Overview to Barcelona: Travel Guide and Tourist Information
- Barcelona Information
- Eating & drinking in Barcelona
- Night life in Barcelona
- Getting around in Barcelona
- Things to do in Barcelona
- Where to stay in Barcelona
- Barcelona street map
Nestled on the shores of the Mediterranean, Barcelona is an elegant, dynamic and incredibly chic European city. It might be Spain’s second city (after Madrid), but Barcelona certainly has the culture, the history and the visitors to compete with the capital.
The well-worn backbone of the city is undoubtedly the picturesque Las Ramblas. A wide thoroughfare with a central walkway on which street performers and vendors ply their trades beneath the trees, it’s a vivid slice of urban carnival.
The Barri Gotic (the city’s oldest quarter) and La Ribera are labyrinthine networks of beautiful, narrow alleyways. Everywhere you go, the city’s ancient roots (stretching back to Roman times) poke through the slightly more recent additions to the city.
Moving away from the busy main drags, the city not only becomes cheaper, but calmer, with a more relaxed, Mediterranean air. And Barcelona is defined by the incredible historical, architectural and cultural variety of its neighborhoods.
Up to the north of the city, Gracia is endearingly cosmopolitan and bohemian. A little to the west, meanwhile, the scruffy district of Barceloneta is a rash of bars and cafés that line the rough and ready urban beach.
Elsewhere, the Eixample quarter is perhaps Barcelona’s most emblematic. A grid of stylish boulevards, it’s home to much of the sumptuously excessive Modernist architecture for which the city is famous.
And when it comes to architecture, you don’t have to go far to find some truly outstanding works from the architect Antonio Gaudi. The Catalan’s famous ripples and undulations are as stunning today as when he first conceived them.
His crowning achievement, however, has to be the (as yet unfinished) stunning cathedral, La Sagrada Familia. To the north of the city center, it’s a massive structure whose turrets soar gloriously upwards into the sky.
Barcelona is at once a vibrant city of great eating and drinking, a stylish city of art, fashion and design, and a city of music and clubs… It is, in short, a place which will leave its many visitors gasping in astonishment.
