There is a large rock on the beach at Blanes called Sa Palomera. It splits the town’s coastline in two, and by long local convention it marks the exact point where the Costa Brava begins.…
Catalonia is a vertical country. There are mountains in almost every view ā Montserrat behind the plain, the Pyrenees to the north, Collserola above Barcelona, the hills that CadaquĆ©s hides behind. And then you drive…
I’ll start with the thing every other article leaves out: CadaquĆ©s is about two and a half hours from Barcelona, there is no train, and the road in ends with a mountain pass. That’s five…
Tarragona has a Roman amphitheatre cut into the cliff, and the beach is directly below it. That’s the whole pitch. You climb through the tiers where a Roman audience sat two thousand years ago, with…
Girona is thirty-eight minutes from Barcelona on the fast train, which means you can leave after breakfast, climb a medieval wall, stand inside the widest Gothic nave in the world, and be back in the…
Japan in July with Kids: The Heat, the Festivals and How to Re-Time Your Trip We took our two children to Japan in mid-July. Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, nineteen days, in the month most guidebooks describe…
An hour and a half inland from Barcelona there’s a town called Igualada where you can fly three different ways ā a paraglider, a glider, or a hot-air balloon. And in Barcelona itself, the municipal…
Every “best restaurants in Barcelona” list is written by someone who was here for four days. We’ve lived here since 2010, and this is the honest version: the places we take visitors, the places we…
If you’re nervous about the sea and you have small children, Cala Llenya is the beach I’d send you to. It sits on Ibiza’s east coast, five minutes north of Cala Nova and about ten…
Barcelona sits in a bowl between the sea and a ridge of hills, which means it has more good viewpoints than almost any city its size, and most of them are free. It also means…
It rains about 55 days a year in Barcelona, and when it does it tends to do it properly ā heavy, sudden, and for a few hours rather than all day. If one of those…
We live in Barcelona and have driven up to Andorra in summer and in winter with the boys. On a clear weekday the drive is about 3 hours. On our pre-Christmas weekend it took 4ā5…
In June 2019 we drove up to Grau Roig with Damian (6) and Marc (3) and walked up to the Pessons lakes. In summer the ski slopes turn into green meadows, and a gravel track…
Most Andorra-in-winter guides assume you’re there to ski. We weren’t. A few weeks before Christmas, around 2016, we drove up from Barcelona with Damian, who was about 3, and Marc, who was still a baby.…
I’ve lived in Barcelona since 2010. Before that, and for fourteen years afterwards, I worked as an account manager for a major online travel agency, looking after hotel portfolios across Spain ā including this coast.…
Montserrat is the day trip everyone takes from Barcelona, and the one most people get needlessly wrong before they’ve even left the city ā because there are four ways to get up the mountain, three…
Bunkers del Carmel: Barcelona’s Best View, and the Sunset Rule Nobody Mentions The Bunkers del Carmel have the best view in Barcelona. Not the best famous view ā the best view, full stop. You stand…
What a Week in Barcelona Really Costs a Family of Four Every “how much does Barcelona cost” article I’ve read gives you a range. Eighty to two hundred euros a day. Which is useless, because…
Tap the square icon in the top corner to open this map in the Google Maps app and save it offline. Most Barcelona maps show you pins. They don’t tell you the thing you actually…
We went to Singapore in late April, flying overnight from Barcelona and landing on the 24th. We checked into our hotel on Sentosa and went straight to the pool, because it was my birthday and…
