Family travel in Spain from a Barcelona family: over ten years of trips with our two boys, and 14 years on the hotel side of the industry. Start with our Spain with kids guide to pick a region, or jump straight to Barcelona, the Costa Brava, the Balearic Islands, the Costa del Sol, Valencia, Madrid or the Basque Country. Every guide has real prices and the hotels we’d book with kids.
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…
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…
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 live in Barcelona, and we’ve spent more than ten years taking our two boys around Spain: from toddler beach weeks in Menorca to a New Year in Seville, a winter road trip in the…
The short version Top 3 Family Hotels on the Costa del Sol Where we’d stay with two kids, ranked by what kind of family you are. Most to do Holiday World Resort, BenalmĆ”dena Pools, organised…
Rupit has 280 residents, sits on a rock in the mountains of inland Catalonia, and you can walk the whole village in an hour. We took three hours, because we had three children and there…
One weekend every October, more than 250 buildings across Barcelona open their doors for free ā including a great many you cannot get into on any other day of the year. The 48h Open House…
Quick answer MNAC is the enormous domed palace at the top of the steps above PlaƧa d’Espanya that everyone photographs and almost nobody goes into. But during pandemics, with everything closed, once we were allowed…