For most of the year, the Barcelones and tourists visiting the city block out the fact that Barcelona is a beach city. Barcelona’s sands are empty in the winter months, save the one crazy Señor whose aim in life is to swim in the sea every single morning, no matter how cold the water may be.

La Barceloneta

Barcelona’s beach-side barrio, La Barceloneta, is within easy walking distance from the old Gothic center of the city. This is by far the city’s most popular stretch of shore. As soon as May and June roll around, people start to remember the Mediterranean Sea is nearby, and flock in droves to Barceloneta Beach.

Cooling off at Barcelona’s beach-side bars

However, there is more to La Barceloneta than swimming and tanning, and for those who prefer to observe the sea from a shaded terrace with a cold drink in one hand and a tapa in the other, this authentic barrio has a lot to offer.

Here are my favorite beach-side bars in Barcelona:

El Filferro
Calle Sant Carlos, 29
Tel: 93 221 9836
Entrees from €11 to €20

You can’t see the Mediterranean from here, but the outdoor terrace set in a small Barceloneta Square is charming. El Filferro is usually less crowded than other bars because it is not right on the beach, though it is literally one block from the seaside. The menu boasts non-cooked tapas, a great wine list and an ample selection of teas. It has a bohemian vibe and a staff of hipster waiters.

Foc Bar
Joan de Borbo 66
Tel: 932 41 153
Drinks from €5 to €13
Web site

Located on the Port, the Foc Bar has a small terrace out front perfect for people watching. The place is very popular with the young foreign crowd and people living on their boats docked at the port. I like it for the selection of cocktails. Foc also shows most sporting events on a large-screen TV inside.

Jai-ca
C/ Ginebra, 13
Tel: 93 319 50 02
Entrees from €9

Best tapas in La Barceloneta? Maybe. If you want to feel true frustration, try to get a table here on a weekend. Ha! Not going to happen. Go early during the week and sit outside on the sidewalk table area. Jai-ca serves beer, wine and some mixed drinks, plus fabulous “Tigre Tapas”.

Princesa 23
Carrer de la Princesa, 23
Tel: 932 688 618
Entrees from €18
Web site

This may not be my favorite place, but you can’t beat the location. It’s overpriced for the quality of the food and drinks, but the Princesa gets away with it because if you fall off your bar stool you will land on the sand. Indeed, it is a fun place to grab a glass of wine around 7 or 8 p.m. as the day is coming to an end. The place is popular with foreigners, and you should keep an eye on your bag.

Santa Marta
Carrer de Grau i Torras, 59
Tel: 34691236801
Drinks from €3.50 to €10

Santa Marta may have the nicest terrace seating of all the bars in La Barceloneta. The view is extensive and looks right out onto the sand and the sea. I like this place for coffee (the Italian coffee is great) and beers in the afternoon. Stop by to work on your tan while reading the paper.

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Hints of Italy

Menton hints of Italy even before you cross the border, with its bilingual street names and Italian-style architecture. Curiously, the town only became French in 1860, having historically been part of Monaco until in 1848 it seceded from the Principality in a spat over taxes on lemon exports. Menton then enjoyed a brief fling as an independent republic before throwing in its lot with the Kingdom of Sardinia and eventually joining France.

Mentonasques are quick to remind visitors even today that Menton is in France merely by choice, and the town’s window shutters in that distinctive Ligurian green are a reminder that this most Italianate of French Riviera towns still has a part of its heart in Italy.

Menton’s health resort history

Climb up to the cemetery high above the Old Town and you will quickly discover how Menton established its credentials in Riviera tourism. A hundred years ago, Menton was one of Europe’s premier health resorts, with thousands of northern Europeans taking their bronchial bacilli to sunny Menton to try and rid their lungs of tuberculosis. The crowded cemetery, full of those who died of consumption, attests to the fact that a few months of indolence in Menton did not always guarantee recuperation. Russians, Germans, English and Irish share the same burial ground, all victims of a disease that indiscriminately struck down poets and philosophers, counts and colonels.

The pulmonary pilgrims of yesterday have been replaced by a new generation of traveler, often anxious to find the quieter side of the Riviera. Menton is always a great stopover on routes from Provence to Genoa —made easy by the frequency of trains along this stretch of coast. Both westbound towards Nice and eastbound into Italy, trains generally run twice hourly.

Exploring the town

But with direct daily TGV services from Paris (and a useful direct overnight train, too), Menton is a place worth visiting in its own right. Our best Menton days have involved nothing more demanding than wandering around the produce stalls in the Moorish market on the waterfront and then drifting from café to café.

Our favorite local curiosity is the “salle de mariage” (wedding hall) in Menton’s City Hall, which is a striking piece of interior design by French artist and film director Jean Cocteau. Further afield, the attractive mountain town of Sospel is reached by direct bus from Menton. And the stunning Giardini Botanici Hanbury (Hanbury Gardens), just over the border in Italy, which we featured last year on EuroCheapo, are only four miles east of the city.

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Malta is of course a sovereign country. Tiny Gibraltar, by comparison, is one of those little political oddities, a relict of Britain’s colonial adventures, that has its own parliament and generally administers its own affairs. And like Malta, Gibraltar is part of the European Union.

A thin veneer of Englishness

Malta and Gibraltar both pack a few surprises. Folks jet in from other parts of Europe and expect Cockney voices or fish and chips; a dash of England with the big plus of more sunshine. And in truth, tourist-oriented businesses in both Malta and Gibraltar do pander to just such expectations.

But you only need to scrape below the surface of either to find that neither Gibraltar nor Malta have more than a thin veneer of Englishness. Both have their own distinctive languages, a reminder that British efforts to impose their own language on these communities were not entirely successful.

Malta is noted for its fabulous old-fashioned buses.

An intriguing ethnic mix

Many visitors to Malta who have Middle East experience comment that Maltese sounds uncannily like Arabic, and they are not far off the mark. Maltese is closely related to Arabic. Gibraltarians speak Llanito, which draws heavily on Spanish but also has words of Arabic, Hebrew, English and Genoese Ligurian origin.

Culturally, both Malta and Gibraltar are an intriguing mix, each community reflecting the respective patterns of migration that have underpinned the development of the two territories. Who ever would have guessed, for example, that Gibraltar has a thriving Jewish community? Or that the threads of Armenian life are alive and well in Malta?

Malta and Gibraltar are both incredibly interesting places to visit and linger, and more in spite of their historic links with Britain than because of those connections.

One of our favorite travel writers, Jan Morris, has written a novel called Hav about a fictitious port in the Mediterranean. Ms Morris certainly had somewhere much further east in mind when she imagined Hav (and in truth, her chimerical Hav, which has a rather Levantine demeanor, enjoyed direct trains from Russia). Yet there is just a hint of Hav as you wander the alleys of the Maltese capital Valletta or explore the backstreets that cling to the west side of the Rock of Gibraltar.

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Great European gardens

Our favorite European gardens certainly include Mount Stewart and Glenveagh in Ireland (free entry at Glenveagh), Kalmthout Arboretum in Belgium and the Tresco Abbey Gardens in the Isles of Scilly.

But our favorite gem, one of the very best gardens that Europe has to offer, lies on the Riviera coast of Liguria (just inside Italy and merely a stone’s throw from the French border).

The Hanbury Gardens at Cape Mortola (Liguria)

The Hanbury Gardens at La Mortola are a Riviera highlight, but one too often missed in favor of the glitz and the gloss of the famous capes across the French border. Thomas Hanbury was a Quaker entrepreneur who arrived on the Riviera coast in 1867. He could have had his pick of any of the great capes, but he chose Capo Mortola for his grand botanical experiment, amassing taxa from across the world and acclimatising them on the wild headland that juts out into the Mediterranean.

Palazzo Orengo in Italy’s Hanbury Gardens, photo by hiddeneurope

This is not a place for studied formality, but a rambling maze of paths and stairways, rocky alcoves and wooded glades offset by stunning views of a Palladian villa (the Palazzo Orengo) and the azure Mediterranean beyond. Guidebooks will tell you to allow a good three to four hours to explore the gardens, but that is nowhere near enough to really appreciate all that the Giardini Botanici Hanbury have to offer.  We recommend arriving in the morning (gates open to the public at 9:30 AM) and stay until dusk (6 PM or even later during the extended summer opening which runs till mid-September). Admission is €7.50.

The Roman road at the Hanbury Gardens

The gardens incorporate a fabulous sunken Roman road, complete with a plaque recording the names of those who walked the route, a roll call that includes emperors, popes and kings – from Niccolo Machiavelli to Napoleon Bonaparte. For these travelers, on the Via Julia Augusta, Capo Mortola was merely a staging post along the road. For Thomas Hanbury, the taming of this stretch of the Mediterranean was his life’s great work. It deserves a whole day, as it is one of the truly fine unspoiled landscapes of the Ligurian coast.

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