It was great! Got to see a lot of awesome stuff and did get to visit Barcelona (Montserrat Monastery as well), Valencia, Granada, Malaga, Gibraltar, and Seville.
I may post longer thoughts on it when I get some time, but we did visit Zoo Barcelona and Bioparc Fuengirola. Barcelona zoo is for sure an older city zoo in feel, but some of the newer African Safari exhibits are quite nice. I was amazed at how many banded mongoose were there! All of the animals we wanted to see we in fact did see, including the Drill (my most sought after species this trip), but also the Iberian Wolf was awesome to see. There were a couple disappointing things at the Barcelona Zoo, but I won't get into too much of that right now.
Getting to see the Barbary Macaques in the Gibraltar Nature Reserve was great. We got pretty up close to them! Or rather they got really close to us!
And Bioparc Fuengirola... wow! Photos do not do this place justice. We had a blast here. This zoo felt like Disney's Animal Kingdom without the rides. It also made great use of its small footprint, much like what San Diego or Cheyenne Mountain Zoo would do here in the United States by layering exhibits, or providing multiple vantage points of multiple exhibits. The new New World exhibit complex is fantastic! In the massive free-ranging space, we saw two very ACTIVE sloths, which usually is not something we ever see. One climbed up a tall support and then climbed all the way across the top of the exhibit to the Mayan temple at the far end.
From both of the two zoos we got to visit, we got to see a bunch of species that the United States doesn't really have, which was great. We are already thinking of when we can get back and tour more of the central and northern part of Spain, but that is at least a couple years off yet!
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