27 August 26
An Interlude On Public Transport
Apart from the excursion up to Vall de Boí via rental car, basically all of travels throughout Catalunya were via public transport. How did this go?
The train (Renfe). Train service in Spain in general and Catalunya specifically can be divided into high-speed rail (the AVE) and regional rail lines. Spain has invested a lot into building out the AVE — Spain has more mileage of high-speed rail lines than any other country besides China — but this has been at the cost of lack of investment in the regional rail network. We rode the AVE twice, once to go from Barcelona to Girona, and the other time to go from Girona to Lleida. These trips were fast as advertised but navigating the stations, particularly Barcelona-Sants, was tricky. We rode the regional rail three times: first to get from Barcelona airport to downtown, then to go from L’Hospitalet d’Infant to Tarragona, and then from Tarragona to Barcelona. The latter two trips were miserably overcrowded and I had to stand all the way both legs. The trains however were on time. There was an episode of Easy Catalan a year ago where the hosts interviewed people on the street in Vilafranca del Penedès on whether they took the train anywhere. The answer was almost without exception no, the trains in Catalunya were just too slow and unreliable.
The metro in Barcelona. We rode it extensively the last three days of our trip. It is a large system and we found that changing between lines took a lot of effort in going up and down to the different underground levels via escalator or elevator. Our base for our stay in Barcelona was a hotel on the metro line running directly to the airport so we had to do a lot of line changing. We also learned that summertime is when they do maintenance on the system; specifically on our first trip from the hotel to downtown we discovered that the L1 line which had the easiest interconnection to downtown was closed for five stations, replaced by a special bus. We then had to route around this discontinuity in the metro lines the rest of our stay. One thing that made our travels easier in Barcelona was buying a three-day Hola Barcelona pass, unlimited travel for that time period on the city buses and the metro. Another fun diversion was taking the funicular up Montjuïc that is directly connected to the metro system.
Buses. They are harder to research than trains or the metro but the buses can be quite enjoyable. Returning to our hotel in Barcelona the last day we found a bus that ran from Paral·lel straight to our hotel — it was much more efficient than the metro plus it skirted the lower slopes of Montjuïc, passing by some magnificent architecture on the way. And my favorite transit experience the entire stay in Catalunya was taking the bus from Lleida south to Mora d’Ebre. There are only two buses a day on that route but the trip passed through some really interesting countryside. Also the bus station in Lleida is right next to the train station which is quite convenient.
Taxis. We used these fairly often for short legs. In general taxis are easily found but we had a stressful twenty minutes waiting for a summoned taxi to take us from our hotel in Girona to the train station to catch the AVE.
All of which has taught me to pay more attention to bus transport while traveling. A good guide for researching buses worldwide is busmaps.com. As an example, this shows all the agencies running buses through Lleida.
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