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The Travel Critic

Barcelona Travel Guide

Barcelona is one of those cities that has absolutely no business being this good.

It’s got Gaudí, beaches, brilliant food, Gothic alleyways, enormous boulevards, late-night restaurants, beautiful hotels and enough sunshine to make you briefly question every life decision that led you to spend February in Bristol.

It is also, inevitably, full of tourists.

Millions of them.

Some are here to look at architecture. Some are here for the football. Some are here for the food. Some are here because they saw a picture of a rooftop pool on Instagram and have spent six months pretending they are interested in Catalan culture.

And then there are the stag parties.

But Barcelona is big enough and clever enough to absorb all of this. You can spend the morning staring at the Sagrada Família, have lunch somewhere extraordinary, disappear into the Gothic Quarter for an afternoon, drink something cold beside the Mediterranean and finish the evening eating pizza at midnight.

I’ve been doing exactly this sort of thing for years.

So this is The Travel Critic’s guide to Barcelona — the hotels, restaurants and experiences I’ve actually tried, rather than a collection of things recommended by somebody who once changed planes at Barcelona airport.

The Best Hotels in Barcelona

Barcelona has an enormous choice of hotels, ranging from tiny Gothic Quarter hideaways to the sort of grand five-star establishments where the towels probably have a better pension than I do.

The trick is finding one that combines location, comfort, service and personality.

I’ve stayed at a few.

Hotel 1898 Barcelona

Sometimes a hotel makes you work very hard to find something wrong with it.

Hotel 1898 is one of those irritating places.

My Hotel 1898 Barcelona review gave it five stars, largely because it does something increasingly rare: it simply gets things right.

It’s right on La Rambla, which sounds like a terrible idea until you discover that the hotel somehow manages to feel completely removed from the chaos outside.

The rooms are stylish without being showy. The beds are excellent. The lighting doesn’t make you look like you’ve just been found at the bottom of a lake. There’s a rooftop pool, a good bar, a spa and a rather lovely sense that someone competent has been in charge.

And the price makes it even more appealing.

The Travel Critic verdict: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Best for: Couples, city breaks, first-time visitors and anyone wanting a stylish central hotel without selling a kidney.

Moxy Barcelona

I’ve developed a slightly worrying affection for Moxy.

This shouldn’t happen.

Moxy is the hotel brand equivalent of the person who arrives at a dinner party wearing trainers and immediately tells everyone they’re “really into design”.

And yet the Moxy Barcelona review is another example of the brand getting the modern city hotel surprisingly right.

It’s contemporary, energetic and deliberately informal, with the sort of communal spaces that make you feel you’re staying somewhere interesting rather than simply occupying Room 417.

The Travel Critic verdict: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Best for: Younger travellers, couples, short city breaks and people who don’t need a hotel to behave like a Victorian country house.

Where Should You Stay in Barcelona?

This is an important one because Barcelona is a city where location can make or break a trip.

Gothic Quarter

The Gothic Quarter is atmospheric, historic and slightly bonkers.

Stone streets, tiny squares, bars, restaurants and buildings that look as though they’ve been standing there since somebody invented trousers.

It’s brilliant for atmosphere and nightlife.

It’s also where I found myself late one evening after arriving from the airport and wandering into CiaoCiao.

More on that shortly.

Eixample

If you want Barcelona’s architecture, restaurants and central location without quite as much tourist chaos, Eixample is probably the safest bet.

It’s elegant, spacious and extremely walkable.

And the buildings are spectacular.

La Rambla

Yes, you’ll probably walk it.

Yes, you should probably see it.

No, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend staying there.

It’s busy, touristy and increasingly resembles what would happen if a European boulevard were designed by a committee consisting entirely of souvenir shops and vape stores.

Hotel 1898 is the exception.

It somehow makes the location work.

The Best Restaurants in Barcelona

Barcelona is one of Europe’s great food cities.

There are tapas bars, Catalan restaurants, seafood, Japanese, Italian, burgers, beach restaurants and enough tiny places serving things on bits of slate to keep an Instagrammer busy for several lifetimes.

I’ve tried a few.

Pez Vela

A beach restaurant in Barcelona has a fairly straightforward brief.

Good food.

Cold drinks.

Sea view.

Don’t ruin it.

Pez Vela manages it.

The Pez Vela review describes a place that attracts exactly the sort of crowd you want at a Barcelona beach restaurant — stylish, relaxed and there to enjoy themselves rather than photograph every individual prawn.

It’s the sort of place where lunch can quietly turn into late afternoon and suddenly you’ve ordered another bottle of wine.

Which is generally a sign of success.

The Travel Critic verdict: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Best for: Beach lunches, relaxed dining and people watching.

CiaoCiao Barcelona

There are worse places to find yourself at midnight than Barcelona.

Actually, there are very few better ones.

My CiaoCiao Barcelona review came after a late arrival at El Prat and a desperate need for food.

The Gothic Quarter was alive, the streets were buzzing and CiaoCiao was sitting in exactly the sort of old stone square that makes you briefly believe Europe has won.

The pizza was good rather than transcendent.

The beer was cold.

The atmosphere was excellent.

Sometimes that’s enough.

The Travel Critic verdict: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Best for: Late-night food, casual dining and recovering from a delayed flight.

Sushi Saki

I have a complicated relationship with all-you-can-eat restaurants.

On one hand: unlimited food.

On the other: the nagging suspicion that the kitchen has been preparing your salmon since the Obama administration.

Sushi Saki is an interesting modern take on the concept. You order on an iPad, six items at a time, rather than queueing around a sad buffet under fluorescent lighting.

It’s not going to trouble Barcelona’s finest Japanese restaurants.

But that’s not really the point.

It’s inexpensive, enormous fun if you’re hungry and delivers precisely what it promises: lots of sushi.

The Travel Critic verdict: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Best for: Families, hungry people, teenagers and anyone who regards “unlimited” as a personal challenge.

The Best Things to Do in Barcelona

There are cities where sightseeing feels like work.

Barcelona isn’t one of them.

Even walking around is entertaining.

The architecture is extraordinary, the streets are full of life and there’s generally a bar somewhere nearby willing to reward you for your exertions.

Sagrada Família

You can’t come to Barcelona and ignore Gaudí.

Well, you can.

But you’ll spend the rest of your life explaining why.

The Sagrada Família is the city’s defining building and one of the great architectural experiences in Europe.

Go inside.

Don’t just photograph it from outside like a man collecting evidence.

Park Güell

Another Gaudí essential.

It’s colourful, strange and wonderfully impractical — which, when you think about it, is basically the Barcelona design brief.

Go early if you can.

Barcelona has discovered tourism, and unfortunately so has everybody else.

The Gothic Quarter

This is where Barcelona gets properly atmospheric.

Wander.

Get lost.

Find a little square.

Have a drink.

Repeat.

It’s one of the few places where getting lost is actually part of the itinerary.

The Best Way to See Barcelona

And this is where I’ve found something I genuinely loved.

GoCar Barcelona

I’ve done plenty of sightseeing tours.

Some have involved headphones.

Some have involved buses.

One involved a man dressed as a pirate in Bristol, which is a sentence that still makes me angry.

Then I discovered GoCar Barcelona.

It’s essentially an electric two-seater buggy with a sat-nav and a GPS-triggered commentary system that takes you around the city.

And it’s brilliant.

You can see the Sagrada Família, Montjuïc, the beach, Las Ramblas and other major sights while actually moving around the city rather than sitting on a bus listening to someone explain Barcelona’s history through a crackling speaker.

Even better, my 15-year-old — a demographic notoriously difficult to impress — apparently declared it the best sightseeing he’d ever done.

That is basically a Michelin star from a teenager.

The Travel Critic verdict: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Best for: Families, teenagers, first-time visitors and anyone who thinks conventional sightseeing sounds like punishment.

Barcelona at Night

Barcelona is not a city that goes to bed early.

Thankfully.

Dinner can start at nine.

Drinks can start at eleven.

And suddenly you’re eating pizza at midnight wondering why Britain decided that the evening should finish at 10.30 because somebody’s got work in the morning.

The Gothic Quarter is particularly good for atmosphere, while the city’s beach restaurants and bars offer a completely different experience.

My advice?

Don’t fight the schedule.

Eat late. Drink slowly. Wander afterwards.

You can sleep when you’re back in England.

Is Barcelona Worth Visiting?

Obviously.

But Barcelona isn’t perfect.

It can be crowded. Parts of it are aggressively touristy. Pickpockets are a genuine consideration. La Rambla can feel like a human experiment conducted on people who have just arrived from an airport.

But move a few streets away and you find something much better.

A city with extraordinary architecture, fantastic food, beaches, nightlife, history and an almost irritating ability to make a Tuesday afternoon feel like a holiday.

It’s beautiful without being precious.

Lively without always being exhausting.

And occasionally, gloriously ridiculous.

Which is exactly what you want from a city break.

The Travel Critic’s Barcelona Reviews

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Hotels

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Restaurants

  • Pez Vela — The Restaurant That Attracts Exactly the Right Sort of Crowd

⭐⭐⭐⭐ Restaurants

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Experiences

The Travel Critic’s Barcelona Verdict

Barcelona is the sort of city that makes you wonder why you don’t live somewhere warmer.

Come for Gaudí.

Stay for the food.

Book a hotel with a rooftop pool.

Have dinner at a stupidly late hour.

And, for God’s sake, don’t spend your entire holiday walking up and down La Rambla wondering where the Barcelona you saw on Instagram has gone.

It’s there.

You just need to turn left.

Find out more from the people who know.