Getting around Barcelona: six trips in ten are made without a vehicle

Most articles about getting around Barcelona start with which ticket to buy. We are going to start somewhere else, because the transport authority’s own survey makes a better opening argument.

For journeys that both begin and end inside the city, in 2024:

Trips on foot, by bicycle and by personal mobility vehicle are the majority (60.1 %). The public transport share stands at 27.9 %.

Six in ten. That is not a slogan about sustainable cities; it is a measurement of what actually happens in a place where most destinations are within a couple of kilometres of most origins. The practical translation for a visitor is that the metro is what you use to change neighbourhood, and your feet are what you use inside one. Almost every plan that goes wrong here goes wrong by inverting that.

One precision, because it is the sort of thing that gets miscopied. The 60.1 % combines walking, cycling and scooters. The document does not publish a walking-only figure and we are not going to derive one. It does say separately that walks of more than five minutes account for 63.3 % of the city’s internal active-mode mobility.

The metro, in numbers that have a date on them

From the operator’s own annual data sheet, in a table headed with its reference date, 31 December 2025:

• 8 lines
• 165 stations
• 125.4 km

Line by line, in kilometres and stations: L1 20.2/30 · L2 12.8/18 · L3 17.8/26 · L4 16.5/22 · L5 18.6/27 · L9 and L10 north 10.4/12 · L9 and L10 south 26.1/23 · L11 2.3/5 · and the Funicular de Montjuïc, 0.7/2.

Yes — the funicular is a line of the metro. More on that below.

A wrinkle worth naming. The operator’s web page that links to this document is labelled with a different reference date from the document itself. We have used the dated table inside the PDF. If you find slightly different figures on the same operator’s site, that is why.

Accessibility. The operator states lifts in 156 of the 165 stations. It publishes no reference year for that figure, which is a genuine gap — the denominator is dated and the numerator is not. It does date the buses: since 2007, the bus network has been fully adapted for people with reduced mobility.

Driverless. The operator says 25 % of the metro network already runs without a driver. It does not name the lines in any text we could read without running its scripts, and the obvious candidates do not reconcile with the percentage arithmetic. So: twenty-five per cent, no list. If somebody hands you three line numbers, ask where they got them.

Four lines that are not the metro, and one that is

This is the thing that confuses more visitors than anything else on the network.

L6, L7, L8 and L12 appear on the map with metro-style numbers and are run by Ferrocarrils de la Generalitat de Catalunya, a different company. They are in the same integrated fare system, so a ticket works — but the stations feel different, the trains are different, and if you are following signs for “metro” you can end up on the wrong side of a concourse.

The Vallvidrera funicular is also FGC — its conditions of use list trains, the Vallvidrera and Gelida funiculars, the rack railway and the Montserrat funiculars as its services.

And the Montjuïc funicular is genuinely metro. It is a row in the operator’s own metro table, counted inside the 125.4 km and the 165 stations, and the fare position is explicit:

The funicular forms part of the integrated fare system and the ticket price is the same as a metro or bus journey. Multi-journey passes and Hola BCN! day passes are also valid.

Two stops: Paral·lel, connecting to L2 and L3, and Parc de Montjuïc. Which means the cheapest way up the hill is already in whatever ticket you were going to buy anyway — a point made at more length in how to get to Montjuïc.

The two cable cars, which are not the same cable car

The Telefèric de Montjuïc goes up the hill towards the castle. It is run by Projectes i Serveis de Mobilitat, a company within the TMB group — not by TMB itself, and not by the city’s services company, both of which you will read.

The Transbordador Aeri del Port is the one that crosses the harbour from Barceloneta. Different installation entirely, and the Montjuïc operator says so in its own answers: the Telefèric de Montjuïc does not do that route. We could not establish who runs the port one from an official page, so we are not telling you.

On whether the Montjuïc cable car is in the integrated fare system: no official page states it either way. Searching the fare authority’s published list of integrated operators for it returns nothing, which is an absence rather than a statement. Treat it as a separately ticketed attraction and check before you assume your pass covers it.

The Tramvia Blau, since people keep looking for it

The blue tram up Avinguda del Tibidabo closed temporarily for works in January 2018 and, as of writing, has not come back.

In November 2025 the city announced it would be restored. The mayor’s stated plan was to include the project in the 2027 budget, so that it could be tendered and works begun at the end of that year. That is a commitment with a date on it, not a service.

Do not plan around it, and do not believe a page that shows it running.

The airport, and the one thing that will actually catch you

The metro line L9 Sud serves both T1 and T2, every 7 minutes, with a journey of 32 minutes into the city.

And then this, which is the single most useful sentence in this article:

These do not serve the airport: single ticket, T-casual, T-familiar, T-grup.

Plus the school pass, event tickets and the Montserrat titles. The airport stations need their own ticket.

The consequence is spelled out by the operator, and it is worse than a fare adjustment:

If you arrive at the Aeroport T1 or Aeroport T2 stations with an invalid ticket, you will have to buy the airport ticket there in order to leave the station.

You are through the barrier and inside, with your luggage, and the machine is the only way out. It is the classic first-morning mistake in this city. The Hola Barcelona travel card does work for the airport, both ways.

And the train does not go to T1. The suburban line runs down a short single-track branch that reaches T2. A new branch, in a newly built tunnel under the runways, which will serve both airport terminals, is described by the operator as a project. Anybody telling you there is a T1 rail station is describing something that has not been built.

Bicing, briefly, because it is asked about

The city’s bike share bars under-16s outright. It does not require you to be registered as a resident — a valid identity document is enough. Whether it is a sensible thing for a visitor to sign up to for two nights is a separate question and the answer is usually no.

Walking, and the block

The grid looks walkable on a map and is longer than it looks, because the Eixample was designed at a scale that flatters paper.

One thing we are not going to give you: the dimensions of a block. The figures everybody quotes are not published on the city’s own Eixample pages, and we could not find a municipal source for them. What the district does say is why the corners are cut:

The blocks were not quite square, because, in order to make visibility easier, the angles at the corners were cut into a chamfer.

For visibility. Not for cafés, not for turning circles — so that you could see what was coming. And that is why crossing an Eixample junction takes noticeably longer than crossing anywhere in the old city, where the streets were never planned at all.

The practical version

Inside a neighbourhood, walk. The old city and Gràcia are both about three kilometres end to end and both punish anybody trying to be efficient in them.

Between neighbourhoods, take the metro. It is the fastest thing in the city and it goes everywhere you are going.

Buy the airport ticket for the airport. Twice.

Check the month before you plan the walking. Six trips in ten on foot is a comfortable statistic in May and a different proposition in August, and both halves of that — heat and crowding — are measured in when to go to Barcelona.

And do not buy a travel pass before you have written down your days. If each day is anchored at one end of the city, as the two-day plan argues it should be, you may make three or four journeys in total. Fares and products change and we do not publish them; the fare authority’s own site does.

Getting to the two neighbourhoods we work in has its own pages, because both have a trap in them: how to get to Gràcia, where four of the recommended stations are in another district, and how to get to Montjuïc, where one of the six ways up is already in your ticket.

And the bit you do on foot with somebody talking

Our walks are walks. The Gothic Quarter route stays inside the old city and never gets on anything; the Gràcia walk covers three hours of short streets and finishes with a glass of vermouth.

Meeting points, days and languages are on those pages, which are current. This one is about a network, and networks change.