Eating our way through Barcelona 🍷🥖🥘
Sunday and Monday, 5th and 6th July 2026
If a picture tells a thousand words, then surely a few hundred photos must tell millions!
My last few posts have been on the long side, so I’m going to let the photos do most of the talking this time.
Our cruise package included two nights in Barcelona, but we decided to add another two. Four days still wasn’t really enough, but we already know we’ll be back. Spain (and Portugal) deserve a proper trip when it’s not the middle of summer. Apart from the heat, it’s peak tourist season, which means bigger crowds and bigger prices. Add the Tour de France starting in Barcelona while we were there, and the city was pretty hectic!
We disembarked from the ship on Sunday morning, took about 30 minutes to get through immigration, then grabbed a taxi from the port to our hotel, dropped our bags and headed straight out to explore the old quarter. There’s no better way to get your bearings than simply wandering, although it was very hot!
A brief siesta after check-in, then we walked to dinner at Contraban, a Michelin-recommended restaurant just a 10-minute walk from the hotel. The hotel is right across the road from the Cathedral in the Gothic quarter – a fabulous spot! The food was beautiful and, at around €100 for the two of us, surprisingly reasonable for the quality.
Monday was all about food… not that you’ll be surprised by that!
Rather than walk to the meeting point for our Culinary Backstreets tour, we caught a taxi. We quickly discovered taxis in Barcelona are cheaper than Uber and other rideshare services, and far more appealing when it’s already hot first thing in the morning. Our driver even put on music in English for us 🎶.
We’ve done several Culinary Backstreets tours over the years, including one here back in 2014 when we only had a single day in Barcelona, so we knew we were in for a treat.
There were just three other guests plus our wonderful guide, Senem, who spent the next five hours introducing us not just to Catalan food, but to Catalan life. We walked all over Senem’s local area in Gràcia, a few kilometres west of the hotel.
We started with coffee (chocolate milk for Dave and two of the others 😉 ), before wandering through Mercat de la Llibertat, where we learned that the market focuses on local produce. In fact, you cannot sell anything here that is not local. We also learned that most markets in Barcelona (there are 39 food markets in the city!) now incorporate a supermarket in the hope they can work in harmony rather than competition.
We saw lots and lots of amazing produce, delicatessens, cheese shops, butchers and more. I was surprised that rabbit remains an important source of protein in Catalonia, and Thursday is traditionally paella day, following the Monday fishing catch. I’m assuming by Thursday it needs using up!
We tried a couple of things in the market including some cheese, some ham (Jamón) and some dried fruit including candied orange slices dipped in chocolate. Much better than any I’ve tasted before!
Next was our breakfast stop, in a tiny neighbourhood bodega where, because we’re in Spain, a glass of cava (bubbles) at 10am seemed perfectly acceptable!
Over breakfast we sampled chickpea and spinach stew, potatoes with romesco sauce, grilled bread rubbed with fresh tomato and Pochas beans braised with calamari, while chatting about local food traditions and meeting the two young brothers who had taken over the restaurant from their father, and grandfather before that. Most of the recipes belong to their grandfather, and everything was delicious, if not the normal breakfast we would eat!
From there we visited a family-run shop filled with dried beans, nuts, spices, dried fruit and cheeses. We tasted wonderful local nuts, compared local pine nuts with imported Chinese ones and discovered chufa (tiger nuts), which aren’t actually nuts at all but tubers. They’re used to make the delicious, chilled drink Orxata, which we sampled later in the walk.
Next came what was possibly my favourite stop — an old-fashioned cake shop. It wasn’t so much about the food, but that we met the 85-year-old owner who still makes everything herself and lives upstairs. We tried three beautiful little sweets before walking uphill to “earn” the cup of Orxata.
Our aperitif stop was next. It was a traditional neighbourhood bar serving vermouth with cola (ikr) alongside olives, pickles and anchovies — but not the salty pizza variety we’re used to back home. The anchovies were particularly good and went so perfectly with the sweet drink.
Lunch somehow followed in a restaurant you would walk past if you didn’t know it was there!
We started with a pickled fish salad (with three types of fish including salted cod, which tbh I didn’t love) with an incredible xató dressing, more tomato-rubbed bread, chargrilled sausage with a very garlicky and delicious aioli, grilled capsicum and onion, and then wonderfully tender pull-apart pork cheek with grilled potatoes.
Just when we thought we couldn’t possibly eat another thing, we finished at Xurreria Trébol, which has been serving churros since 1955. Dave got to choose our order (mainly because he’d eaten less than everyone else!) and went for the classic churros with thick hot chocolate.
Excellent decision Dave. One each was plenty – but so yummy!
After all that food we did what the locals do best… headed back to the hotel for a proper afternoon rest, this time on foot the few kilometres along the well-known Las Ramblas. We easily hit our 10,000 steps today and saw some amazing Gaudi architecture too 🙂
Remarkably, after a full day of eating we still managed to find room around 9pm for a light tapas dinner of prawns, crispy calamari, patatas bravas and a single chicken croquette to share. Many restaurants don’t even open for dinner till 8pm, so 9pm is not considered late.
And yes… somehow there was still room for dessert.
A shared chocolate sundae from Burger King (sometimes you just have to embrace the full spectrum of dining experiences), before we needed to head back to the hotel for me to record my ‘foodie’ session with Sally from ABC Riverina to go to air on Thursday around 9:30am. Listen in if you can!
My next post will be the last one for this holiday. Tonight we are staying in Andorra, then tomorrow night at a Parador (Castle) in Cardona. I can’t wait to tell you about staying in a 1,100-year-old castle!
Sara xx
As I write this, we’ve had a fabulous hotel buffet breakfast and now we’re on our way to collect a hire car. We decided to pick it up outside the city to avoid the stress of driving through Barcelona traffic, and our next destination is somewhere we’ve wanted to visit for years…
Andorra!
A few fun Barcelona facts
• Barcelona’s seven beaches are all man-made, created for the 1992 Olympic Games using imported sand from Egypt.
• Ask for a bikini in Barcelona and you’ll be served a toasted ham-and-cheese sandwich, not swimwear.
• Barcelona has its own Statue of Liberty, tucked away outside the Arús Library.
• Parc de Collserola is one of the largest metropolitan parks in the world, far bigger than New York’s Central Park.
• The city has more historic bomb shelters than public parks.
• Gaudí’s masterpiece, La Sagrada Família, began construction in 1882 and is still being completed more than 140 years later.