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I'm taking a very short trip (5 days) to Barcelona next week to attend the Primavera festival.

The day before and after the festival i've got a couple of days to go do the whole tourist thing.

Visiting Park Guell and Sagrada Família are high on my To Do list, but if anyone has good suggestions of great locations to go eat, drink and be merry, here's the place to post them!

If you're into Gaudi, Sagrada Familia! There is nothing nothing quite like walking the spiral stairs to the top.

Also the Casa Battló tour. It ain't cheap, but it's very cool.

If the evenings are fine and you want to relax, then you could do a lot worse than sit by the beach later on. I found this to be a perfect end to a hard weekend there last summer.

A short walk from Las Ramblas you'll find c/ Riera Baixa (map: http://tinyurl.com/2hbzf3 ), there's a handful of record stores - good ones - and the area itself, bounded by Las Ramblas and the Macba, is pretty great: tons of little eccentric bars and what have you. One of which I was quite fond of on my last visit was Benidorm (39 Joaquim Costa) which was hip without being cloyingly self-conscious about it.

A real treat - and lord knows I've mentioned this so many times - is Cocktails Boadas, a perfectly preserved art deco gem. A man in a white tuxedo will fix you a world class Mohito, Martini or whatever it is you fancy and you get to spend an hour feeling like you're in Casablanca. It never gets too busy and is full of locals (generally a good sign I always think). It is, in your parlance Gareth, deeply sexy.

Edit: More Gaudi - you can wander over the roof of Casa Mila, well worth a look.

Go visit Javier Mariscal's Gambrinus Lobster.

Mariscal's an amazing artist. When my dad went to Barceloa I asked him to get me something - anything - of his. He got me a children's book written in Catalan, which is awesome.

cjh wrote:A short walk from Las Ramblas you'll find c/ Riera Baixa (map: http://tinyurl.com/2hbzf3 ), there's a handful of record stores - good ones - and the area itself, bounded by Las Ramblas and the Macba, is pretty great: tons of little eccentric bars and what have you..

This area (The Raval) is good to wander around if you don't have much to do - and just want to visit some bars, see what a traditional/historic part of the city looks like. It also has a reputation for being a bit seedy and being a target area for petty crime which seems unwarranted (maybe I'm just blind to that kind of stuff?) - but this seems to keep tourists with quidebooks away which can only enhance your experience.

Also if the Gaudi gets too much you can vist Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion - http://www.miesbcn.com/en/foundation.html - for a nice change.

La Boqueria - brilliant food market, located right next to Las Ramblas.

Barcelona is so much fun -- this from somebody who speaks no Spanish.

Hanging out in el Raval is a lot of fun. Go to a restaurant by the shore and eat some God damn paella. Eat some serrano ham. Drink some cheap red wines -- they are good at making these, for whatever reason. Walk around, obviously. My alternative to climbing the steps at Sagrada Familia was imbibing a jar of sangria while sitting in its shadow. I was there during the '03 heat wave and it was too hot to do anything except drink.

The CCCB is awesome, and centrally located. They had a great exhibit on "trash culture" which included Fox News coverage of 9/11 projected onto a wall, complete with audio, subtitles, and the crawler. The Spanish sat there in disbelief.

Do watch out for pickpockets, bag snatchers, etc. The petty criminals of Barcelona have refined their art to an incredible degree of sophistication. One morning, I sat in the park at la Gracia and watched a dude open up a wallet, remove the cash, and toss the rest into a trash can. Same guy returned every ten minutes with a fresh wallet.

I was too drunk to really remember specifics, but I loved each day of the week-and-a-half I spent in Barcelona. Walk around and have fun, you won't go wrong.

Visit the pub. With me. McTwat, KKB and I plan to have 'done' tourism all to hell by Wednesday night and would like to go drinking with Nottingham after it arrives.

We've been before and think we know places. Last time, I ended up dancing for hours in a hip-hop club on my own, dressed in a M&S v-neck sweater and smart slacks.

You'll need to build up your endurance if you want to watch Built To Spill at 3am on Saturday morning.

daniel robert chapman wrote:Visit the pub. With me. McTwat, KKB and I plan to have 'done' tourism all to hell by Wednesday night and would like to go drinking with Nottingham after it arrives.

We've got the whole week to 'lark about' Chapman...