Located at the Mediterranean Sea in the very north of the Spanish coast, Barcelona is undoubtedly the most cosmopolitan and economically most active city in this country. It’s the capital of Catalonia, a region of Northern Spain that has its own unique culture, traditions, and personality. Barcelona is one of the most beautiful and exciting cities in the world attracting millions upon millions of visitors each year. There are many exhilarating and striking places to visit in Barcelona.
Barcelona tourist attractions include attractive beaches, wondrous mountains, a vibrant nightlife, and most of all its very own culture, tradition, and history. It has almost everything any holidaymaker would desire. Because of easy access and favorable weather conditions, it is comfortable to enjoy all the things to see in Barcelona.
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Places to Visit in Barcelona:
There are numerous places where there is something for everyone from families or couples to singletons. We are listing the must-see tourist destinations in Barcelona that travelers should never miss if they ever decide to visit Barcelona. So enjoy.
10. Camp Nou
For sports fans, one of the most thrilling places to visit in Barcelona is Camp Nou. It is the home ground of FC Barcelona and the largest stadium in Europe. Seating up to 99,786 people, this famous stadium is the third-largest stadium in the world. The fans do not go there only for football either.
The stadium has held live concerts by acts like Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, U2, Julio Iglesias, and was even used by Pope John II in 1982 to deliver mass to a congregation of over 121,000. One thing you can do is to grab a ticket for a game held in the Camp Nou and see Barcelona’s enthusiastic football fans at their most animated state. It will be a remarkable experience.
If you cannot see a game, then you can get a taste of all the excitement at the museum, with its multimedia exhibits and a self-guided tour of the stadium. With huge touch-screens allowing visitors to discover arcane aspects of the famous team, the museum provides a high-tech view into the club. The best bits of the museum itself is the photo section, the goal videos, and the views out over the stadium.
Here you can actually see golden boots of great goal scorers of the past. You can also learn about the greats who have played for Barca over the years, including Maradona, Ronaldinho, Kubala, and many others. If you gaze out across Camp Nou, the self-guided tour of the stadium is an experience in itself.
This tour takes in the dressing rooms of the team, leads out through the tunnel onto the pitch and finishes in the presidential box. If you want, you will also get to see the television studio, the press room, and the commentary boxes. It will take about 2½ hours for the whole visit to the historic stadium.
9. Museu Picasso
If you are a fan of Pablo Picasso than the best places to visit in Barcelona for you is the Museu Picasso. The Museum is a crucial starting point for understanding the shaping years of Pablo Picasso. There are 4251 works done by Picasso exhibited here. The museum was opened in 1963.
The Picasso Museum also reveals the artist’s relationship with Barcelona that was shaped in adolescence and that continued until his death. The collection of the museum is exclusive and virtually exhaustive up to the Blue Period. The collection also includes important works from 1917 and the series Las Meninas (1957). There is also an inclusive collection of the artist’s prints.
The museum is housed in five adjoining medieval palaces in Barcelona’s La Ribera. The setting alone makes the Museu Picasso unique (and worth the probable queues). The pretty courtyards, galleries, and staircases preserved in the first three of these buildings are as delightful as the collection inside.
8. Montjuïc
The Montjuic is a hill located near the center of Barcelona. It features a large number of attractions including the Spanish Village, the Magic Fountain and one of the city’s most important museums, MNAC. Most of these have originated from two major events that took place in Montjuic: the 1929 International Exhibition and the 1992 Olympics.
Montjuic is, in fact, a mountain inside the city. You will have a splendid view of Barcelona from all sides. Covered with flowers, exotic trees, and giant cactus, the hillside is a great place to have a picnic. The eastern side of the hill is almost a sheer cliff, from where you can have a commanding view over the city’s harbor immediately below. Montjuic features another one of the most interesting tourist attractions in Barcelona named the Palau Nacional (National Palace).
It was originally built as the central pavilion for the International Exhibition. The “neo-Baroque style” building houses the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (MNAC). As well as the 19th and 20th-century works of art, the museum also features Roman, Renaissance, and Gothic and Baroque art. There are also a number of sports facilities built for the 1992 Olympics.
7. Font Magica
You will never get bored of things to do in Barcelona. For instance, Font Magica is literally what the name suggest-a magic fountain. Font Magica or the Magic Fountain is the main feature of the collection of waterfalls and ponds on Avinguda Maria Cristina, which stretches from the Palau Nacional to Placa Espanya in Montjuic. This impressive fountain was constructed for the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition.
The fountain delivers a spectacular display of color, light and water acrobatics with musical complement every Thursday to Sunday in the summer months and every Friday and Saturday during winter. At the same time, the Palau National is illuminated, providing a beautiful background.
Visit Montjuic Magic Fountain, and be dumbfounded by the magnificent display of color, light, water, and music, which generate over 50 kinds of shades and hues. The moving water jets, illuminated in changing shades and hues and synchronized with light and music, seem to be a magic dance that unfolds, subsides, rises and falls, is obscured and bursts forth before our eyes during the displays.
Montjuic’s Magic Fountain is the chosen site for the “Piromusical” every year. It is a huge firework display with music and laser show, which is the closing event for Barcelona’s main festival, La Merce.
6. Casa Batllo
Casa Batllo will simply take your breath away. It is one of the strangest residential buildings in Europe. We are talking about Gaudi at his hallucinogenic best. It is one of the three houses on the block between Carrer del Consell de Cent and Carrer d’Arago that gave it the playful name Manzana de la Discordia which literally means ‘Apple (Block) of Discord’.
The building is locally known as the “house of bones” or “house of dragons”. From the outside, the portico of Casa Batllo looks like it has been made from skulls and bones. In fact, the “Skulls” are balconies and the “bones” are supporting pillars. The house looks alive if you stare at it long enough. Take a look at the pavement before entering the house. Each paving piece carries stylized images of an octopus and a starfish.
The outside will surprise you, and you will fall in love with the inside! It is not just a building. It is an artistic legend. The internal light wells shimmer with tiles of deep-sea blue. The straight line was eschewed and so the staircase wafts you up to the 1st (main) floor. Everything swirls: the ceiling is twisted into a vortex around its sun-like a lamp; the doors, window, and skylights are dreamy waves of wood and colored glass.
It is the same in all the other rooms and enclosed terrace. Twisting, tiled chimney pots add a surreal touch to the roof. Its unique interior is just as extraordinary as its fairytale-like exterior.
5. Parc Guell
One of the fun things to do in Barcelona is having a nice relaxing walk through the Parc Guell. Park Guell is where Gaudi turned his hand to landscape gardening. This park is a very strange and enchanting place where Gaudi’s passion for natural forms really took a flight to the point where the artificial almost seems more natural than the natural.
The area was originally meant to be a residential property development with Gaudi doing much of the planning and landscape design. In 1922 the city bought the estate for use as a public park. The park contains amazing stone structures, stunning tiling, and fascinating buildings.
There is a Gaudi Dragon Fountain at the entrance of the park. Adorned in beautiful colored tiling, the dragon is rather hypnotic and magical. You can also see a walkway supported by twisting rock pillars that seem to be growing out of the ground like tree trunks. They do feel natural even though they are irregular in shape.
At the top of Guell park is a terraced area where you get a wonderful view of the park and of Barcelona City. Much of the park is still wooded, but it’s laced with pathways. With stunning views of the city, this is a magical experience. So prepare yourself for the trip.
4. Barceloneta
A nice relaxing tour to Barceloneta must not be completed without you going to Barceloneta. There are seven different beaches stretching over 4.5 km (2.8 miles) of coastline. Among them, the Barceloneta probably tops them all. Located in the traditional fishing district, this is one of Barcelona’s oldest and best-loved beaches. It is a wide long beach full of restaurants, which are mostly American style and bars.
There is an intriguing collection of legless bronze figures in what looks like a birdcage at the end of Joan de Borbo in Moll de la Barceloneta. This is Juan Munoz’s A Place Where it Always Rains sculpture. There is also Los Cubos (the Cubes), which is a hippy hang-out and popular meeting spot. And if you go further down you can see the rooftop glitter of Frank Gehry’s Goldfish sculpture.
If you want to have a nude sunbathing, then go to the area in front of Barceloneta’s Leisure Centre. It is the unofficial spot for nude sunbathing in Barcelona. There are also some excellent seafood restaurants including the highly-regarded Can Majo.
3. Casa Milà
There are so many exciting places to visit in Barcelona that one cannot decide where to go. Whatever, Casa Mila is a must-visit spot. So keep it on your list. Casa Mila is the last masterpiece of Antoni Gaudi. It was built between the years 1906 and 1910. It is better known as La Pedrera (the Quarry) because of its irregular grey stone portico, which ripples around the corner of Carrer de Provenca.
The colorful building is considered one of the artist’s most eccentric and alluring architectural creations with not one straight edge on the exterior. Curved, sinuous forms are the main elements inside and outside La Pedrera. The Casa Mila’s portico resembles the moving sea, the waves interacting with the seaweed-motifs on the wrought-iron balcony railings.
The most interesting place in the house may be the rooftop. There you can find a large collection of surrealistic chimneys that look completely different from one another and several sculptures that dominate the rooftop.
Casa Mila is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. So there are only three areas you can visit here: the dreamlike attic space with its brick catenaries arches; the rooftop where the chimneys bring to mind the silhouette of warriors rising up among the dunes of the desert; and finally a period apartment.
Casa Mila today is a guiding light shining with creation and knowledge, a grand container full of content, which has a vital role to play in the transformation of society and obligation to the people. It also hosts a large exposition of Gaudi works, covering Sagrada Familia and Casa Batllo, not only La Pedrera itself.
2. La Rambla
This is probably the city’s most famous street and is a bustling hive of activity. La Rambla goes from Plaza Catalonia to the Port Vell harbor of Barcelona and borders the Raval and the Gothic areas of the old city. Because it is actually a series of several different streets that all have a distinct feeling it is often called Las Ramblas. La Rambla is exactly 1.2 kilometers long and nearly everyone who visits Barcelona walks along with it.
The Spanish poet Federico García Lorca once said, “It is the only street in the world, which I wish would never end.” Barcelona is a city of narrow, winding streets and the Rambla was the only space where everyone could stroll and spend their leisure time. The Rambla became a meeting place for all the social classes because of its central location.
La Rambla is a window into Catalan culture, with cultural centers, theaters and architecturally fascinating buildings lining its sides. The middle part of the Rambla is pedestrian zed and bordered by trees. You will find an abundant amount of Kiosks, flower stalls and street artists here. A stroll here is pure sensory overload, with souvenir hawkers, bucklers, pavement artists, mimes and living statues all part of the ever-changing street scene.
As you walk along, you’ll see landmark buildings, such as the greatest theater of Barcelona’s opera, the Gran Teatre del Liceu, the Palau de la Virreina and the spectacular Boqueria Market.
1. Sagrada Familia
The Sagrada Família is Antoni Gaudi’s unfinished masterpiece and one of the most popular tourist attractions in Barcelona. This famous work of art attracts nearly 2.8 million visitors each year. It is an architectural bible that has become a Barcelona icon. The construction of this famous church began in 1882 and it will take a decade more to finish. The fame of the building only grows with passing time.
The church already is an astonishingly intricate structure even though the work is still in progress. You can visit the crypt where Gaudí is buried. You can an awesome time by seeing the transept and central nave with its giant, tree-like pillars and fabulous vaulting. The history of the church is narrated in a museum, which also tells the story of its great architect. The towers can also be visited with an elevator and a long walk, which will lead you to the top of a tower.
You will have a wonderful view over Barcelona from here. The design elements and the religious symbolism built into all the spaces of the church will make you breathless.