Holidays in Barcelona - Exploring the Catalan Coast
By Dani Alonso

Nothing feels better than describing your home town. In any case, I must admit that sometimes the knowledge you have of a city as a tourist is very different than the one you get when you live in there, so it was not that easy to select the key points for you to follow.

In any case, I must make a note on the content of this article. To find the hot spots of Barcelona you can use a destination guide. If you want to know how to make a route on the whole catalan coast, this is your place.

Barcelona has many highlights, but if you leave the city back you can travel either north or south and you will find an amazing diversity of places. In this case, and as I know that someone will tell me about this, I admit I will fall under the title of sun & beach holidays. But let's be sincere with myself, this is the main reason why tourists come to Spain.

Dear travelers to my home country, you are more than welcome. To travel along the catalan coast you will use the train or the bus. My proposal is to encourage you to take a Ryanair flight to the Girona airport (in their web-page you will find it as Barcelona-Girona). When you arrive at your destination, which is a city that has not a lot to offer, the best you can do is to take a train to the north, in order to reach a town called Llançà. This town is nothing special, but when you take a bus from this little town to Port de la Selva, then you really will reach one of my favourite places, away from mass toursim, that you can find near Barcelona. This place is also pretty close to the border with France, and there you will enjoy beautiful beaches with space to place your towel and to enjoy under the sun. A personal trick for you: when you arrive to the main beach, don't limit yourself to stay there. If, facing the sea, you keep walking to the right following the coast, you will find some hidden beaches, some rocky ones, and even a nudist one for the lovers of no-clothes-on. No, this was not my favorite, I promise.

If you go back to Llançà, you will find some buses that can take you to the more touristic places such as Platja d'Aro, Sant Feliu de Guíxols, Lloret de Mar and many others. Also you will find buses to another intermediately touristic zone, specially the one called Cadaqués. A town with history, nice buildings, and a beach that some others could be jealous about. Also the town of Roses stands pretty close to it and it is also worth a trip there. From any of those destinations you can always come back to Girona or to Barcelona with bus service. Normally a company called Sarfa is the one that operates all this routes.

In the case you prefer to fly to Barcelona, or there are no routes available from the place you come from to Girona, you can also take the train from there to Llançà or take buses to the touristic region of Costa Brava where there are the towns mentioned before.

Concerning the south part from Barcelona, the train will be your only and very economic mean of transport. All trains from Barcelona to national destinations depart from Sants-Estació. The south part is not that one of rocky beaches and deep blue waters, but it has other attractive spots. To begin with, beaches are a lot more extensive, and this reduces the amount of people you find there. On the way to the south of Catalonia you can find many places to stay, but I would highly encourage you to get to the very end of the region, where the river Ebre reaches the sea, forming a 35 km deep delta, all covered by rice fields. A good town to stop would be the one called l'Ampolla, and from there you can rent a car or take a bus to visit the many different places that the delta has to offer: from a bird sanctuary to cycling or getting on a boat in the internal lakes the river has made, or simply to go wild and enjoy swimming in a beach where you have nobody else at 1 km from you, with no danger at all, and where most of the times you can walk deep inside with water just raising up to your waist.

In the end, the decision is yours. The most hot spots are absolutely crowded, some intermediate points can be good in balance, and unspoiled zones are always paradise for the ones who enjoy relaxing holidays in family. Take your decision and get there, Catalonia es waiting for you!

Dani Alonso

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