Route through Montserrat
The capricious nature. Montserrat is a mountain that surprises for being different from the others. It is the most important and significant in Catalonia and is located about 30 km from the center of Barcelona. The Montserrat massif necessarily attracts attention: depending on where you look at it, its silhouette resembles the serrated blade of a saw.
This explains its name. The Catalan word Montserrat means sawn mountain. This becomes even more understandable as you go up the mountain. The appearance of the rocks leads one to imagine that Montserrat has been sculpted, worked, sawn by a prodigious hand. The poet Verdaguer, one of the great epic authors of literary history, saw the mountain as sawn by angels. In fact, the mountain range is the heraldic symbol of Montserrat.
The geological origin is sedimentary, and its rocks are made up of a conglomerate of pebbles settled in calcareous cement. Over the millennia, tectonic movements, climatic changes, and erosion have ended up modeling a rough relief, with large walls and rounded blocks. In its bowels, physical agents have opened caves, chasms and caverns.
Architecture
The rugged relief of the Montserrat mountain makes the construction of the Sanctuary irregular. Its architectural ensemble is made up of two large building blocks: the basilica, together with the monastic dependencies, and the buildings for tourists and pilgrims.
Among the various buildings of the Benedictine monastery, the chapter room, the neo-Romanesque cloister and the refectory, its architectural style stands out, renovated in 1925 by Josep Puig i Cadafalch.
Architecturally, the basilica is between the Gothic and Renaissance traditions. Due to the French War (1808-1814), the basilica was very affected, and until the end of the s. XIX could not be rebuilt. The immensity of the Sanctuary does not reside so much in its architectural ensemble as in knowing how to discover the religious, cultural, social, historical and ecological values that symbolize the experience of a people.
The current community of Montserrat is made up of about eighty monks who follow the rule of Saint Benedict (6th century). The main objective of the community is to continue making the mountain a meeting and prayer point.
Culture is also part of Montserrat as the monastery has a library with almost 300,000 volumes, a choir of singing children, considered the oldest children’s conservatory in Europe and a museum containing works by artists such as El Greco, Picasso and Salvador Dalí.
There are various routes to enjoy the impressive natural landscape, such as the Itinerary of the Monastery to the top of Sant Jerónimo, a circular route of great interest to the top of Montserrat with spectacular and dizzying panoramic views over the massif and, on clear days, over great part of Catalonia.
Accessibility
Montserrat
You can get to Montserrat by train from Barcelona (Plaza – foot of the mountain) and go up with the Montserrat Rack Railway. Both fully accessible for people with reduced mobility
The cable car to Montserrat does not have access for people with reduced mobility.
The Monastery: Most of the areas are accessible to people with reduced mobility.
The monestir offers a free little green train for people with limited or reduced mobility.
Montserrat Tourist Information: Tel: +34 93 877 7701
The Basilica is accessible, although people with reduced mobility cannot access the Virgin’s dressing room and must observe it from a distance of 2.00m.
Museums are accessible.
The restaurants are fully accessible by wheelchair.
There are 2 nuclei of bathrooms for public use and, in both, there are accessible toilets.
The shops, the post office, the hotel and the apartments are fully accessible.
The San Juan and Santa Cueva funiculars are not accessible for wheelchairs and scooters.