About, current & future plans of barcelona Travel Hacks

Welcome to Barcelona Travel hacks

I have been living in Barcelona for two decades and enjoy exploring, adventure, live music, local food, festivals, and nightlife. This is my passion project.

The Mission

Barcelona Travel Hacks is primarily a travel blog but not wanting to copy the hundreds of other Barcelona travel blog websites, I have set some clear goals:

1. Repeatability: All trips and activities must be repeatable by the reader. This is not a wonderlust website or a coffee table book. I want to empower people to say "Lets go tomorrow", not "maybe someday".
2. What to do and see: The biggest question I see online is "What do I get to see?" or "Is it worth it?". These are highly subjective questions which I try to tackle by including a full playable image gallery to explain visually what can be seen and done.
3. Relevant links: Include links to relevant info, products and further reading for the traveller. As a habitual traveller and explorer of Catalonia, there are certain items that always go in my rucksack. I share with you what I take for each attraction or activity.
4. Downloadable documents: Practical and informative guides and PDF documents. I do love having a good train map or a list of restaurants for the places I visit, so I have included where relevant, downloadable PDF documents.
5. Easy page navigation: Each blog must follow a standard layout so that it is easy to follow. Information is categorised on each page under standard navigable headings so there is no need to read the whole page just to find one piece of information.
6. Categorisation: Filter attractions and activities by themes such as castles, beaches, museums etc. Distance from Barcelona, by neighbourhood or zone. This was always a must for me because some days I just want to go to a beach, other days I want to hike up a mountain, and sometime I just want to explore a town or village.

The Seed

The seed for this website dates back to 2017 and was from friends suggestions that I should create a travel and tourism website because of my extensive knowledge of exploring Catalonia. I started assembling the content and organising it into pages using word documents.

During covid and home confinement, I started to experiment with website builder tools like wordpress. I quickly came to the conclusion that this would not allow me to create this website according to my vision. The only solution I could think of was to learn to code.

Barcelona Travel Hacks is actually a website that I have 100% coded myself with custom designs for the database, front-end and back-end code. My design philosophy is to not use third party code where possible but to have complete creative and technical control. I maintain this design philosophy today, regularly deploying updates and upgrades as well as new content.

Scope and Audience

Barcelona Travel Hacks is designed to be useful for residents, students, visitors, tourists and locals in Barcelona and Catalonia, and aims to be the best and last website you look at regarding Barcelona.

Finding stuff on Barcelona Travel Hacks Website

Barcelona Travel Hacks is a 300 page website (and constantly growing!) so finding stuff might be tricky, but each attraction or activity has been sorted by:

1. Locality: This is the neighbourhood, "barrio", in Barcelona or general area outside of Barcelona. i.e., Pre-Pyrenees and Pyrenees, Costa Brava etc.
2. Theme: I have categorised each attraction with multiple theme tags such as beaches, museums, Catalonia hiking etc.
3. Distance: What can I do that is one hour or less from Barcelona? Well, this category is for you. I actually have options for traveling by train and by car by travel time to filter the content.
4. Budget: What can I do for free in Barcelona? What can I do for €10 etc. We all make decisions based on cost and budget so I include prices summary tables to help decide what to see and do.

The future

I have many more things to do and see in and around Barcelona and will try to upload new content and photos regularly. Each page takes between 100 and 200 hours to write and curate all the images, PDF documents, weather components etc. For this reason I am not able to maintain a regular publishing schedule.

I have loads of new features that I want to deploy to the website and I am slowly working through my list.

Contact and Feedback

The information on Barcelona Travel Hacks is correct at the time of publishing the blog. However, this is a live website and is updated regularly. If you find something incorrect, want to ask a question, or have any feedback about how to improve the site, please contact me via email at barcelonaTravelhacks@gmail.com or via the Facebook page and I will endeavour to answer your questions and make any necessary corrections.

Thanks and Happy Exploring!