Barceloneta

There’s no finer place for lunch on a sunny day than Barceloneta, an eighteenth-century neighbourhood of tightly packed streets with the harbour on one side and a beach on the other. It was laid out in 1755 – a classic eighteenth-century grid of streets where previously there had been mudflats – and the long, narrow streets are still very much as they were planned, broken at intervals by small squares and lined with multi-windowed houses. The local market, Mercat de la Barceloneta, was stylishly refurbished in 2007, while at Barceloneta’s famous seafood restaurants – most characteristically lined along the harbourside Passeig Joan de Borbó – for most of the year you can sit outside and enjoy your meal.