I love Spain. I genuinely, deeply, unreservedly love it – and I say that as someone who has spent enough time there to have moved past the honeymoon phase and into something more honest.
The people, the food, the architecture, the rhythm of life, the way an evening can stretch from dinner at nine to dancing at three without anyone looking at a watch. And then there is the climate – warm, generous, Mediterranean in the truest sense of the word, as if the sky itself was designed to make you feel at ease.
It comes as no surprise to me that Spain welcomed a record 96.8 million international tourists in 2025. The country earns every single one of them.
But travel, if you do enough of it, starts to teach you things about yourself. You learn what you actually want from a trip versus what you thought you wanted.
You learn where your tolerance ends. And sometimes, you come home from a place that everyone loves – a place that objectively deserves to be loved – and you quietly admit to yourself: I don’t think I need to go back. That place, for me, is Barcelona.
Let Me Be Clear Before I Continue
Barcelona is extraordinary. I want to say that plainly, because what follows is not an argument that you should not go. The Sagrada Família alone justifies a visit from virtually any corner of the world.
The Gothic Quarter, with its narrow medieval lanes and the particular way the evening light falls on stone that has been standing since the fourteenth century, is one of the most atmospheric urban environments in Europe.
Gaudí’s fingerprints on the city – Casa Batlló, Park Güell, Casa Milà – represent a kind of architectural imagination that simply does not exist anywhere else.
I know all of this. I have seen it. I appreciated it. And then I had a week in August, and by the end of it I was ready to leave. Although my initial intention was to stay much longer in the city.
August in Barcelona: The Good, the Bad, and the Beach
I arrived with reasonable expectations. I knew August in Spain could be brutal – I had experienced enough Spanish summers to know what a Mediterranean August is capable of.
What I got instead was genuinely pleasant: sunny, dry, around 27 degrees during the day and a comfortable 22 at night. The city surprised me. The weather was perfect.
What was not perfect was the beach.
I had packed for the sea. I had a towel, sunscreen, the reasonable expectation of blue water and a few hours of Mediterranean bliss. What I found at Barceloneta, Bogatell and Nova Icària was something quite different.
The first problem was space – or the complete absence of it. I have seen crowded beaches before, but I was not prepared for what August does to Barcelona’s coastline.
The sand was not a beach so much as a continuous human mosaic: towel against towel, shoulder against shoulder, not a gap visible in any direction.
The second problem was the water. On every day of that week, the sea looked uninviting – murky, with a greenish cast and an odour that I could not quite identify but that I did not find appealing.
Several locals, when I mentioned it, shrugged and mentioned overflow pipes near the shore. I cannot verify that, and I will not – it may simply have been the conditions of that particular week.
But I was there for seven days, and the water looked the same every morning. I did not swim in Barcelona. I had come to the sea and not swam in it. That, for me, was the moment the city started to lose me.
The Crowd That Never Ends
The beaches were the sharpest disappointment, but they were part of a larger experience that I found genuinely exhausting by the end of the week: the sheer relentless scale of the tourist crowd.
Barcelona in August does not feel like a city with tourists in it. It feels like a tourist operation with a city somewhere underneath.
Every pavement along the Ramblas, every terrace near the cathedral, every viewpoint at Park Güell: queues, waiting, the constant management of bodies in space.
Restaurants required the kind of luck or planning that takes the spontaneity out of eating. Photographs required patience, and frequently included other people.
The locals – who have taken to hanging banners from their balconies asking tourists to go home – are grappling with a problem that has no easy solution when your city has become one of the most visited on Earth. I understand them completely.
A Few More Things Worth Knowing
Pickpocketing in Barcelona is endemic and highly organised. This is not a vague warning about being careful – it is a specific, operational reality.
Keep your bag in front of you. Do not leave your phone on a café table. Be especially alert on the Metro and along the Ramblas. In a week I witnessed two incidents involving other tourists and heard about several more.
I also noticed, more than in other Spanish cities I have visited, a visible roughness to certain streets – particularly in the Gothic Quarter, where the concentration of people and the narrowness of the lanes creates conditions that are difficult to keep clean, and where the experience of walking at certain hours was less pleasant than I had hoped.
These are not criticisms of Barcelona as a place. They are the honest picture of a week spent there, and you deserve to have it.
Where I Would Go Instead: Three Cities That Keep Calling Me Back
1. Valencia
Without hesitation, every time. I have been to Valencia several times, and I will go back again – not because I feel I have not seen it, but because it is the kind of city that reveals something new each visit and that I simply enjoy being in.
I want to be careful not to oversell this, because Valencia deserves to be discovered on its own terms rather than simply as “the better Barcelona.” It is its own city, with its own character. But since I am drawing the comparison, let me draw it honestly.
The architecture is magnificent – not Gaudí, but the city’s own extraordinary contribution to European building. The Art Nouveau and Art Déco streets of the Eixample district, the modernist Central Market with its soaring iron-and-glass roof, and Santiago Calatrava’s City of Arts and Sciences at the end of the old Turia riverbed – one of the most visually striking architectural complexes in Spain, and somehow still underrated.
Valencia ranked 7th globally for quality of life in 2025 according to Numbeo – big enough for culture and energy, but small enough to stay sane. That is precisely how it feels on the ground.
The beach is simply better. Much cleaner water, more space, a proper seafront promenade that feels like it belongs to the city rather than to the tourist industry. I swim in Valencia every time I visit. That alone tells you most of what you need to know.
In terms of cost of living, Valencia is considerably more affordable than Barcelona, which is one of the most expensive cities in Spain, comparable to Madrid (I love Madrid but I will talk about it in another article).
The practical effect is that you eat better for less, stay in nicer accommodation for less, and feel less like the city is monetising your presence at every turn. And the safety? I walked freely, without one hand permanently on my bag.
One detail that rarely gets mentioned but matters enormously for anyone planning a beach trip: Valencia has a longer effective summer season than Barcelona, with warm and swimmable conditions extending further into both spring and autumn. If you are timing a trip around the sea (as I often do), that extra flexibility is worth a great deal.
2. Santander
Santander was a surprise. I stayed longer than I had planned, and that is always the most honest review a city can receive.
It is an average size, modern city. There is something immediately likeable about it, a quality that I find difficult to pin down precisely but that I suspect has something to do with the combination of genuine elegance and complete lack of pretension.
The city is extraordinarily clean and well-ordered, the streets are pleasant to walk, and the pace feels human rather than frantic.
Santander sits on Spain’s Costa Verde – the Green Coast – and the name earns itself. The city offers pristine beaches surrounded by lush mountains and impressive architecture, and despite being a popular holiday destination among Spaniards, it remains relatively undiscovered by international tourists.
That is part of its appeal. You feel like a guest in a city that is living its own life, rather than a unit being processed through a tourist experience.
Santander is a strikingly green city – not just because of the climate, but because it has parks scattered all over it. Formal gardens, the wooded Parque de Mataleñas, mini parks overlooking the seafront, the long and beautifully manicured Avenida Reina Victoria with its seating areas, sculpture parks, and sunbathing lawns. Walking in Santander is a genuine pleasure.
The beaches are wild and clean – Santander’s beaches collectively earned Blue Flag certification for 15 consecutive years through 2025, reflecting consistently high water quality and safety standards.
And because the city is on the northern Cantabrian coast rather than the Mediterranean, the sea has a freshness and a coolness in summer that, in recent years of relentless Mediterranean heat waves, feels like an actual luxury. You come out of the water refreshed rather than simply wet.
The food is serious too. The culinary offering features fresh seafood and traditional Spanish dishes, and the city’s tapas bars and market restaurants operate at a level that rewards the traveller who is willing to eat where the locals eat rather than where the hotel recommended. I will go back to Santander. I said that to myself on the train out, and I still mean it.
3. Granada
Granada does something that very few cities do: it makes you feel as though you have slipped, without quite intending to, a few centuries into the past.
Of all the Spanish cities I have visited, Granada is the one I find most authentically, most completely itself. It has not been smoothed into a version of itself for tourists.
The Moorish quarter of the Albaicín, with its whitewashed houses and labyrinthine cobbled lanes, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site – and it feels like one, in the best possible way.
Not preserved behind glass, but alive, inhabited, real. Mass tourism in Granada is highly localised – mostly concentrated around the Alhambra. The rest is real, unvarnished Spain.
And then there is the Alhambra itself, which rises above the city and is visible from almost everywhere within it.
I find this detail unexpectedly powerful – the constant presence of this extraordinary thing on the hill above you, glimpsed between buildings, framed by streets, never quite out of sight. It gives the city a quality that I can only describe as permanence. Granada has been here a very long time, and it knows it.
Granada stands as one of Europe’s most budget-friendly destinations in 2026. The city’s unique tapas culture means that many traditional bars serve complimentary tapas with drink purchases – each round brings a different tapa, transforming a few drinks into an affordable and genuinely cultural evening.
Accommodation, food, entertainment – everything here operates at prices that remind you how expensive other Spanish cities have become by comparison.
Granada was named Europe’s most affordable wellness destination for 2025, and while that framing might conjure something sanitised and spa-like, what it actually points to is something more interesting: a city where the pace of life, the quality of the air, the access to the Sierra Nevada just beyond the city limits, and the sheer density of beautiful things to look at create a kind of restorative effect that you do not plan for and do not entirely understand until you are already in it.
I feel something in Granada that I struggle to feel in cities that are performing for their visitors. I feel like I am somewhere that is genuinely, unhurriedly, and completely itself.
My Honest Conclusion
I will go back to Spain as many times as life allows. I will probably return to Barcelona at some point – there are things there I want to see again, and a city of that greatness does not disappear because one August was overwhelming.
But if someone asks me where to go in Spain right now, I know what I will tell them. Valencia for the sea, the architecture, and the feeling of a great Mediterranean city that has not yet been hollowed out by its own success.
Santander for the green coast, the clean beaches, and the particular pleasure of being in a Spanish city that is still, quietly, for the Spanish.
Granada for everything else – for the Alhambra on the hill, the tapas, the cobbled lanes, and that rare and valuable sensation of a place that has been here forever and is not in any particular hurry to change.
Spain has so much more to offer than its most famous destinations. These three cities are proof of that – and they are waiting, more quietly than they deserve to be, for the people who are ready to find them.
These are personal impressions from one traveller’s experience. Travel is deeply subjective – your Barcelona might be entirely different from mine, and that is exactly as it should be.
