City Walks Barcelona Tour Cards

• Small and lightweight cards
• Good information on historical sights, restaurants and shops
• Excellent descriptions of Barcelona
• Good, clear maps with all the relevant street names, metro station names, etc

• A lot of overlap
• Some more day trips could have been covered
• If this is your only Barcelona guide, you may miss the detail of a book

• City Walks Barcelona
• "50 Adventures on Foot"
• Publisher: Chronicle Books
• ISBN: 9780811859110
• Fifty self-guided walking tours printed on handy cards - a map on one side and a description of the sights on the other.
• Tours of all of Barcelona's main sights, plus a couple of day trips to places outside the city.
• 

No matter how hard they try, tourists always stand out like sore thumbs when they're traveling. For a start, they dress differently. Secondly, they tend to carry cameras. And they're usually seen obstructing the sidewalk as they try to pin point themselves on a huge map (which they're holding in one hand as there is an 800-page guide book in the other).

Chronicle Books can't give you fashion tips or solve the camera problem, but they can get round the issue of having to carry a map and guide book.

The City Walks series of self-guided tour cards are perfect for the tourist that likes to travel light. With 50 tours of the city to choose from, you pick the one (or ones) you want that day, slip the necessary cards you need into your pocket and leave the rest at the hotel.

The map on one side covers just the area you need, while the description on the other side of the card gives you the perfect amount of information - brief enough (and of a large enough font) to be easily read on the go.

Most walks are quite short. Often, one route starts where a previous one ended, so you can easily do several walks in a day. If you manage to do all 50 tours, you'll know Barcelona better than most locals!

Sounds perfect, right? So why only four stars?

The main problem is the large amount of overlap. I did all of the La Ribera walks in one day and ended up walking past the same church about four times. There is also an assumption that you will do all the tours: they only talk about each sight once, so if you happen to miss the tour that explains that sight, you may never read about it at all.

If some of the shorter tours had been combined, these problems could have been reduced.

Still, the concept is so good that, despite these flaws, this is still the best Barcelona guide you can get.

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