In a city with an insane amount of restaurants, bars, cafes, art galleries, graffiti and shops, we really scored the perfect home at No. 4-5 L’Hostal D’En Sol. Our street’s namesake is the apartment building we’re residing in, dating back almost 250 years, when it served as, you guessed it, a hostel. An ancient carriage entrance covered in pop-graffiti that can be found throughout the city gives way to a dark, stone terraced open-air foyer and staircase, leading up to an incredibly narrow, sagging staircase cum ladder.
Ancient staircase we go up and down several times per day… it’s about 2 feet wide, and each stair is a unique shape!!
Climbing the 4 flights to our top floor apartment rivals an insanity workout; but after the heart rate comes down from its spike and you stop gasping for breadth, you realize you’re in a unique, artsy, comfortable space that is just about the perfect home for our gang. There are little to no right angles, a sagging log beamed ceiling reinforced with reassuring steel girders from a more recent renovation, a well-polished, warn wood floor, and floor to ceiling windows that open on to tiny European balconies, looking out to a fantastic balcony garden in the fourth floor apartment across from us. With just enough space for all of us at the dining table and a built-in Moroccan-style sofa in a sitting room, we’ve made short work of settling in.
Our front door, which still has the original carriage entrance from a couple of hundred years ago… the graffiti, we assume, is more recent.
Third floor dog peering out as we mount the stairs
The best feature of our abode, however, is not its centuries old hipness, but its location, which serves as the gateway of Barcelona’s Gotic Quarter. A labyrinth of walking streets, placas, and alleys spider out over about 2 or 3 square kilometers, making it fun for the kids to explore with little to no cars or motorbikes threatening to mow them down. While there is a lot to explore, we’ve found we don’t really have to go beyond a few steps from our front door to live a happy, fulfilling life.
This is called “El Cap” and is the first outdoor mosaic sculpture done by the American Pop Artist Roy Lichtenstein for the Barcelona 1992 Games. It sits about 100 yards from our apartment, and a handy landmark for taxis!
If you walk six feet straight in front of our carriage door, we have what might be Barcelona’s best restaurant, El Salon. We’ve already had 3 dinners there, and we still have another week to go! Like any good neighborhood eatery, El Salon features a warm and inviting staff that has gotten to know us, and a comfortable, cozy dining room that might be considered romantic save the constant gyrations of Tuck and Jones bobbing around the table. Candlelit outdoor tables are also available, where we’ve grabbed a midnight Cubano and apple tort.
Yve at the front door of El Salon
If you turn left from our door and walk 20 paces, you come to a great cafe called Caracas that serves the perfect Iberian ham, cheese and baguette panini you’ve ever tasted. Accompanied by a fresh squeezed orange juice and a double cappuccino, it’s the perfect way to start the day; and we have on many a mornings! Next to the cafe is a convenient market featuring all necessary essentials. And if that’s not enough, two more doors down is a legendary sandwich shop called Bo d Be. Fresh baked breads, innovative ingredients, fresh grilled meats… it has a long line every day, and a great place to meet up with people from all around the world. An excellent bakery and butcher shop top off the resources in this direction.
Morning routine at Caracas
Wescott and Otto working on their composed rap – part of their music curriculum – at our cafe.
If you turn right from our door and walk 10 feet, you’re in Placa Dels Targiners. This gem is a perfectly proportioned square with an ancient Roman wall as a backdrop for sets of candlelit tables shared by four different restaurants and bars all snuggled into the 13th and 14th century buildings crowding around. We’ve hit 3 out 4 establishments so far, looking forward to visiting the fourth, which is a bar, after the kids go to bed one night :-). Our personal placa also sports some of the best graffiti art we’ve seen in the Gothic Quarter, in addition to a couple of great art galleries and shops.
Placa Dels Targiners by night, complete with guitarist!
If we’re really feeling adventurous, Port Vall and the waterfront beaches are a 10 minute walk from our home. It begs the question: why don’t we live here??!! The seaside promenade rivals almost any I’ve been to, including Sydney, stretching many kilometers. Surfing, sailing, biking, long-boarding, skate boarding, wind surfing, paddle boarding, naked sun bathing, eating and drinking are all blended into a resort like feel that seems unprecedented in such a huge, urban city. Wescott, Yve and I have had fun running in the morning down the chain of beaches, and we all biked the coast a couple of days ago, discovering lots of amazing modern sculpture, which is littered everywhere in Barcelona, great architecture and a very cool playground! The kids surfed once, and despite pretty small waves, they managed to have fun and spread the Cleanline brand to a new country.
Otto and Wescott just after surfing Barceloneta Beach
Clearly a now reoccurring theme, two weeks is simply not enough time to truly appreciate all of our neighborhood, let alone the rest of Barcelona… but I feel like all of us will frequent this European gem many more times in our lives.
a few minutes walk from our apartment, this facade serves as a magnificent backdrop to an evening stroll.
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