[UPDATE: HD is deactivated by default and there is no option to change that. So if you want to see it in HD, you have to activate yourself by hitting the HD-button inside the video.]

The Botanical Garden – Jardí Botànic – in Barcelona is located in Montjuc, the same area where the Olympic Games were hosted 1992. It is a huge garden with collections of Mediterranean plants from all over the world. I enjoyed a wonderful sunny day walking between those unknown plants… perfect motifs for shooting some photos. In the video a share my favorites, mostly macro photos.

Duration: 1:14 Min.
Format: 16:9
Resoultion: 720p
Codec: H.264

So here’s my “best of list” and my experiences:

1. www.loquo.com

Big classifieds site with lots of ads. The site has an English translation, but not many English ads, knowing Spanish is very helpful. No special features, unstructured information.

2. www.nuroa.es (in Germany www.nuroa.de)

Meta-search engine. This search engine aggregates listings from many portals and makes them searchable in one place. It has an English translation and useful filters. Nice thing is that you can search for English keywords and nuroa will automatically translate them into Spanish. So if you search for “room” in “Barcelona” you get all listings containing the Spanish word for room: “habitación”.

3. www.idealista.com

Real estate portal with special section for shared flats. This section has a feature that matches your needs with the offering of the listings. The goal is to limit the results only to “relevant” listings. Nice feature!

4. www.fotocasa.es

Real estate portal with some listings for flat shares. English translation exists. Not so many ads in general for shared flats.

5. www.google.es

Like the “Eye of Sauron” Google sees just about everything… so if you prefer a plain, unstructured search with no special features at all, Google works, too. The danger is, however, that you might get a lot old listings as well.

Hope that this brief review helps everyone, that is looking for a shared flat or a room in Spain. As none of these sites work only for Barcelona, you should find good results in other big cities like Madrid, Sevilla, Valencia etc, too. Sure those websites also might be helpful in finding an apartment or even house to rent or buy, but I don’t have any experience with the buy / sell and rental markets.

See you in Barcelona :-)

Happy End :) We are coming back with a lot of great memories.

See You at home,
Caro & Ingo

Entrance to the Park: “The four Guardsmen”:

another Giant Sequoia:

Dead Sequoia: (Search for me in the picture *g*)

The largest Tree on Earth: “General Sherman”

Nearly forgot: As in most National Parks, there are wild animals around. Sequoia has lots of wildlife, but the most exciting animal to see there is one of the brown bears. And we saw two of them :) First a very young one and later the day a full grown bear:

Joshua Tree (a.k.a. “Wonderland of Rocks”) was a great National Park and perhaps the best campground we visited. And it would have been even better, if were rock climber. If you love rock-climbing this is the place to be :-) Sadly we neither had the skill nor the equipment to try this part. Nevertheless Zion had some unique rock formations and beautifull (desert-)vegetation.

Ingo in the “Wonderland of Rocks”

Sunset at Grand Canyon:

Colorado River at Horsehoe Bend:

“touching” Colorado River at Lees Ferry:

Antelope Canyon:

The narrow, steep and unpaved trial was sometimes a little bit scary. You shouldn’t have fear of heights because the trail runs up directly to the canyon wall. Looking down some hundrets of meters wasn’t uncommon:

Hoover Dam:

Hoover Dam Generators:

The Valley of Fire has its name because of these red glowing rocks: (absolutely no photo editing!!!)

 

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Nearly every Hotel/Casino here would make a nice picture, but no reason to bore you :)
This Hotel is the “Excalibur”. Crazy, hu?

some impressions:

and here two friends we made on the way up to the waterfall: