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Recreational space has always been high up the list with every redesign of the city. Recently, peripheral bits of industrial wasteland have benefited from the drive to provide some greenery and relative peace, but the late nineteenth-century expansion of Barcelona relied instead on transforming previously fortified, and very central, sections of the city. The quickest respite from the centre, and one which can be slotted quite comfortably into a day's pottering about the old town, is the Parc de la Ciutadella , lying east, and within easy walking distance, of the Barri Gòtic. Once the site of a Bourbon fortress, this is a formal park, with a zoo, museums and other attractions spread about its paths and gardens. To the south lies the beach, stretching from the fishing (and seafood-eating) district of Barceloneta , jutting out into Barcelona's central harbour, to the continually expanding Parc de Mar , which has totally transformed a previously redundant section of the city's coastline.

The PARC DE LA CIUTADELLA seems to have a peculiar ability to take in far more than would seem possible from its outward dimensions. As well as a lake, you'll find here Gaudí's monumental fountain and the city zoo, two natural history museums and Catalunya's legislative assembly, the Parlement . This last occupies a fortress-like structure right at the centre of the park, the surviving portion of the star-shaped citadel from which the park takes its name. It was erected by Felipe V in 1715, to subdue Barcelona after its spirited resistance to the Bourbons in the War of the Spanish Succession, and a whole city neighbourhood - refounded as Barceloneta - had to be destroyed to make room for the citadel. The Bourbon symbol of authority survived uneasily, until it too was destroyed in 1869 and the surrounding area made into a park. It seems a fitting irony that the main palace structure is once again home to the autonomous Catalan parliament, which first sat here between 1932 and 1939.

Perhaps the most notable of the park's sights is the Cascada , the monumental fountain in the northeast corner. Designed by Josep Fontseré, the architect chosen to oversee the conversion of the former citadel grounds into a park, this was the first of the major projects undertaken here. Fontseré's assistant in the work was the young Antoni Gaudí, then a student: the Baroque extravagance of the Cascada is suggestive of the flamboyant decoration which was later to become Gaudí's trademark. The best place to contemplate it is from the small open air café just south of it. Here you'll also find a small lake, where you can rent a punt and paddle about among the ducks (?1.80 per person per half-hour). Gaudí is also thought to have had a hand in the design of the Ciutadella's iron park gates, at the entrance on Avinguda Marqués de l'Argentera.

South of Parc de la Ciutadella, and across the tracks of the Estació de França, the port district of BARCELONETA is the closest to the centre of the self-contained village suburbs that used to ring the city and are now part of greater Barcelona. The triangular wedge of development was laid out in 1755 - a classic eighteenth-century grid of streets where previously there had been mud flats - to replace the neighbourhood destroyed to make way for the Ciutadella fortress. The long, narrow streets are still very much as they were planned, broken at intervals by small squares and lined with low-built, multiwindowed houses designed to give the sailors and fishing folk who lived here plenty of sun and fresh air.

If you arrive by cable car from Montjuïc, you'll get a superb aerial view of the district on the way in. The neighbourhood also retains something of its erstwhile village character, particularly in the central Plaça de la Barceloneta , around whose fountain and eighteenth-century church continue the sort of prosaic, local activities foreign to most of Barcelona's old town squares - people filling water-bottles or simply passing the time of day, kids riding bikes and playing ball. One of the more relaxing ways to make the journey along Barcelona's seashore, is to catch the new rodamolls (every 30min from Easter week through October Sat & Sun 11am-11pm and also Mon-Fri from 22 June to 13 Sept; one-way and return trips ?1.50 and ?2.40 for adults and ?1.20 and ?1.80 for children under 11 years), a wheeled tourist train which goes between the Colombus monument, and Port Olímpic, passing through Maremàgnum, Barceloneta and along the beaches.

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