BARCELONA SPOT

BEST LOOKOUTS FOR PHOTOGRAPHY

No doubt Barcelona’s streets are an amazing place to practice street photography. The many different neighbourhoods, each of them with a special tint and a very remarked architectural styles provide an infinity of opportunities to get awesome pictures.

However, many times you need to look to a city from above to completely understand it’s design, extension and how it is structured. In many cities you would have to pay in order to climb to a high building, have a look and come down.

In Barcelona we are exceptionally lucky, and the best views of the city are not just free to visit but moreover very interesting places for sightseeing, walking around or just to spend a good afternoon with friends.

Let’s see where are these places and witch kind of pictures can we expect from each of them.

Park Güell

Even it is one of the most touristic places because of Gaudi’s architecture, Park Güell is much more than that. Just on top of Gracia’s neighbourhood, it is most of the time skipped by locals because of high touristic affluence. However, the paths and roads that surround the Gaudi’s area are relatively quiet and hide beautiful nooks and places that are to be discovered.

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Some of the parts of the main walk, which as I said, is not that crowded, were also designed by Gaudi and built with stones on a very original way, creating galleries, arches and aisles that cannot be seen anywhere else.

Following the road a couple of lookout points can be reached, being these not that high as the bunkers or Tibidabo, but much closer to the city, which provides a very special angle of it. I specially prefer the one with the cross on top of a stone structure, where in the late afternoons during the week there is usually no-one, being a very special place to sit, relax and enjoy the city on your own.

Bunkers del Carmel

A little bit apart from the city center’s buzz, El Carmel is a quiet and sloppy neighbourhood on the upper west side of the city. On top the hill there are some abandoned “bunkers” from the Spanish civil war, built by the republicans in 1937 in order to defend Barcelona from the fascist forces.

This place, even it it not specially prepared for tourists has become very popular among the young (and mostly international) people as the place to enjoy the best views of Barcelona when the sun goes down.

The area is composed of the unused and derruidos old buildings where people sits and just enjoys the view. Lately, a small museum has been opened in one of the bunkers where the development of Barcelona is explained during the years of the war, another interesting reason to visit the place.

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A post shared by Barcelona Street Photography (@bcn50mm) on Apr 15, 2019 at 10:46pm PDT

Not only landscape style pictures can be captured, but with some light conditions and imagination, street photography kind-of pictures can be found as everywhere.

Where is it?

Tibidabo

On the very top of the hill, Tibidabo can be seen from every part of the City. It is the highest point of the city and a reference of Barcelona.

As you may know, Barcelona’s Eixample, designed by Gaudi, is a grid of streets that are parallel or perpendicular to the sea and Tibidabo mountain. Locals, when speaking about were they are or where there are going to meet, speak about sea-side or mountain-side sidewalks, a very specific vocabulary that only someone that has lived for a while in Barcelona will understand.

Most probably the best light conditions to photograph Barcelona from Tibidabo are on sunrise as the sun comes up right in front of us from the sea; unfortunately I still did not have the chance or the courage to wake up so early xD.

Walking up to the Tibidabo and accessing to the lookout is totally free; there is public transport to reach the top, being one of the options a funicular, always a singular and interesting infrastructure.

As you may already know, there is an amusement park and a church on the very top of the mountain, which is actually the visible building from the city and illuminated at night. The church is free to visit but there is a fee to access the park.