About this companion

The Barcelona Companion is a working guide to the city, not a brochure and not a ranked list of "musts." Each entry is written by people who went to the place — queued for the ticket, climbed the hill, ate the meal, missed the last metro — and then wrote down what they actually found. Where something is overrated, the entry says so. Where a famous sight earns the hype and the price, it says that too.

How the city is divided

Barcelona is dense, and it does not reward treating it as one blur of landmarks. We group it the way most visitors end up walking it:

• Gaudí & modernisme — the Sagrada Família, Park Güell, the Passeig de Gràcia houses, and the Eixample grid they sit in.
• The old city — the Gothic Quarter, El Born and the Picasso Museum, and La Rambla with the Boqueria.
• Sea & hill — Montjuïc above the port, the Barceloneta beaches, and the neighbourhood of Gràcia.
• The table, the road, the airport — how Catalans actually eat and drink, the day trips out of town, getting around, and arriving from El Prat.

The rule

One rule decides what goes in: it has to have been checked on the ground, recently. Opening hours move, a tapas bar everyone loved changes hands, a "skip-the-line" ticket stops skipping the line. We would rather stand behind a tight set of entries than copy fifty from older guides. Where something is likely to have shifted — museum hours, festival dates, transport prices — the entry tells you to confirm before you build a day around it.

What we link to

Where it helps, entries point to the sources worth trusting — the official sites for the monuments, the city transport authority for tickets and timetables, the tourism boards for the towns nearby. We are not paid to recommend anything, and we keep the guide clear of the sponsored "experiences" that clutter most travel pages.

That is the whole of it. Start with whatever is near your hotel, read the practical entry on getting around, and let the city open out from there.