6 days in Barcelona

The church was started in 1882 by another architect, and a year later a 31-year-old Antoni Gaudí took over. He spent the rest of his life on it, and in his last years he lived in his workshop on site. In 1926 he was hit by a tram and died; he is buried in the crypt below your feet.

It has always been paid for by donations and ticket sales, which is why it has taken so long. Gaudí reportedly said, "My client is not in a hurry." Every detail carries meaning: the 18 towers stand for the 12 apostles, the 4 evangelists, Mary and Jesus. The central Tower of Jesus Christ, finished for the 100th anniversary of Gaudí's death, makes it the tallest church in the world.

Bardeni is an 8-minute walk from the Sagrada Família, so you can go straight there after the visit. It's a small "meat bar" whose chef has written a book about cooking meat. It holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand, the guide's award for very good food at fair prices.

Spain's great meat tradition is the Iberian pig: black-hoofed pigs that roam oak forests in the southwest and fatten on acorns ("bellota"). Their ham is cured for up to three years, and the cuts from the same pig, like secreto and presa, are grilled pink like steak. Bardeni serves this alongside croquetas and small sandwiches (montaditos), tapas-style at the bar.

The seafront promenade, the Passeig Marítim, is one of the best city runs in Europe: flat, car-free and right next to the sand for about 5 km. It only exists because of the 1992 Olympics, when the city replaced railway lines and factories along this coast with beaches, a boardwalk and the Olympic Village.

On a Saturday morning it's full of local runners, cyclists and people doing yoga on the sand, and in October the air is cool and fresh. Every beach you pass has its own character: Mar Bella is sporty, Bogatell is local and family-friendly, and Barceloneta is the old fishermen's beach closest to the city centre.

Barcelona began here as the Roman town of Barcino, and pieces of its 2,000-year-old walls and temple columns still hide between later buildings. The maze of narrow lanes grew in the Middle Ages, when the city was a Mediterranean trading power. Much of the "Gothic" look you see, like the carved bridge on Carrer del Bisbe, was added in the early 1900s to make the old town more romantic.

Plaça Reial is newer, built in the 1850s on the site of a demolished convent, with palm trees and lampposts designed by a young Gaudí. Nearby, Plaça Sant Felip Neri is the quietest square in the old town. Its church walls still carry shrapnel marks from a 1938 bombing that killed dozens of people, many of them children.

Tapas are small plates meant for sharing over a drink. One story says they began as a slice of bread or ham placed on top of a glass to keep flies out ("tapar" means to cover). In Barcelona they mix with Catalan habits like the weekend "hora del vermut", a vermouth with snacks before lunch.

The street it's on, Carrer dels Escudellers, is named after the potters who made bowls here in the Middle Ages. Colom is a family-run place known for generous portions, paella and fair prices. That's rare this close to La Rambla, which is why it has a queue.

FC Barcelona was founded in 1899 by a Swiss businessman, Joan Gamper. Its motto is "Més que un club", more than a club. During the Franco dictatorship, when Catalan language and symbols were suppressed, the stadium was one of the few places people could express Catalan identity together. You'll still hear chants of "In-de-pen-dèn-ci-a" at 17:14 in every home match, marking the year Barcelona fell in 1714.

Camp Nou ("new field") opened in 1957. It has been through a huge rebuild, with Barça playing on Montjuïc for two seasons before returning in late 2025. When fully finished it will hold over 100,000 people, the largest stadium in Europe. Getafe are a club from Madrid's southern suburbs, known as a tough, defensive side.

Park Güell was meant to be a luxury housing estate. The industrialist Eusebi Güell, Gaudí's great patron, wanted an English-style garden city (hence the English spelling "Park") with 60 villas. Only two houses were ever built, and Gaudí lived in one of them for almost 20 years. The project failed and the city turned it into a public park in 1926.

The colourful mosaics are "trencadís": broken tiles, plates and glass pieced together, a technique Gaudí and his collaborator Josep Maria Jujol made famous. The long wavy bench on the main terrace is shaped to fit the human back. Underneath it, the Hypostyle Room's 86 columns were designed to hold a market and to collect rainwater.

Gràcia was a separate town until Barcelona absorbed it in 1897, and it still feels like a village: narrow streets, low buildings and lots of small squares. It grew as a working-class town with a strong radical streak. You can see it in square names like Plaça de la Llibertat (Liberty) and Plaça de la Revolució.

Locals are proud of it, and every August the Festa Major de Gràcia turns whole streets into handmade decorations, from jungles to underwater worlds. On a Sunday the squares fill with families, terraces and kids playing football. It's a good place to slow down and watch local life.

The concrete platforms on top of Turó de la Rovira hill are not really bunkers. They were an anti-aircraft battery built in 1937–38, during the Spanish Civil War, to defend Barcelona from bombing raids by Franco's Italian and German allies. The city was one of the first in Europe to be bombed heavily from the air.

After the war, people who came to the city looking for work built shacks among the ruins, and a small shanty town lived here until 1990. It was cleared before the 1992 Olympics. Today it's part of the city history museum and a favourite sunset spot for young locals.

In 1904 the textile businessman Josep Batlló hired Gaudí to remodel an ordinary apartment building. Gaudí turned it into something out of a dream: a wavy façade covered in coloured glass, balconies like masks, and almost no straight lines anywhere inside. Locals nicknamed it "the house of bones".

It's often read as the legend of Sant Jordi (Saint George), Catalonia's patron saint. The roof is the dragon's scaly back, the tower with its cross is the knight's lance, and the bony balconies are the dragon's victims. It sits on the "Block of Discord", next to houses by Gaudí's two great rivals, each architect trying to outdo the others.

Velódromo opened in 1933 and is one of the great old café-bars of the Eixample, with a long wooden bar, high ceilings, a mezzanine and billiard tables. For decades it was a neighbourhood meeting place open from breakfast until late at night.

It closed in 2009, and people in the city were sad to lose it. It reopened a few years later with the original interior kept, and a menu mixing Catalan bar classics with dishes like the pastrami sandwich that made it popular again. It's a good example of how Barcelona tries to keep its old bars alive.

Your neighbourhood has a real history. In the 1800s Poblenou had so many mills and smokestacks that it was called the "Catalan Manchester". When the industry left, it fell into decline and many factories stood empty for decades.

Since 2000 the city has turned it into the "22@" district for tech and creative companies. Many old brick chimneys were kept as monuments among the new glass buildings. Rambla del Poblenou, the tree-lined main street, still feels like a local village high street.

Montjuïc is the green hill that overlooks the port. Its stone built much of medieval Barcelona, including Santa Maria del Mar. The castle on top dates from the 1640s and was rebuilt in the 1700s, and for most of its life its guns pointed at the city as much as at the sea.

That gave it a dark reputation as a military prison. In 1940 Lluís Companys, president of the Catalan government, was executed in its moat by the Franco regime. Today it's a peaceful place with wide views, reached by a cable car that has carried visitors since 1970.

The Palau Nacional looks centuries old but was built for the 1929 International Exhibition, which transformed this side of Montjuïc. The Magic Fountain below and the Poble Espanyol were made for the same event. The palace now holds the National Art Museum of Catalonia (MNAC).

Its treasure is a collection of Romanesque murals from small churches in the Pyrenees. In the 1920s they were peeled off the church walls and brought here to save them from being sold abroad. The Poble Espanyol is a "Spanish village" of copies of buildings from across Spain, also from 1929, now full of craft workshops.

Nobu is the brand of chef Nobu Matsuhisa, who mixed Japanese cooking with Peruvian flavours after years working in Lima. He opened his first big restaurant in New York with actor Robert De Niro as a partner, and the brand grew into hotels around the world.

The Barcelona hotel sits in a tower beside Sants, the city's main train station, a business district that rarely sees tourists. Its height is the point: from the top floors you see the whole city, from Montjuïc to the mountains of Collserola, as the lights come on.

Food has been sold on this spot since the Middle Ages, when farmers set up stalls outside the city gate. The covered market you see today got its iron roof and stained-glass entrance in 1914. Its official name is Mercat de Sant Josep, but everyone calls it La Boqueria.

La Rambla itself was once a seasonal stream running along the old city wall; the name comes from the Arabic word for sandy riverbed. When the walls came down it became the city's favourite promenade. Today it's very touristy, but the walk from the market down to the sea is still a classic.

In the Middle Ages this was the district of sailors, merchants and craftsmen, and they built their own church: Santa Maria del Mar, finished in just 54 years (1329–1383), very fast for the time. The porters of the port carried the stones on their backs from Montjuïc, and you can see them carved on the main door. The story inspired the bestselling novel "Cathedral of the Sea".

In 1936, at the start of the Civil War, the church burned for days and lost its decoration. That's why the inside is so bare and bright. Nearby, the old Born market hall covers excavated streets of the city destroyed after the siege of 1714. That defeat is remembered every 11 September, Catalonia's National Day.

This park stands on the site of the most hated building in Barcelona's history. After the city fell in 1714, the Bourbon king built a huge star-shaped fortress here, the "Ciutadella", to keep the people under control, tearing down a whole neighbourhood to do it. When it was finally demolished in the 1860s, the land was turned into the city's first big public park.

The Cascada is the park's monumental fountain, built for the 1888 Universal Exhibition and designed by Josep Fontserè. A young Antoni Gaudí, still a student, worked on it as his assistant, one of his first jobs in the city. Climb the side stairs to stand right above the waterfall, under the golden chariot of the goddess Aurora.

The cathedral stands where Barcelona's first churches stood since Roman times, right beside the old Roman walls. The building you see was built in the Gothic style between the 13th and 15th centuries. The grand front façade is much newer, completed only around 1900, when the city finally paid for the design that had waited for centuries.

It is dedicated to Saint Eulalia, a 13-year-old girl martyred by the Romans, who lies in the crypt below the altar. That is why 13 white geese live in the cloister, one for each year of her life. On Sundays, people still gather in the square in front to dance the sardana, Catalonia's traditional circle dance.

Hotel Colón stands on Avinguda de la Catedral, a wide avenue opened after the Civil War, when bombed buildings in front of the cathedral were cleared. The hotel has been a classic of the old town since the mid-20th century, known for rooms looking straight at the cathedral's Gothic façade.

The rooftop terrace is the reason to come. It sits almost level with the cathedral spires, so at sunset you see the stone turn gold with the whole old town around it. The hotel now operates as Lamaro Hotel, and the rooftop bar is called L'Àtic. It's open to non-guests.

Barcelona and Mexico have a special link. After the Spanish Civil War, Mexico took in tens of thousands of Republican refugees, many of them Catalan, and families still travel between the two. Today Mexican food is one of the city's favourite cuisines.

Carabela sits on Pas de Sota Muralla, the "passage under the wall", on the line of the old sea wall where the Gothic Quarter, El Born and Barceloneta meet. Its big terrace is popular with expats, and it's known for Tex-Mex classics and frozen margaritas, a relaxed last-night dinner.