I came back from Barcelona last weekend a bit disappointed. The city is large, ....large....and full of tourists. If it wasn't for the Sagrada de Familia, I could have been in Disneyland. Don't get me wrong, it does have some nice barrios - Barrio Born and Gotic were my favourites - but over all -infiltrated with tourists in their holiday hats and backpacks. I did enjoy watching all the street acts though - Che Guevara was my fave , shockingly real.
Anyway, this extract from an FT article posted on Gridskipper, couldn't have said it better:
A few hundred metres away, Las Ramblas is full to bursting point. Yet it’s empty of atmosphere. There’s nothing wrong with this tree-lined street with traffic either side, its centre given over to a fluctuating mass of pedestrians. If you like balloon-twisters, portrait-sketchers and living statues (a hooded monk; Christopher Columbus; a painter falling off his ladder) it’s a good place to come. But nothing unique or special has survived the tourist invasion.
Basically...go to Valencia instead :)
