How does one adequately describe elegant Barcelona, where I was fortunate to spend the bulk of a recent 12-day vacation?

Like most major European cities, Barcelona has its museums and monuments. But Barcelona itself is a canvas, patterned with eccentric edifices, art noveau buildings and austere Gothic churches. Amid days of perfect blue sky, we explored a city that seemed confident and graceful. We walked along Las Ramblas, the promenade intersecting the city, watching a constant parade of stylish strollers. We meandered through the old Gothic quarter where cobblestone lanes seem to whisper of history and secrets.

We ate with relish. With a smack of the lips, I recall sweet sips of cava (the Spanish retort to French champagne), slurping caracoles (escargot) out of gravy-lined shells and dunking churros—fried fingers of dough—into a mug of viscous hot chocolate.

We took in, as much as we could, the abundance of art—medieval and modern. Barcelona seems to have nurtured some of the last’s century’s most creative minds—Picasso, Miro and Dali. And we were left in open-mouthed wonder by the architecture of Antoni Gaudí.

Swirling chimneys, rippling roofs, balconies melting into skeletal shapes: his imagination appears willfully whimsical if not downright surreal. But in the soaring coral-like spires of the Familia Sagrada church or the playful riot of colours of Parc Güell—where families still gather for their ritual Sunday strolls—there is a method to his aesthetic madness.

Walls ripple because there are no straight lines in Nature and cheerful mosaic adorn surfaces because creatures in the animal kingdom are seldom unembellished. Gaudí saw the Divine Design as the ultimate blueprint and expressed this conviction in the organic shapes of his architectural designs. His love for the Divine was a constant thread in his work. Carved onto the façade of one of the apartment buildings he designed, are roses, his secret tribute to the Virgin Mary. And then, there is his final unfinished magnum opus, the Familia Sagrada church, which he worked on the last 10 years of his life. Unsurprisingly, a prayer card I found at his tomb in the crypt of the Familia Sagrada church, touts the cause of his beatification under the heading: ‘Antoni Gaudí I Cornet: God’s Architect (1852 – 1926)’.

After a few days in Spain, I found it was fitting that Gaudí should choose to express his spirituality through stone and cement. After all, Hispanic expressions of piety are so tactile. Holy objects— no matter of antiquity—are regarded as the cherished heirlooms; to be touched, caressed, kissed.

We saw this in the town of Saragosa, which holds a pillar on which the Blessed Virgin is said to have appeared to St James the Apostle. Housed under an immense Baroque basilica, the pillar is quite small and covered with an embroidered cloth, topped with a Marian icon. The exposed part of the column is concave, worn away by so many kisses and caresses from countless faithful over the centuries.