Barcelona
A Barcelona weekend, arranged around what only happens at weekends
Two days in Barcelona is a distance problem. A weekend is a calendar problem: Friday night, Saturday and Sunday are three different cities, and the plan has to know which one it is standing in.
Book the Sagrada Família for Saturday morning, early. Do that before reading the rest of this, because it is the only thing here that sells out and every other decision moves around it.
Friday: arrive, then go straight into the old city
Do not eat near the hotel. Get on the metro, get off in the old city, and walk.
The Gothic Quarter after about ten at night is the version of itself that most weekend visitors never see, because by then they have checked in, eaten somewhere convenient and gone to bed. The coaches have gone, the shops are shuttered, and the streets go back to the width they were built at. Cross Plaça Nova, go down carrer del Bisbe under the arched bridge, and keep going until you are lost, which takes about four minutes. What changes after dark, and the route that works in it, is the Gothic Quarter at night.
Eat late. You are in Spain and the kitchens agree with you.
Saturday: the basilica, then downhill on foot
Take your morning slot. Come out, walk down Avinguda Gaudí instead of getting on the metro, and look at the modernista hospital complex at the end of it.
Spend the middle of the day walking the Eixample down to Passeig de Gràcia. The façades are free from the pavement; going inside one of them is a good hour and it is an hour you do not have this weekend.
Saturday afternoon belongs to whichever of these you prefer:
- Born and Santa Caterina, if you want streets, small museums and somewhere to sit.
- The seafront, if the weather has made the decision for you.
- Montjuïc, only if you are prepared to give it the whole afternoon. The castle, the 1929 Exposition buildings and the Fossar de la Pedrera are one sequence and it does not survive being rushed.
Book Saturday dinner. It is the one night of the week when not booking has a cost.
Sunday: the day the city is doing something for itself
Get up earlier than you want to.
Sunday morning is when Gràcia does the vermouth hour — a short glass, ice, an olive, a splash of soda, poured from a tapped barrel, before lunch and not after it. It is the only part of that neighbourhood that runs to a timetable, it costs a few euros, and it is full of people who live there. How to recognise a place that still does it properly, and why we refuse to publish a list of bar names, is in vermouth in Gràcia.
Walk it off through the squares afterwards — and if the weekend has a Saturday evening spare, the neighbourhood’s own version of an evening is described in Gràcia at night. Plaça de la Vila with the clock tower, Plaça de la Virreina, Plaça del Diamant, Plaça del Sol — five of them within fifteen minutes of each other, each doing a different job at a different hour, described one by one in the squares of Gràcia.
Do not plan Sunday shopping. A large part of the city’s retail does not open, and a plan that assumed otherwise leaves you standing in front of shutters with three hours to fill.
Leave for the airport from wherever you have ended up. This is the whole reason Sunday is the walking day.
Two things to move if your weekend is a different shape
Arriving Saturday morning instead of Friday night. Then Saturday is the old-city day and Sunday morning is the basilica. You lose the night walk, which is the largest single loss in this plan.
Staying until Monday. Monday is when several museums close and when the city goes back to work. Use it for a neighbourhood rather than for an institution, or for the day trip you did not have room for.
If you would rather be walked round it
Two of ours line up with a weekend rather than with a Tuesday. The Gothic Quarter after dark runs on Friday and Saturday nights, at the hour when those streets change; and the Gràcia walk ends in a cellar with a glass in it, which on a Sunday is not a gimmick but the thing the neighbourhood is actually doing at that moment.
If your two days are not a Saturday and a Sunday, the plan is a different one and it is written out in two days in Barcelona.
Which weekend, though, is the question underneath this one — and both halves of it are measured and published: when to go to Barcelona.
Quick answers
- Is a weekend long enough for Barcelona?
- For a first visit, a weekend gets you the Sagrada Família and the old city and not much else, which is the same as any two days. What a weekend adds that a Tuesday and Wednesday do not is Sunday morning, which is the one time the city is visibly doing something for itself rather than for visitors.
- What is open in Barcelona on a Sunday?
- Bars, restaurants, most museums and every street. A large part of the retail is closed, and the ordinary neighbourhood markets wind down early or do not open at all. Plan Sunday as a walking-and-eating day rather than a shopping day and it becomes the best day of the weekend rather than the flattest.
- What should I do on the Friday night?
- Get into the old city rather than into a restaurant near the hotel. The Gothic Quarter after about ten at night is quiet, narrow and completely different from the same streets at four in the afternoon, and it costs nothing to walk through. It is also the only part of the weekend that does not compete with anything else for time.
- Is Sunday a good day for a guided tour in Barcelona?
- It is the best day for one in Gràcia, because the vermouth hour is a Sunday ritual and it is the part of the neighbourhood with a fixed timetable. It is a poorer day for anything that depends on shops or workshops being open.
- Should I book anything in advance for a weekend trip?
- The Sagrada Família, and any restaurant you actually care about on the Saturday night. Everything else in this plan is street. Buy the basilica ticket from its own site and take a morning slot, because on a two-night weekend an afternoon slot removes a whole half day.
The tours this piece is about
The Gothic Quarter after dark
By day it is a crowded stage set. By night it is a narrow city.
- How long it lasts
- 2 h
- Runs in
- EN · ES · CA
- Price
- 18 €
Never more than 20 people
Gràcia: the town that rang the bell
A bell, a bombardment, and a vermouth at the end of it.
- How long it lasts
- 3 h
- Runs in
- EN · ES
- Price
- 36 €
Never more than 10 people
More in the journal
Planning your trip
- Barcelona rains about fifty-three days a year, and it does it all at once
- One day in Barcelona: the case for cramming, and why we argue with it
- Two days in Barcelona, planned backwards from the tickets
- Three days in Barcelona, and what the third one is actually like
- Barcelona with children: a short list, with the drawbacks attached
- Coming back to Barcelona: what changes on a second visit