Picasso´s lost paradise: how a corner of Catalonia brought inspiration
(The Guardian Travel News)

As a new Picasso exhibition opens at London´s Royal Academy, we visit Horta de Sant Joan, the hilltop village that the artist said taught him `everything´I was standing in a cave Picasso once slept in. Actually, it´s more of a ledge beneath a craggy, overhanging limestone rock. Yet, in the summer of 1898 the 16-year-old Picasso and a friend spent a month sleeping here: in the Santa Bárbara mountain in the Terres de l´Ebre region of Catalonia, some 210km south-west of Barcelona. He would later write: `Everything I know, I learned in Horta.`Local lore has turned the ledge into a cave but, either way, it´s certainly remote - high up amid the dense holly oak and pine forests of the mountains. Apart from the odd derelict farmhouse, there was nothing for miles and all I heard were warbling sparrows and the trickling of a brook. Continue reading...