Montserrat

The mountain of Montserrat is located about 30 miles northwest of Barcelona.  "Montserrat" means "serrated mountain" in Catalan.  It is most famous for the Monastery of Montserrat which is associated with several legends: "here St. Peter left a statue of the Virgin Mary carved by St. Luke, Parsifal found the Holy Grail, and Wagner sought inspiration for his opera."  Even though all the guidebooks emphasize the monastery, my friends and I never actually went inside for the entire afternoon we were there.  We left the residence at 11:30am and spent an hour or two on trains before we arrived.  As soon as we got there, the views were STUNNING and we decided to take a funicular and go for an hour hike to the tallest peak. We thought that we'd go into the monastery on the way back down, but by the time we eventually walked down (we missed the last funicular ride) the last train was going to leave in 15 minutes. We got back to the residence around 9pm.

I did not do my research before going and had no idea there would be such wonderful hiking.  Needless to say, I did not wear hiking shoes, but instead my green Toms.  Yes, my feet are sore a little, but no blisters!  All the views and resulting photographs were 100% worth it.  (And we even made friends with a 26 year-old professional photographer from Russia with broken English!)

On the right of the first picture below you can see the outside of the monastery.  You can see it again in the second picture taken from the bottom of the funicular (through two panes of glass!)

A photo of the funicular just for kicks (and for those who have never ridden one before) looking down:

The first view we saw (before taking the very short train ride up the mountain to the monastery) was certainly jaw-dropping.

Here are two photos of our altitude at different points in the day.  The first photo is from the top of the funicular and the second is at the the tallest peak.  Do some math to calculate how high we climbed!

And here are tons of photos of the vistas and the amazing light.  Easily the best part of the day.  My Barcelona Fodor's guide says that "Montserrat's rocky masses are of stone conglomerate, which, over thousands of years, has been molded into bizarre shapes by tectonic movements, climatic changes, and erosion."