Sights Overview

The crowded Rambla, the reverberation of a flute in the silence of the medieval Gothic Quarter, bright ceramic color splashed across Art Nouveau facades, glass and steel design over Roman stone: one way or another, though always inventively, Barcelona will find a way to get your full attention. The Catalonian capital is boiling into the new millennium in the throes of a cultural and industrial rebirth comparable only to the late-19th-century Renaixença that filled the city with its flamboyant Moderniste (Art Nouveau) architecture. Wedged along the Mediterranean coast between the forested Collserola hills and Europe's busiest seaport, Barcelona has catapulted to the rank of Spain's most-visited city, a 2,000-year-old master of the art of perpetual novelty.

The city's palette is vivid and variegated: the glow of stained glass in the penumbra of the Barri Gòtic; Gaudí's mosaic-encrusted, undulating facades; the chromatic mayhem at the Palau de la Música Catalana; Miró's now universal blue and crimson shooting stars. Then, of course, there is the physical setting of the city, crouched cat-like between the promontories of Montjuïc and Tibidabo, between the Collserola hills and the 4,000-acre port. Obsessed with playful and radical interpretations of everything from painting to theater to urban design and development, Barcelona consistently surprises itself in its constant quest for emotion and self-renewal.

Indeed, Barcelona never sleeps. So passionate you can feel the city vibrating around you, Barcelona is wired with a vitality that somehow stops short of being intimidating. Just about the time you might begin to drop into a food- and wine-induced slumber at two in the morning, barcelonins are just heading out, as the city's night scene begins to kick in for real. Irrepressibly alive, creative, acquisitive, and playful in about equal doses, the city never stops. No matter which outside governmental regime pulled the strings in the past, Catalans just kept working, scheming, playing, and building. Now, with its recent past as a provincial outpost well behind, Barcelona is charging into the future with more creativity and raw energy than ever.