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Alissa, Dani and Remi smiling at a misty overlook at Montserrat, with Arlo on a shoulder ride and cloudy mountains behind them

Spain

Montserrat with Kids: Fog, Crowds, and a Wedding We Stumbled Into

A day trip to Montserrat from Barcelona with a 7- and 2-year-old: the train and cable car in the rain, the wrong basilica line, and a surprise wedding while we waited out the weather.

Alissa ·

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Montserrat was our Friday day trip from Barcelona. The rain from the day before lingered, and it ended up being a foggy, crowded, and slightly chaotic day that we're still glad we did. It also gave us one of those travel moments you could never plan.

Why Montserrat matters

Montserrat means "serrated mountain" in Catalan, and the jagged peaks about an hour from Barcelona make it easy to see why. It's also the spiritual heart of Catalonia. Hermits were living on the mountain long before a Benedictine monastery was established there in the 11th century, and the monks have been there ever since, through fires, French troops in the Napoleonic Wars, and the Spanish Civil War.

The pilgrims come for La Moreneta, a Romanesque wooden statue of the Virgin and Child, known as the Black Madonna and beloved as the patron of Catalonia. In 1522, Ignatius of Loyola, the future founder of the Jesuits, spent a night in vigil before her and left his sword at her feet. Montserrat is also where the Camino Catalán begins: pilgrims walk here from Barcelona, then continue west across Catalonia and Aragon to join the long Camino de Santiago route toward Santiago de Compostela. You'll see hikers with backpacks among the tourists.

The ornate gold altar of the Montserrat basilica with the small dark statue of the Black Madonna in a niche above it, candles lit below
La Moreneta, the Black Madonna, in her niche above the basilica's altar.

Tickets and getting there

We bought our entry tickets the night before on the Montserrat Visita website. The entry tickets let you pick a child fare, but the combo tickets (train plus cable car or funicular) only let you select the adult fare online, so we decided to sort that out at the train station instead.

We took a taxi to Plaça d'Espanya, found the machine, and bought two adult tickets and one child ticket for the combo return of the train and cable car (Arlo is under 4, so he was free). The train is easy and goes directly to the cable car station, but it was crowded and we barely got seats for the hour-plus ride, so plan accordingly.

Arlo standing in the aisle of a crowded train carriage on the way to Montserrat, with passengers sitting and standing around him
On the crowded train from Plaça d'Espanya, the kids stood after getting sick of sitting on our laps.

On Montserrat Visita, the entry ticket for adults was €20 and children under 8 were free. Our ticket included the basilica visit at a set time (ours was 11:45), an audio guide, the audiovisual space, and the Montserrat Museum. The combo train and cable car ticket is a separate purchase, and online it only shows the adult fare, so buy it at the machine at Plaça d'Espanya if you need a child ticket.

If you'd rather have a guide, there are also tours to Montserrat from Barcelona on GetYourGuide.

Fog on the cable car, rain on the trails

The cable car ride up was through the fog, so the famous views were mostly white. Because of the rain, we didn't attempt the 1.3 km hike to the cross or any of the other trails at the top that would have been nice to see.

A yellow cable car gondola on its cables above green forested hills, mist hanging over the mountain peaks
The cable car, disappearing into the fog.
Remi grinning in a selfie inside the yellow cable car, wind in her hair and the misty mountains through the window behind her
Remi, enjoying the ride up.

The indoor options were packed with other people waiting out the rain too. We found a somewhat dry corner of the patio before we'd seen much of the area.

The famous basilica

Finally we went into the basilica, which was part of our entry tickets, but we stood in the wrong line for at least 20 minutes. The line to the right is to see the Virgin statue, and the basilica itself is the middle one. We figured this out just as they were closing for an hour at noon, either at capacity or for some other reason, I'm not sure.

Remi in a red Adidas jacket jumping in front of the Montserrat basilica facade and its rose window, with the stone courtyard wet from rain
Remi in front of the basilica, with a very wet courtyard.

A wedding, a pew, and a sleeping toddler

We wandered around the museum, and when we came back we got in just as the rain was starting to get heavier, so we sat in a pew to wait it out again. This ended up being lucky, because a wedding was just starting.

It was a bit surreal. The front half of the sanctuary was obviously friends and family, and the back was tourists: people like us in raincoats and ponchos, and some in full hiking gear, all with cameras out, even us. First came the groom, then a group of kids with flowers, then the bride down the aisle. It's one of those travel moments you can't plan. Arlo slept through it all.

Tourists in raincoats and ponchos holding up phones in the pews of the Montserrat basilica while a bride in white walks down the aisle in the distance
The back half of the sanctuary: tourists, ponchos, and a lot of cameras.

The trek back down

Remi lit some candles and we started the trek back down, since the rain was still coming down. Overall it was worth the trip, but the crowds and the weather made it less enjoyable than it could have been. The religious importance of the place also wasn't our reason for visiting, so we were mostly there for the setting.

Remi in a red jacket standing in front of rows of red, blue and green candles lit beneath a tiled image of the Virgin in the Montserrat basilica
Remi lighting candles.

We left the stroller behind and were glad we did, but it was a lot of carrying Arlo, with all the steps and hills.

We made it back to the city that evening and explored the Barceloneta block party and found some carnival rides, which you can read about in our Barcelona post.

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