Spain

Spain is where we live when we’re not traveling. Sitges, thirty minutes south of Barcelona, sea in front and the Garraf Natural Park behind us.

That changes what we can tell you. Our Catalonia guides aren't built from a week's research trip. We know which beach gets quiet before 9am. We know which Sitges hotel has exceptional staff because we walked past it four hundred times a week. Eli grew up spending summers on the Costa Brava. We volunteer at CRAM, the sea-life rescue centre at El Prat de Llobregat. We hiked in the Pyrenees, swam with tunas in Ametlla de Mar, spent our honeymoon at Hotel Calipolis on the Sitges seafront and have eaten seafood paella more times than is strictly necessary.

We should be upfront about scope. Spain has a lot to offer, and most of our content is Catalonia — the Barcelona region; the coast from Barcelona south to the Ebro Delta, north to the Costa Brava, and inland to La Garrotxa's volcanic craters and the Pyrenees above Espot. It's the part of Spain we know from the inside, not from an itinerary. If you want something beyond Sagrada Família selfies and Barceloneta, that's exactly what we cover.

The Catalonia most visitors miss looks like: wild calas reachable only on foot, a long nudist beach forty minutes by train from the city, an Andalusian-inspired town where the heladería displays its second-place trophy with genuine pride, and a coastline that gets quieter and wilder the further south you drive.