Barcelona and Catalonia [Paperback]

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 final touches on a high speed international rail network and the world's longest metro line. A new city center is under construction around the hideous soon-to-be-buried elevated roundabout, the Plaça de les Glòries Catalanes, where Jean Nouvel's landmark Torre Agbar (the 'Suppository') already shimmers with 4500 LED illuminations: one building will be the Centre de Disseny, dedicated to designer everything past, present and future. A cutting-edge Marine Zoo is being set up along the coast by the new Forum, where architect Zaha Hadid recently laid the first stone of her Spiralling Tower.

"But the vibrant city of Gaudi, Picasso and Miro hardly stands alone. The real Barcelona is the city state of Catalonia, a splendid region of olive groves and vines, mountains and beaches, medieval hill towns and idyllic Mediterranean scenery -- all missed by visitors making a beeline to Barcelona. In our new Cadogan Guide we make an effort to tempt the reader into this fascinating hinterland, to explore the proud, restless Catalan genius underlying the unique 'Dali Triangle' around Girona, the startling Modernista cava cellars of the Alt Penedes and brand new endeavors such as the Fundacio Alicia for scientific culinary research, directed by the 'world's greatest chef,' Ferran Adria of elBulli."

Dana Facaros and Michael Pauls have done a terrific job with this guide. We also found Top 10 Barcelona (EYEWITNESS TOP 10 TRAVEL GUIDE) a very handy reference during our visit.

Our reading list for this stop on our tour included several old favorites:

Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell. Orwell's street level view of the Barcelona uprising and the spirit of a city at war is a classic, of course. Barcelona's tradition of keeping the old and building for the new give the book an immediancy that is hard to resist.

Travels with My Donkey: One Man and His Ass on a Pilgrimage to Santiago by Tim Moore. This book tells the history and describes the culture of the medieval Way of St. James, a very different region of Spain, but enlightening on how people from Barcelona differ from the northern regions.

Barcelona by Robert Hughes. A long time cultural history favorite: architecture, art, religion and literature from Rome to the present. 180 mostly black-and-white photographs.

Antoni Gaudi by Ignasi de Sola Morales. You can't escape Gaudi in Barcelona -- and who would want to -- nor dozens of books on his art. This 1992 book is a comprehensive study featuring 300 color illustrations.

There's much, much more, but Barcelona & Catalonia (Cadogan Guides) is a wonderful introduction.

Robert C. Ross 2009

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 the history of Barcelona was quite long and interesting. Also insightful were the sections on Gaudi', Parc Guell, the Sagrada Familia and the architecture of the Example.

Perhaps the one thing I thought could have been done better was the maps. There are two maps for Barcelona, a larger one which covers most of the city, and a more detailed one for the area around the old town. Both were reliable and very useful for general orientation. The problem is that these maps were instead not very useful in finding restaurants, whose location is briefly described in the "eating out" section but not located on the map. In some cases the street/square where the restaurant was located wasn't even labeled in the map, which caused us some trouble. Cadogan's maps would be much improved if hotels/restaurants were clearly indicated. Given that, as I was writing before, these guides include a relatively small number of options, I think these locations could be included in the maps without adding too much clutter.

But with this caveat this is a great guide and I would certainly buy it again. Good job once again, Cadogan!

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 possible.

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 3 reviews  4.7 out of 5 stars