By Robin Graham I bet Washington Irving didn’t have to put up with any of this. Getting a ticket to visit that great treasure of Islamic art and culture, the Alhambra — made famous by Irving himself, among others — is no easy task. It isn’t that it’s hard to [...]

Gràcia, smack in the middle of Barcelona, wasn’t always just a district in the city, but was once its own village, and as the NY Times points out in their recent photo essay on the ‘hood, “it’s never lost that village feeling and remains a jumble of narrow streets and [...]

Phoenix is a city in Arizona, but it’s also the name of a band from Paris, and their song appears in the above video featuring shots from Seville, a city in Spain. Phoenix (the city) also has a lot of people of Spanish descent. See where I’m going with this? [...]

When most food-loving people ruminate over “meccas” of global cuisine, cities like New York, Tokyo, Singapore, and Barcelona conjure instant salivation. Being a foodie is serious business, so for most, traveling to these cities for the culinary experience is not a matter of if, but when. In a recent article [...]

Lately, it seems that I’m running into cliche destinations a lot. The kind of places that are inundated with packaged tours, overzealous nightlife, and sunburned tourists donning wide-brimmed hats. The thing I’m realizing is that these destinations became cool for a reason. If you head away from the parasitic Cancun, you can find amazing countryside and Mayan ruins. Same goes for Thailand [...]

Some let their frustrations out through screaming, others by crying or pouting silently in a corner. In Barcelona,  one pissed-off Catalan graffiti artist lets his frustrations out by painting the streets of the Gothic Quarter creating lanes: one labeled  “tourists,”­ the other labeled “normal” for the locals. It is no [...]

Summer is the season of summits, but not all summits are created equal. I might come off as politically disinclined when I say (or in this case, write) that there is one meeting that interests me the most: the Madrid Fusion International Gastronomic Summit. Someone’s talking my language. My tummy [...]

What do you call a person who is obsessed with Spain? A Spainophile? A Spainaholic? A Spainophyte? (A google search of spainophyte resulted in a result that asked whether I meant “sporophyte,” “The spore-producing phase in the life cycle of a plant that exhibits alternation of generations.”) Either way, for [...]

Come see Barcelona with Danny. You remember Danny, right? My 37-year-old unemployed friend who spends his days in Barcelona drinking coffee, smoking, cigarettes, and skateboarding around the city with nary a care. Yes, I’m jealous. Enjoy this unique look at Barcelona.

Trick question. The answer is that it depends. Are you in Spanish or French Basque country? What’s the difference? To find out, the NYT takes a road trip through both countries, starting from the westernmost part of the region in the beach town of Bakio — about an hour north [...]