Bon jour! We just got used to have breakfast at 9am! I got down at around 8 to start cooking breakfast. Some of them were already there. We made ham & egg macaroni. We started off to Santa Maria de Montserrat.

Santa Maria de Montserrat is a Benedictine abbey located in the Montserrat mountain, in Monistrol de Montserrat, in Catalonia, Spain. It's only a 30 minute drive from Villa Serenity. It was a totally different day from the day before.

The monastery is absolutely beautiful. It is Catalonia's most important religious retreat and groups of young people from Barcelona and all over Catalonia make overnight hikes at least once in their lives to watch the sunrise from the heights of Montserrat. Virgin of Montserrat (the black virgin), is Catalonia's favourite saint, and is located in the sanctuary of the Mare de Deu de Montserrat. We didn't pay our respect as the queue was too long waiting to enter into the sanctuary just on the right of the basilica.

We visited the basilica. It was beautiful! the paintings, the rose windows etc.

We stayed and shopped in the Montserrat shop for a while. Alan bought a photo book of the Montserrat. then we headed for the mountains.

At 1236 meters above the valley floor, Montserrat is the highest point of the Catalan lowlands, and stands central to the most populated part of Catalonia. The stone monolith is ideally located to play an important role in the cultural and spiritual life of Catalonia.

I planned to do one of the trails. It was a very hot day so we said we would take the easiest one instead. We took the tram to go up to Sant Joan. We found ourselves in the middle of the map on the right. Me & Alan, Kevin & Milly, Ju and Kwong the 6 of us took the short hike from station to Sant Joan where the holy caves are.

The walk took around 30 minutes but we were quite amazed by the views and the caves, stones around so we probably had eventually stayed for total an hour. Check out our video to see the stone steps leading down the rocks.

We went back to the station and then saw a lot of dark black clouds above. So better hurray. We took the lower path from the station to go via Sant Miquel back to the monastery. It said it took 50 minutes, we did it in 45 minutes as the clouds were getting more and more like the hail clouds we had the day before. We did our last minute shopping at the monastery :) me and Alan bought 2 mugs and the gang bought a couple of things as well. The basilica also holds one of the monastery's most noted attractions, the 50-member Escolanía, one of the oldest and most renowned boys' choirs in Europe, dating from the 13th century. At 1pm daily you can hear them singing "Salve Regina" and the "Virolai" (hymn of Montserrat) in the basilica. Kwong spotted a CD the 1st time we were there in the shop and before we left, he wanted to buy that but it was already sold out!

We finally got back to our cars before the rain! It rained very heavily again and luckily this time without hail.

It was a pity as we planned to do BBQ by poolside that night. We could still do that as there would be 80% no rain as it rained that time so heavily, it couldn't possibly continously raining for more than 4 hours. Anyway, we dropped the idea and decided to cook another meal.

That night I made minestrone with bacon... yum yum.. and baby asparagets. The others cooked a variety of meat. We had another great night! The next day we would have a busy day as we would do Barcelona. We would only have half a day there so got to leave before 10am.....

Bon nuit!