s universal tongue. Still, there are moments of pride: at one dinner, Rob and I proudly order in Spanish before realizing there is an English menu if one scrolls further down; we sit between a loud British couple who demand the biggest beer available and a group of Indians who scandalize the waiter by asking for red pepper flakes. With competition like this, we are model tourists, blending smoothly into a country where I’ve scarcely spent a week.

Even model tourists must go home, however, and after three nights in Madrid, drained by rotating through my modestly sized Italian wardrobe and still anxious about my bag, I am ready for a return journey. If things go according to plan, I will be back on the Iberian Peninsula before long, ready to sample more of its diversity, more of its tapas, and more of its inviting streets before the siesta calls. I have no Spanish blood, but as the child of a Spanish professor and someone who studied in Madrid some 40 years ago, and this peninsula feels like a natural extension of my life.

Part Four is here.