Poble Espanyol

Poble Espanyol is one of those Barcelona attractions that sounds like a tourist trap on paper — a purpose-built 'Spanish village' with fake architecture and craft stalls — and turns out to be something much more interesting in practice. Built in 1929 for the International Exposition on Montjuïc, the village was originally conceived as a temporary showcase of Spanish regional architecture and was supposed to be demolished afterwards. It wasn't. It has been open continuously since 1929 and is now, improbably, a genuine piece of Barcelona's own history.

The 'village' is a full-scale construction of 117 buildings representing every region of Spain — Andalusian whitewash, Aragonese towers, Castilian courtyards, Catalan Gothic, Basque farmhouses — assembled in a loose townscape with plazas, fountains, and winding lanes connecting them. Architects Puig i Cadafalch and Miquel Utrillo spent a year travelling Spain documenting buildings before the project began, and the result is far more architecturally specific and interesting than you might expect. The main square, the Plaza Mayor, is genuinely beautiful and lined with café terraces.

During the day, many of the buildings house working craftspeople — glass blowers, leather workers, ceramicists, print makers — who you can watch from the doorway or whose workshops you can enter. There's also a decent contemporary art museum (Fundació Fran Daurel) inside the grounds and a flamenco restaurant that runs shows most evenings. The venue transforms completely at night: several of Barcelona's serious nightclubs operate within the village walls, including the legendary Tablao de Carmen.

It's worth a few hours any time of year, but particularly in the late afternoon when the golden light hits the pale stone of the Castilian section and the terraces fill up for the pre-dinner drink. Children tend to love it — there's something genuinely delightful about the scale and variety of the architecture, and the whole place is walkable and easy to navigate.