A neighourhood guide to El Poblenou: The chic area where you won't feel the anti-tourism heat

If you sojourn Barcelona close now, arsenic the precocious play has firmly travel to an end, it’s apt that you’ll person thing but beauteous interactions with the locals. This couldn’t beryllium said for the city’s earlier visitors this summer, who had to endure being sprayed by h2o pistols and were driven retired of the metropolis centre by anti-tourism protests.

But determination are inactive remnants of a peculiarly tense summertime successful Barca, with “tourists spell home” graffiti adjacent the section landmarks serving arsenic a semi-permanent reminder.

But don’t fto it enactment you disconnected visiting the city. Barcelona needs tourism, it conscionable doesn’t request centralised throngs of wholly un-self alert tourists blocking traffic, holding selfie sticks and making their precise lived-in metropolis centre unlivable.

So, if you’re considering paying the spot a sojourn soon, marque similar the locals and research the El Poblenou neighbourhood instead. This is the spot to spell if you’re the benignant of idiosyncratic who likes to sojourn European cities to get a sensation of what it’s really similar to unrecorded there.

The chic, up-and-coming country is fashionable among young Barcelonans owed to its comparative region from the busy, visitor-heavy citadel and its closeness to immoderate of Barcelona’s champion beaches.

El Poblenou is conscionable 30 minutes thrust from Barcelona-El Prat Airport airport, and salient edifice chains are starting to basal themselves there, including Meliá Barcelona Sky, a 4-star edifice that is housed wrong an ultra-modern skyscraper designed by legendary French designer Dominique Perrault.

If views are your thing, this is the spot to be, with Meliá Barcelona Sky presently lasting arsenic the 4th tallest gathering successful the metropolis (rooms from £144 a night, melia.com).

While Barcelona Sky is person to the sea, there’s besides a The Hoxton by Ennismore spot successful the country — offering that classical London edifice charm — and it is situated conscionable 21 minutes locomotion from the Sagrada Familia (rooms from £153 a night, thehoxton.com).

But don’t consciousness similar you request to locomotion everywhere: Poblenou is simply a presumption connected 1 of the city’s astir utile Metro lines, L4, making it casual to get to and from.

For this reason, if you’d alternatively enactment cardinal and task retired to El Poblenou, we urge ME Barcelona, Meliá Barcelona Sky’s luxurious, avant-garde sister edifice nearer the centre of the city, which has a rooftop excavation truthful stunning it practically demands to beryllium photographed (rooms from £273 a night, melia.com).

As for what bash successful Poblenou? Drink, firstly. This isn’t a enactment area, but it is simply a societal 1 — similar a Spanish Hackney, if Hackney wasn’t truthful extortionately costly now, oregon truthful afloat of Australians. So, bask the dilatory paced Mediterranean drinking culture.

Recently opened Masa Vins (instagram.com/masa.vins) is an uber-trendy vino barroom with mirrored interiors and despicably bully looking, well-dressed customers. Oh, and the wine’s bully too. Then there’s Henry’s Bar, located a 7 infinitesimal locomotion away, via Carrer de Pere IV.

Henry’s feels similar a Spanish mentation of Ridley Road Disco — the benignant of spot you should extremity a lively nighttime successful Poblenou with immoderate dancing and drunk inhaling of chickenhearted wings.

“Chicken wings?!” you scoff. Line your tummy earlier then, with thing much authentically Spanish, similar tapas astatine El 58 (instagram.com/restauranteel58) oregon Galician razor clams and locally caught lobster astatine Racó de la Vila (racodelavilla.com).

But the champion nutrient volition beryllium recovered connected the different broadside of Poblenou, nearer the station, astatine Bar Andalucía (Carrer d'Espronceda, 51, Sant Martí, 08005), with its hand-written menus and exceptional location cooking. A erstwhile worker’s barroom from backmost erstwhile Poblenou was an wholly concern area.

The paper changes ever somewhat time by time according to which ingredients are caller and successful season. Shrimps, sardines, pork knuckle, tripe, steak of beef, paella, home-baked tarts, you sanction it, Bar Andalucia has it.

In the daytime, walk your clip picking up sourdough buns and challah astatine Barbara Bakery, oregon visiting the ultra-stylish, appointment-only Vasto Gallery (Carrer de Llull, 109, 08005), which is portion architecture project, portion creation abstraction (vasto.es).

But beryllium definite to walk astir of your clip connected the pristine adjacent beaches, with Barcelona situated connected the northeast seashore of the Iberian Peninsula, similar Playa de Bogatell and Nova Icaria, oregon brave the section nudist formation Mar Bella.

If there’s 1 mode to guarantee an anti-tourism escaped holiday, it’s blending successful with the locals similar this — it mightiness conscionable outgo you your clothes.