This, together with a 'Barcelona card' (purchase at airport or tourist info offices) which provides unlimted use of transaportation and discounted entry fees to numerous tourist places, is all that anyone needs to make the most of this diverse and large city.

I'll certainly be purchasing more books from this series.


A colourful book with lots of suggestions for places to see.   February 27, 2002
 22 out of 23 found this review helpful

This book is for the most part very good. It's a handy size to carry around with you, and it contains lots of photos which are useful in deciding what you should see and when. For me, the pictures are the book's main strength - it's very easy to flick through this book and think "that looks interesting, let's go there". They also make the book a nice memento of your visit once you've returned.

The city is divided into sections, and a suggested itinerary is given for each. You will most probably not want to follow these to the letter, but there are very helpful for prioritising what to visit during your stay. There is also a list of restaurants and bars located within each of these sections, and although we didn't use this feature much it did lead us to find a very nice vegetarian restaurant called L'Illa de Grycia.

The coverage of the city on the included maps was very good - for example the DK guide (which we also took) doesn't cover the area around the main station - however it suffers from the same problem as the Rome Spiral guide in that locations mentioned in the text aren't grid referenced, although it was less of a problem in Barcelona than Rome (this issue has been addressed for the Prague book)

The information on the underground/public transport could have been better; we bought the wrong travel card initially as it's quite difficult to find a map showing the travel zones in Barcelona (basically everything is in zone 1). We also couldn't find any useful information on the cable cars in the harbour.

However, overall we found the book perfect for what we wanted. It gave us lots of ideas for things to see and although it's not perfect it gives you a good platform for a stay in the city.