Barcelona & Catalonia (Cadogan Guides) (Cadogan Guide Barcelona & Catalonia)

We visited Barcelona earlier this year for the first time, and found a fascinating, vibrant city, that had been greatly improved when it hosted the Olympics. Barcelona has a long tradition of keeping major architectural elements from its past, often giving them new uses, and it relied on this tradition to open up the waterfront to the rest of the city. The result is one of the most interesting walking cities in the world.

The Cadogan Guides are worth buying and reading before a visit to any of its regions, and the Barcelona guide is no exception. An extract gives a fair description of the treasures here:

"We have watched Barcelona evolve since our first visit in 1980, and are happy to report that the city that captivated the world in the 1992 Summer Olympics is hardly ready to rest on its quirky, design-obsessed laurels. While millions come to marvel at the colossal construction project that is the Sagrada Famil"a, away from the crowds the city is putting the...Read more

Over the last couple of years I have become a loyal customer of Cadogan travel guides (I also own Cadogan guides for "France", "Bologna and Emilia Romagna" and "Gascony, the Pyrenees and Toulouse", all of which I liked a lot). I prefer guides that devote a lot of space to history and site description and not too much to hotels/restaurants etc and these guides are just like that.

I used this guide while spending a few days in the wonderful Barcelona and I liked it a lot. The guide is well-written with a lot of historical information (taking into account the size of the book), nice maps (with a caveat, see below), very nice formatting, useful tips on "don't miss" locations. We tried only one of the restaurants suggested in the guide (which was all right) but we also checked out a few others and they seemed to be very good choices overall. In one case we could not get a table because the restaurant was already all booked for the day (Kaiku, on the beachfront)! The section on...Read more

We used this book in combination with Risk Steeves's brief book (or extended booklet) and a fabulous and indestructible Rough Guide map. We already knew where we wanted to stay, so our focus was on understanding the history of Barcelona, prioritizing the sites we would see (and taking in those sites in a sane way), and getting lost only in the best of ways. The Cadogan guide was outstanding for the first of these things especially and made a solid dent in the second (especially where background details were concerned). The maps were merely OK -- good for exploring a specific neighborhood but not for cross-neighborhood navigation. The Metro map in the back, on the other hand, was perfect and extremely useful. But we didn't buy this book for its maps. The authors are clearly familiar with the area and possess a witty yet informative writing style. We loved the area and if we can manage to return, we will bring this book along for the journey. Would give 4.5 stars if it were...Read more