barcelona Hotel accommodation - Best prices, best places.
Find the lowest hotel rates guaranteed!
From luxury hotels to budget accommodations.
We have the best deals and discounts for hotel rooms in barcelona.
Make your reservations Online.
Until the Eixample stretched out across the plain to meet them, a string of small towns ringed the city to the north. Today, they're firmly entrenched as SUBURBS of Barcelona, but most still retain an individual identity worth investigating even on a short visit to the city. Gràcia , particularly - the closest to the centre - is still very much the liberal, almost bohemian stronghold it was in the nineteenth century, with an active cultural life and night scene of its own. Apart from mere curiosity, each of the other suburbs also has a specific sight or two that makes them a worthwhile target. Some, like Gaudí's Parc Güell , between Gràcia and Horta , and the Gothic monastery at Pedralbes , are included in most people's tours of the city, and for good reason. Other sights are more specialized - like the football museum at FC Barcelona's superb Camp Nou stadium or the ceramics collection in the Palau Reial - but taken together they do help to counter the notion that Barcelona begins and ends in the Barri Gòtic. Finally, if you're saving yourself for just one aerial view of Barcelona, wait for a clear day and head for Tibidabo , way to the northwest: a mountain with an amusement park and a couple of bars with the best views in the city.
GRÀCIA is the most satisfying of Barcelona's peripheral districts, and given its concentration of bars, clubs and restaurants, the one you're most likely to visit. Beginning at the top of the Passeig de Gràcia, and bordered roughly by c/Balmes to the west and the streets above the Sagrada Família to the east, it has been a fully fledged suburb of the city since the nineteenth century - traditionally home to arty and political types, students and the intelligentsia, but also still supporting a very real local population (including one of the city's biggest Romany communities) which lends Gràcia an attractive, no-frills, small-town atmosphere. Come here to eat and drink by all means, but also take time to stroll through the streets and squares, and get the feel of a neighbourhood that - unlike the Eixample - still feels like a neighbourhood.
Gràcia is close enough to walk to if you wish - around a thirty-minute hike from Plaça de Catalunya. Getting there by public transport means taking the FGC train from Plaça de Catalunya to Gràcia station, or buses #22 or #24 from Plaça de Catalunya up Gran de Gràcia; or take the metro to either Diagonal, to the south, or Fontana, to the north. From any of these, it's around a 500-metre walk to Gràcia's two central squares, Plaça del Sol and Plaça Rius i Taulet, in the network of streets off the eastern side of c/Gran de Gràcia.
Real guidebook sights in Gràcia are few and far between: in fact, there's just one. But much of the pleasure to be had here is less regimented than that - dropping in on local squares and cafés, wandering the narrow, gridded eighteenth- and nineteenth-century streets, catching a film (there are several cinemas with regular English-language showings) and generally taking time out from the rigours of city-centre life.
Plaça del Sol is the centre for much of the district's bar-related activity, an enjoyable place to sit out during the day at one of the cafés, admiring the solid nineteenth-century buildings that surround the square and the more recent architectural additions by Gabriel Mora and Jaume Bach. At night, especially at the weekend, the square becomes an outdoor meeting-place, a base from which to launch yourself at the bars, clubs and restaurants in the vicinity. A couple of blocks down is another pleasant stop, Plaça Rius i Taulet , whose most obvious feature is a thirty-metre-high bell tower. Quieter, but a nice place for a drink at one of the pavement cafés is Plaça de la Virreina , just north of Plaça del Sol.
Gaudí's first major private commission, the Casa Vicens (which he finished in 1885) is at c/les Carolines 24 (Metro Fontana is the closest station). Here he took inspiration from the Mudéjar style (a type of brickwork developed by Muslims living under Christian rule in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Spain), covering the facade in linear green-and-white tiles with a flower motif. The decorative iron railings are a reminder of Gaudí's early training as a metalsmith, and to further prove his versatility - and how Art Nouveau cuts across art forms - Gaudí designed much of the mansion's furniture, too (though unfortunately you can't get in to see it). However, Casa Vicens is really only a minor distraction, and for one of Gaudí's more extraordinary projects you should continue to Parc Güell, twenty- to thirty-minutes' walk from Gràcia.
Home |
spain |
Barcelona
|
