Catalonia

Overview

Catalonia is Spain’s northeastern corner, dropping from the high Pyrenees to the Mediterranean, and the most useful thing to know about it is that the headline sights ring Barcelona at day-trip range: Roman Tarragona, medieval Girona, the Costa Brava coves, the Dalí museums of the Empordà and the serrated ridge of Montserrat. The capital has its own guide, along with pages for the Sagrada Família, Park Güell, Casa Batlló and La Pedrera. The rest of the region gets a fraction of the attention and deserves far more of it.

This is also the part of Spain where you are not entirely in Spanish-speaking Spain. Catalan comes first on street signs, menus and school timetables: it is co-official with Spanish, dominant in regional government and education, and a first language for around a third of the population, with most of the rest carrying functional knowledge. Nobody expects a visitor to speak it, but a bon dia on entering a shop lands well.

Four provinces divide the territory, and they make a workable planning grid. Barcelona province holds the capital and Montserrat. Tarragona has the long sandy Costa Daurada, the Roman remains of ancient Tàrraco and the rice-and-flamingo wetlands of the Ebro Delta. Girona province carries the Costa Brava, the medieval city of Girona itself, the volcanic cones of La Garrotxa and the Dalí towns of Figueres and Cadaqués. Lleida climbs into the Pyrenees and Aigüestortes national park.

Food is a reason to come on its own, from long-onion barbecues in the Tarragona countryside in late winter to two restaurants regularly ranked among the best on earth, one of them in Girona. The food section goes deeper; arrive hungry.

The calendar runs on its own beats too. Sant Jordi (23 April) turns every high street into a bookstall with roses to match. Midsummer belongs to Sant Joan, when bonfires burn along the coast on the night of 23 June. And through the warm months the castells, human towers built by amateur teams in matching shirts, rise in town squares; UNESCO listed the practice in 2010.

History & character

Greeks, Iberians and Roman Tàrraco

Greek traders founded Empúries, near L’Escala on the Girona coast, around 575 BCE, the first Greek colony on the Iberian Peninsula. Rome landed at the same spot in 218 BCE during the Second Punic War, and Tarraco, modern Tarragona, grew into the capital of Hispania Citerior and later Hispania Tarraconensis. More of that city survives above ground than anywhere else in Spain; the see and do section covers it.

The Marca Hispanica and Wilfred the Hairy

After the Muslim conquest of the peninsula, Charlemagne’s Franks retook the territory around Barcelona in 801 and organised it as the Marca Hispanica, a fortified buffer of counties on the empire’s southern edge. Count Wilfred the Hairy (Guifré el Pelós, ruled 878 to 897) gathered several counties under the house of Barcelona and founded the dynasty from which Catalonia grew. The four red bars of the Catalan flag are traditionally traced to his bloodied fingers drawn across a golden shield; the story is legend, the flag genuinely medieval.

The Crown of Aragón

In 1137 the betrothal of Ramon Berenguer IV of Barcelona and Petronila of Aragón created the Crown of Aragón, a composite monarchy in which Catalonia and Aragón shared a sovereign but kept separate laws, courts and parliaments. Barcelona supplied the ships and the trade, and the Crown spread across the Mediterranean: Mallorca in 1229, Sicily in 1282, then Sardinia, Naples and, for much of the 14th century, the Duchy of Athens. In 1359 the Catalan Corts set up a standing committee, the Generalitat, the direct ancestor of today’s regional government.

1714 and the Nova Planta

Catalan self-rule did not survive the War of the Spanish Succession (1701 to 1714), in which Catalonia backed the losing Habsburg claimant. Barcelona fell on 11 September 1714, a defeat now marked as the Diada, Catalonia’s national day, and the Nova Planta decrees that followed abolished the Generalitat, the Corts and Catalan as a language of administration. Modern Catalan nationalism starts from this wound.

Factories, the Renaixença and Modernisme

Nineteenth-century Catalonia industrialised faster than anywhere else in Spain, with textile money pooling in Barcelona and its ring of mill towns. The city burst its walls into the Eixample grid, planned by Ildefons Cerdà in 1859. A literary revival of Catalan, the Renaixença, ran alongside the factories, and by the 1880s the new bourgeoisie was commissioning Modernisme, the Catalan strand of Art Nouveau, from Antoni Gaudí, Lluís Domènech i Montaner and Josep Puig i Cadafalch. Seven of Gaudí’s works in and around Barcelona now carry UNESCO listing.

War and dictatorship

The Second Republic restored an autonomous Generalitat in 1932; the Civil War destroyed it. Lluís Companys, its president, was handed over from occupied France by the Gestapo and executed at Montjuïc Castle in 1940. The Franco regime then banned Catalan from public life, schools and publishing for nearly four decades, which is a large part of why the language’s current strength matters so much here.

Democracy and the independence decade

The 1978 constitution restored autonomy, and the 1992 Olympic Games rebuilt Barcelona’s seafront and its self-image. A 2010 Constitutional Court ruling that cut back the region’s 2006 statute of autonomy fed a decade of mass pro-independence politics, peaking in the referendum of 1 October 2017, held in defiance of a court ban, and a short-lived declaration of independence. Leaders were jailed and later pardoned; president Carles Puigdemont went into exile in Belgium. The question is not settled. Expect estelada flags on balconies, and do not expect anyone to want your opinion on the matter.

See & do

Barcelona, briefly

Barcelona needs its own guide and has one, so here is the short version. The Sagrada Família finally topped out: the central Tower of Jesus Christ reached its full 172.5 metres in February 2026, making it the tallest church building in the world, 11 metres above the previous record holder, Ulm Minster, and Pope Leo XIV inaugurated the finished tower that June, a hundred years after Gaudí’s death. Park Güell, Casa Batlló and La Pedrera carry the rest of the Gaudí canon, while Domènech i Montaner’s Hospital de Sant Pau and Palau de la Música Catalana are the Modernisme most visitors skip and should not. Camp Nou reopened in November 2025 at reduced capacity, with rebuilding continuing towards 105,000 seats and completion now expected in 2027.

Girona

Girona rewards a full day, not the two hours most itineraries allow. The cathedral’s Gothic nave is the widest in the world at 22.98 metres, second among churches of any style only to St Peter’s in Rome, and the flight of steps below it appeared in the sixth season of Game of Thrones. El Call, the medieval Jewish quarter, keeps its tight lanes and the Museum of Jewish History in the Centre Bonastruc ça Porta; the community here flourished until the 1492 expulsion. Walk the Passeig de la Muralla along the old city walls, then come down to the Onyar, where the riverside houses were repainted in a palette of 29 colours in 1982, which is why they photograph the way they do.

Tarragona

Tarragona wears its imperial past casually. The second-century amphitheatre sits just below the old town with the Mediterranean directly behind it; the Roman circus, about 450 metres long, ran through what is now the Plaça de la Font, and its vaults still hold up the neighbourhood; the Les Ferreres aqueduct, nicknamed Pont del Diable, stands 4 km north with two tiers of arches rising 26 metres. The whole ensemble was UNESCO listed in 2000 as the largest Roman archaeological complex outside Italy. The 12th to 13th-century cathedral, Romanesque turning Gothic mid-build, crowns the old town, and the Balcó del Mediterrani gives the classic sea view. Inland, the Cistercian monastery of Poblet is the province’s other heavyweight monument and has its own page.

The Costa Brava

The “wild coast” got its name from the journalist Ferran Agulló, writing in La Veu de Catalunya in 1908, and the name still fits: 199 beaches and coves between Blanes and the French border, pine woods on cliffs, and a surprising number of villages that stayed villages. Calella de Palafrugell keeps the white-porched fishing quarter of Port Bo, its old net vaults now restaurants, with Llafranc a kilometre away and Tamariu a few more. Begur watches its coves, Sa Riera, Sa Tuna and Aiguablava among them, from a castle-topped hill 200 metres above the water. Tossa de Mar’s Vila Vella, walled in the Middle Ages with towers from the late 14th century, is the only fortified medieval town still standing on the Catalan coast. Lloret de Mar is the big package resort, and the Greek ruins of Empúries lie up the coast near L’Escala.

The Dalí triangle

Salvador Dalí is the Empordà’s own industry, spread across three sites run by his foundation. The Teatre-Museu in Figueres, his home town, opened in 1974 on the ruins of the municipal theatre that burned in the Civil War, and he designed it as one enormous artwork: a glass geodesic dome over the stage, giant eggs along the roofline, the Mae West room resolving into a face, a Cadillac in the courtyard descended from his Rainy Taxi, and the artist himself buried in a crypt beneath it all. It drew close to 1.4 million visitors in 2016, among the highest of any museum in Spain. His house at Portlligat, beside Cadaqués, is where he lived and painted, and the castle he gave Gala at Púbol completes the triangle. The bare rock scenery around Cap de Creus, which turns up behind The Persistence of Memory, is the fourth exhibit and it is free.

Montserrat

Montserrat, the “sawed mountain”, rises in pink conglomerate teeth to Sant Jeroni at 1,236 metres, with the Benedictine abbey of Santa Maria shelved into the cliff below. The abbey holds La Moreneta, the dark-skinned Madonna who is Catalonia’s patron, and the Aeri cable car or the Cremallera rack railway lifts you from the valley floor; the Sant Joan funicular continues higher, and walking trails fan out towards the summits. Climbers know the mountain for routes like the Cavall Bernat pinnacle, a 1,111-metre finger of conglomerate. Go early or stay late; the middle of the day belongs to coach groups.

The Pyrenees

Aigüestortes i Estany de Sant Maurici, declared in 1955, is Catalonia’s only national park: granite high country holding around 200 lakes between 1,500 and 2,500 metres, entered from Espot in the east or Boí in the west. Below the western entrance, the Vall de Boí keeps nine Romanesque churches, UNESCO listed in 2000; the 12th-century Pantocrator from Sant Climent de Taüll now hangs in Barcelona’s MNAC, with a fine reproduction in the church itself. The Vall de Núria has no road at all: a rack railway from Ribes de Freser is the only way up to the sanctuary and its walking country. For winter, Baqueira-Beret in the Vall d’Aran is Spain’s largest ski area.

Towns & cities

Barcelona

Barcelona holds 1.6 million people in the city and 5.6 million across the metropolitan area, which makes it the obvious base and also the one place in Catalonia where tourism pressure is a live political issue. Stay a few nights, use the trains, and give the rest of the region the time guidebooks usually spend on the Gothic Quarter.

Girona

Girona (106,476 people) is the best base in northern Catalonia: under forty minutes from Barcelona by high-speed train, ten minutes from its own airport, and within easy reach of the Costa Brava, Figueres and La Garrotxa. The monuments are covered above; as a place to sleep and eat it beats any coastal resort out of season.

Tarragona

Tarragona (141,542 people) is a working provincial capital with Roman ruins threaded through it rather than fenced off beside it. It is also the capital of castells: the Concurs de Castells, the sport’s biggest competition, is held here every two years in October. Santa Tecla, the city festival, runs 15 to 24 September and is the liveliest time to be here.

Lleida

Lleida (140,797 people) sits on the Segre river in the dry Catalan interior, capital of a fruit-growing plain that feels closer to Aragón than to the coast. This was Roman Ilerda, taken back from Muslim rule by Ramon Berenguer IV in 1149, and its university was founded in 1297, the third oldest in the Iberian Peninsula. The Seu Vella, the old cathedral on its hill, mixes Romanesque and Gothic and spent the 18th century converted into a fortress. Most travellers pass through on the way to the Pyrenees; the Seu Vella justifies a stop.

Figueres

Figueres is Dalí’s home town and the keeper of his Teatre-Museu, described in the see and do section. It sits on the high-speed line between Barcelona, Girona and France, so it works as an easy rail day trip.

Sitges

Sitges (32,609 people, 35 km southwest of Barcelona) is the coast at its most social: 17 beaches, a Carnival in February or March with some forty floats, and a standing reputation as one of Europe’s great LGBTQ+ destinations. The painter Santiago Rusiñol made it an artists’ town in the 1890s, and his studio survives as the Museu del Cau Ferrat. In October the Sitges Film Festival takes over, one of the world’s serious fantasy and horror festivals.

Reus

Reus (111,601 people) is where Antoni Gaudí was born in 1852, a fact the city explores in its Gaudí Centre since the architect built nothing here; what it has instead is Modernisme by his contemporaries, led by Domènech i Montaner’s Casa Navàs. It was also one of the world’s great vermouth towns, with over thirty producers at the trade’s peak, and the aperitif hour is still taken seriously.

Cadaqués

Cadaqués, whitewashed at the end of a slow road over the Cap de Creus peninsula, was a home of artists and writers long before the day trippers arrived, and Dalí’s house sits over the next bay at Portlligat. Out of season it is one of the finest overnights in Catalonia.

Besalú and the Garrotxa towns

Besalú announces itself with a 12th-century Romanesque bridge over the Fluvià, seven uneven arches with a fortified gate partway across, and inside the town is a restored 11th to 12th-century mikveh, the only Romanesque Jewish ritual bath left in Spain. It was the capital of its own county until 1111 and has been a protected historic ensemble since 1966. Olot, the workaday centre of the volcanic zone, and the smaller Santa Pau make the natural bases for walking La Garrotxa.

Into the Pyrenees

Espot and Boí are the two access villages for Aigüestortes and the obvious mountain bases. Vielha anchors the Vall d’Aran, where street signs run in Aranese as well as Catalan and Spanish. Ribes de Freser is the valley station for the Núria rack railway.

Food & drink

Catalan cooking is a cuisine with its own canon, not a regional accent on Spanish food, and eating your way through it is a legitimate itinerary. The base notes are olive oil, tomato, garlic, ground almonds and hazelnuts in the picada, allioli beside anything grilled, and salt cod treated with respect.

Pa amb tomàquet

The defining dish is also the simplest: bread smeared with tomato and olive oil, often with garlic, and it turns up under, beside or beneath almost everything else you order. Ask for it if it does not appear on its own.

The calçotada

Calçots are long mild onions grown in the Tarragona countryside, with the Valls harvest holding IGP protection, and the calçotada is the late-winter ritual built around them: onions charred black over vine cuttings, peeled with the fingers, dipped in romesco sauce of nuts, dried peppers, garlic and oil, followed by grilled meat once everyone’s hands are already filthy. Farm restaurants around Valls do the full version; city restaurants sell a politer imitation.

From the sea

Fideuà swaps paella’s rice for short noodles sautéed in stock, loaded with monkfish, cuttlefish and shellfish; it was born down the coast in Gandia but the Catalan seaboard has adopted it wholesale. Arròs negre stains its rice with cephalopod ink over a base of squid or cuttlefish and seafood broth, and suquet is the fishermen’s casserole of the Costa Brava harbours.

Cold plates and the winter pot

Escalivada is vegetables grilled whole, peeled and dressed; esqueixada is a cold salad of shredded salt cod with tomato and onion, made for hot days. At the other end of the year sits escudella i carn d’olla, the great boiled dinner: broth first, thickened with pasta, then a tray of meats, vegetables and the spiced pilota meatball. The Christmas version, sopa de galets, uses outsized snail-shaped pasta shells and meat from four animals, and a 14th-century writer claimed Catalans ate escudella every single day. Botifarra, the Catalan pork sausage in its many forms, is the standard grill order.

Sweet things

Crema catalana is the yellow custard of egg yolk, milk and sugar under a burnt-sugar lid, flavoured with cinnamon and citrus, and Catalans will remind you it is not a crème brûlée. Mel i mató, fresh mató cheese under honey, is the lighter finish.

Cava, Priorat and the wine map

Cava, Spain’s traditional-method sparkling wine, is overwhelmingly a Penedès product, and Codorníu, founded in 1551, is the oldest producer still at it; winery visits from Barcelona are an easy half day. The serious red wine is Priorat, one of only two DOQ regions in Spain alongside Rioja: old-vine Garnacha and Cariñena grown on slate terraces above tiny villages, powerful and priced accordingly.

The top tables

El Celler de Can Roca in Girona, three Michelin stars and more than once named the world’s best restaurant, takes reservations eleven months out and fills them in minutes. Disfrutar in Barcelona, named world’s best in 2024, is the other pilgrimage booking. If neither works out, you will still eat better in an ordinary Girona or Tarragona dining room than in most of tourist Barcelona.

Nature

Catalonia compresses alpine granite, volcanic cones, a river delta and a famously rough coastline into one small map, and much of it is protected.

Aigüestortes and the high Pyrenees

The lake country of Aigüestortes i Estany de Sant Maurici is described under see and do; for walkers the essentials are around 200 lakes, two entrances at Espot and Boí, and the nine-refuge Carros de Foc circuit for those with several days. The GR-11, the long trail along the Spanish side of the Pyrenees, threads the Vall d’Aran on its way across the range.

Pedraforca and the Cadí

The pre-Pyrenees are limestone, and their emblem is Pedraforca, the “stone pitchfork”: two parallel ridges joined by a neck, topping out at 2,506 metres, inside the Cadí-Moixeró natural park between the villages of Gósol and Saldes. Catalans rank it with Montserrat and Canigó among their emblematic mountains, and it fills with hikers and climbers accordingly.

Cap de Creus and the Empordà wetlands

Cap de Creus is the easternmost point of the Iberian mainland: a 190 km² peninsula of bare, wind-hammered rock, nearly treeless, rated a worldwide reference site for structural geology and now a natural park. The 11th-century monastery of Sant Pere de Rodes looks down on it from 500 metres. South along the bay, the Aiguamolls de l’Empordà wetlands are the province’s other protected park and its best easy birdwatching.

La Garrotxa volcanic zone

Inland Girona holds a natural park of around 40 volcanic cones and more than 20 lava flows, the most recent eruption about 11,500 years ago. The Croscat cone, with its quarried scoria face, and the crater of Santa Margarida are the signature walks, and the Fageda d’en Jordà is a flat beech forest growing straight out of a lava flow, at its best in autumn.

The Ebro Delta

Where the Ebro meets the sea in southern Tarragona, 320 km² of rice paddies, lagoons, dunes and salt flats form one of Europe’s largest wetlands. Flamingos nest at the Punta de la Banya, and the delta holds breeding colonies of Audouin’s gull, one of the world’s rarer gulls. Deltebre is the base; a bicycle on the flat rice roads is the way to see it.

The coast on foot and underwater

The Camí de Ronda began as a patrol path for coastguards chasing smugglers along the cliffs, and its surviving sections, some now folded into the GR-92 Mediterranean footpath, are the best way to reach Costa Brava coves that roads miss. Off L’Estartit, the Medes Islands marine reserve is among the best diving in the western Mediterranean.

Climate

Catalonia stacks several climates into a small space, which is good news for trip planning: something is in season nearly all year.

The coast is classic Mediterranean. Barcelona averages 9°C in January and 25°C in August, the sea is swimmable from June through October, and the modest annual rain, around 600 mm, falls mostly in spring and autumn bursts. The Costa Daurada south of the city runs a touch warmer; the Costa Brava a touch cooler and windier.

The wind has a name. The tramuntana, the dry cold northerly that pours off the Pyrenees into the Empordà, can blow hard for days on end, scouring the sky to a hard blue; it shows up in Salvador Dalí’s painted skies and in local speech, where a person can be tocat per la tramuntana, touched by the wind.

The Pyrenees are properly alpine, with reliable winter snow at altitude; the Baqueira-Beret season runs December to April. High walking country generally clears of snow from late June into early October. Inland Lleida is another world again, semi-arid with hot dry summers and mild winters, and the mid-altitude towns of the Garrotxa and the pre-Pyrenees sit usefully cooler than the coast in high summer.

When to go

Spring and autumn are the broad answer; the detail depends on what you are here for.

Spring

April to mid-June is the best window for the cities: warm, dry enough, and lit up by Sant Jordi on 23 April, the Catalan day of books and roses, when every town centre becomes an open-air bookshop. Around Corpus Christi, Berga stages La Patum, a five-century-old festival of devils, giants and gunpowder that UNESCO listed in 2008. The calçotada season is finishing; catch it while you can.

Summer

Sant Joan opens high summer on the night of 23 June with bonfires, fireworks and coca de Sant Joan pastry; the fires are lit from the Flama del Canigó, a flame carried down from Mount Canigó and relayed across the Catalan lands. July and August are for the coast and the high mountains, and for patience: the Costa Brava saturates, Barcelona fills with cruise traffic, and plenty of city restaurants close for part of August.

Autumn

September is arguably the single best month. Tarragona’s Santa Tecla runs mid-month, Barcelona’s Festes de la Mercè close it around the 24th with correfocs, giants and castells, and the grape harvest is on in the wine country. The sea stays warm well into October, when the Sitges Film Festival takes over that town and, every second year, the Concurs de Castells packs Tarragona. The Diada, Catalonia’s national day, is 11 September.

Winter

Ski season runs December to April at Baqueira-Beret and the smaller Pyrenean resorts. At sea level, winter means the Sitges Carnival in February or March, the start of the calçotada season, empty coves, and the year’s cheapest hotel rates. The cities stay fully alive; the beach villages half close and are lovelier for it.

Getting there

By air

Barcelona-El Prat is Spain’s second-busiest airport, moving around 50 million passengers a year, with direct flights across Europe, a set of intercontinental routes and a dense domestic network. Girona-Costa Brava airport, 10 km south of Girona city, handles a smaller, largely low-cost schedule and lands you far closer to the northern coast.

By train

From Madrid, high-speed trains reach Barcelona in around 2h30, with departures every half hour and three competing operators (Renfe AVE, Ouigo and Iryo) keeping fares honest; the same line serves Zaragoza, Camp de Tarragona and Lleida. Northwards, the high-speed line through Girona and Figueres has linked Barcelona with France since 2013, with direct trains to Paris via Perpignan. From Valencia and the south, trains run up the Mediterranean corridor.

By road

The AP-7, the Mediterranean motorway, enters at La Jonquera on the French border and runs the length of the region past Girona, Barcelona and Tarragona on its way towards Valencia. From Madrid the motorway route comes via Zaragoza. Long-distance buses are the cheap fallback and take most of a day from the capital.

By sea

Ferries link Barcelona with the Balearic Islands year round, and Grimaldi Lines sails from Genoa and Civitavecchia in Italy. Barcelona is also one of the Mediterranean’s busiest cruise ports, which you will notice in the old town on ship days.

Getting around

Trains

Catalonia is the easiest Spanish region to cover by rail. Rodalies commuter trains fan out from Barcelona to the metropolitan towns, Sitges and the airport, while FGC, the Generalitat’s own railway, runs further commuter and mountain lines. For longer hops, the high-speed line strings Lleida, Camp de Tarragona, Barcelona, Girona and Figueres into a single fast corridor.

Buses

Regional buses fill the gaps the trains leave: the Costa Brava villages, the Pyrenean valleys, the wine country. Services thin out sharply on Sundays and out of season, so check return times before committing to a day trip.

Car

Rent one for the Priorat, the Garrotxa, the Ebro Delta, the smaller coves and any serious Pyrenees time; skip it for the cities. Driving into Barcelona is more trouble than it is worth, and the old centres of Girona and Tarragona are restricted or pedestrian anyway. Coastal corniche roads are slow and twisting; allow more time than the map suggests.

In the cities

Barcelona runs 12 metro lines plus trams, buses and the integrated T-card fares that also cover Rodalies within the city zones. Girona, Tarragona and Lleida are walking cities; you will not need transport inside any of them.

Practical info

For Spain-wide basics (currency, plugs, time zone, tipping, entry rules), see the Spain country guide. Everything below is Catalonia-specific.

Language

Catalan is co-official with Spanish and the default in signage, schooling and administration; roughly a third of the population speaks it as a first language and most of the rest understand it. Spanish works everywhere and English is common in tourist areas. A few Catalan words (bon dia, gràcies, si us plau, adéu) are noticed and appreciated. In the Val d’Aran, Aranese, a variety of Occitan, is official too, and signs run trilingual.

Tourist pressure and where you sleep

Barcelona is actively managing mass tourism: new short-term rental licences are blocked and the city has moved to let existing ones expire by 2028, so check any apartment listing for its licence number and treat hotels as the safer bet. The headline Gaudí sites sell timed tickets through their official websites, sagradafamilia.org first among them; buying ahead is not optional in summer.

Petty theft is overwhelmingly a Barcelona problem rather than a regional one, and it is about property, not violence. If it happens, you can file the police report (denuncia) online at denuncias.policia.es rather than losing half a day at a station.

Mountains

Call 112 for any emergency, mountain rescue included. Plan Aigüestortes and Núria logistics around the access rules in the getting around section, carry real layers even in August, and treat Pyrenean weather forecasts as load-bearing information rather than a suggestion.

Bulls and bullfighting

The Catalan parliament voted to ban bullfighting in 2010, and there have been no bullfights in Barcelona since 2011; the older correbous street traditions involving bulls survive in parts of Tarragona province and remain contested.

LGBTQ+ travellers

Sitges is one of Europe’s best-established LGBTQ+ destinations, with Pride and a busy summer events calendar on top of the February Carnival. Barcelona is thoroughly relaxed; the smaller inland towns are simply quieter rather than unfriendly.

Language

Essentials

1. YesSí
2. NoNo
3. PleaseSi us plau
4. Thank youGràcies
5. You're welcomeDe res
6. SorryPerdó
7. HelloHola
8. GoodbyeAdéu
9. Good morningBon dia
10. Good afternoonBona tarda
11. My name is …Em dic …
12. Do you speak English?Parles anglès?
13. I don't speak CatalanNo parlo català
14. I need a doctorNecessito un metge

Out & about

1. The bill, pleaseEl compte, si us plau
2. How much does this cost?Quant costa això?
3. Two of these, pleaseDues d’aquestes, si us plau
4. Do you accept cards?Accepteu targetes?
5. Where is the bathroom?On és el lavabo?
6. What's the wifi password?Quina és la contrasenya del wifi?
7. Today / tomorrowAvui / demà
8. A glass of waterUn got d’aigua
9. A beer, pleaseUna cervesa, si us plau
10. Is breakfast included?L’esmorzar està inclòs?
11. Could you take a photo?Em podries fer una foto?

Also available: Castilian