This post is about our first visit to Barcelona in 2022. Since that visit, we’ve now returned to Barcelona for three weeks. You can find all of our Barcelona posts here.

Last August I spent three days in Barcelona and loved every minute of it! Come along for a virtual get-away as I relive our adventure.

First Some Background

Neither Calder or I had been to Spain before, which made this trip extra exciting. We only had a week to spend in the country, so we narrowed our focus to the Barcelona and Girona (more on that city in a future post), both in the Catalonia region of the country.

The goals of our adventure were simple, enjoy ourselves while getting a good feel for the city and its different neighborhoods. Ideally, we’d love to return with the boys for a longer trip where our whole family can focus on learning Spanish and immersing ourselves in the culture. With that in mind, we kept our sightseeing list fairly short on this trip, while noting the many things that we’d love to see during our next visit.

Get a Hotel in the City Center

Unless you’re staying with someone in the city, I recommend booking a hotel in the city center. We stayed at the Hotel Jazz, which is located near the university and at the junction of multiple neighborhoods (L’Eixample, Gothic Quarter, El Raval,).

The location was a great starting point for heading out on foot to explore. There were plenty of restaurants and shops right outside our door, and a short walk would take us into the heart of the local neighborhoods, where we could really get a feel for their character.

We got into town late, but the airport is very close to the city, so we took a taxi to the hotel for a reasonable rate. There were also metro stops nearby, if needed. During our stay we got around so easily by bus & bike that we didn’t need the metro, but I’m kind of bummed that I didn’t give it a spin.

Travel Guides, Maps, & Communication

We did most of the planning for this trip on the plane ride across the ocean! While in the airport, I bought a kindle version of Lonely Planet Spain. Note that if you’re heading to Spain, that version came out in 2018, but a new version is supposed to be released this summer.

It had been a long time since I bought a Lonely Planet guide, but that purchase took me right back to college when I took a few short trips to Europe (without a cell phone or laptop!), and we depended upon the guides for everything… especially maps!

I was so used to being able to dog-ear pages and quickly flip back and forth between different sections in the guide in book form. Before using the kindle version, I was worried that it’d be hard to navigate through on my phone. Luckily that worry was alleviated the moment that I opened the app.

The guide extremely easy to on a phone. Links within the book take you from one section to another. There are also external links that will take you right to the business websites in your browser, open locations Google maps, etc.

In addition to having the guide, we made sure to download the Google maps for all places that we’d be traveling. With downloaded maps, your phone can still access GPS data and you can find your way around even if you’re not using the local cell service.

I didn’t turn on international travel service for my phone for this trip. With the hotel’s wi-fi I was able to check my email and make calls whenever I was in our room, and since I had the maps when I was out and about, I didn’t need cell service.

Hop on (and off!) the Bus

Ok, so knowing that we wanted to get a taste of the many neighborhoods while covering as much ground as possible, we decided to do the most touristy of all touristy things: take a bus tour!

I’ve never ridden on a hop-on hop-off bus, but once I was on, I was psyched to realized that it’s such a great way to get a glimpse of the city. This website gives you an overview of the two bus companies that run tours in Barcelona. In many ways, the companies are very similar, so I don’t think that you can go wrong with either. We happened to use Bus Turistic for our tour.

As the name implies, you can get to hop on and off of the bus as many times as you want until your ticket expires. Tickets run for either 24 or 48 hours. We opted for the 24 hr ticket, and it was enough for our needs, but I think that if I had more time in the city, the 48 hr ticket is worth the price. It’s also smart to think about when you want to start your ticket timer. We waited to start until about 12pm, which meant that the next morning we could easily hop on the bus and ride it until at least noon (if you don’t plan on getting off, then you have some wiggle room to ride it past your expiration time).

When you get on the bus, you’re given headphones and a map. At each seat there are ports for the headphones, and you can listen to a recorded guide of the route. The recording provides a history of the city and the sights that you’re passing by.

I can’t stress enough what a great way it was to get a quick overview of the city, get transportation to key tourist sites, and to learn a little something along the way.

Next Post

Now that we have logistics out of the way, in the next post I’ll share some of the things we did: museums, food, fun.