Cruise ends in Barcelona

Hi Katy,

Here are 2 suitable hotels to stay while in Barcelona. One of them is a Marriott chain hotel.

https://www.marriott.com/hotels/travel/bcnir-ac-hotel-irla/

https://www.hotelbarcelona1882.com/en/

To get around Barcelona, get the Barcelona Pass.

https://www.barcelonapass.com/what-you-get/

I recommend you visit these notable places time permitted: Park Güell, Montjuïc, Montserrat, Sagrada familia, Casa Mila, Plaça de Catalunya, Gràcia Neighborhood, La Boqueria, and Las Ramblas.

https://www.neverendingvoyage.com/gracia-barcelona-guide/

To get to Malaga from Barcelona:

Fly or take the train. Flying is the fastest way to get there 3 hrs 34 min flight to Malaga airport. The train will take you 5 hrs 50 min.

Set up a base in Malaga then you can take public transportation and do day trips to explore Marbella, Cordoba, Granada, and Seville.

You can fly out of Malaga and connect a flight at either Barcelona or Madrid airport to fly back to Texas.

Barcelona is a very major city. I suggest you go onto Wikipedia and read about Barcelona there.
We have been to Malaga, Spain and we found it to be a very congested city with a large number of high rise condos. We won't return. You might want to read online about Spain and identify the most popular cities for tourists. It's a very large country--per European standards.

Best thing to do right now would be to get a guide book. I prefer the Rick Steves books above others. It should answer your questions about what to see, where to stay, what to eat and how to travel place to place. You can order them as paper or downloadable ebooks. I’d also download the free Rick Steves Audio Europe App. There’s a ton of information on Spain, even an audio walking tour of Barcelona.

I agree that you should start reading about Barcelona. The Maribel guides (online only) are great, too.
We began our cruise in Barcelona a couple of years ago and, since we'd been there before and love it, rented an apartment for 3 nights before leaving. It's a wonderful city to walk it, and the Metro is great, too. If there is a performance at the Palau de Musica while you are there, I highly recommend getting tickets for it before you leave. It is a fabulously beautiful concert hall.

We are huge Marriott people and stayed here last summer and really liked it: https://www.marriott.com/hotels/travel/bcnfp-four-points-barcelona-diagonal/

It was a great location - easy walk to Glories metro station, and across the street, there's a great open-air shopping complex with good restaurants and a huge Carrefour supermarket. It's not right in the hustle and bustle of the Ramblas area, which we liked, but it's still a wonderful location - close to Sagrada Familia.

And right on this website, under "Explore Europe," you can click to good basic info about sights in Barcelona and elsewhere in Spain.

I haven't done the trip but I'd be careful about time comparisons between rail and flying. Trains take you from city center to city center, while flying means time getting to and from airports, going through security, etc. Spain's rail system is very good in general.

If I had a few days in Spain after a short visit to Barcelona, I would not head to Malaga or Marbella, which to my mind are not even second-tier destinatioms (though I found Malaga a very pleasant place to spend a few of the 120 days I've spent in Spain since May 2016). A couple of nights in Barcelona is really not adequate at all. To then take the time to travel all the way to the southern coast of Spain is not, in my view, a good use of your time--which I assume is limited. There are many, many more interesting places in Spain, some of them within about an hour of Barcelona. (Start with Girona.)

Many of Barcelon's top sights require pre-purchased tickets. After deciding what you are most interested in seeing in that city, come back here with a list and we'll tell you which tickets you need to buy in advance. Barcelona's tourist load seems to be increasing significantly every year, so information about ticket strategy in guidebooks may not be totally accurate.

On a short trip you have a tough decision about the mode of travel between Barcelona and Malaga. It's roughly 6 hours via AVE train, or you can deal with airports. Marbella is a bus ride from Malaga; I'm nearly certain there are buses directly from the airport. European beaches tend to be much, much more crowded than US beaches, and they are often rocky, requiring costly rental of loungers. Be sure you know what you're getting into.

Malaga has a major airport, but I think departing from anywhere other than Barcelona or Madrid will require a connection in Europe. However, you may not have non-stop flights to your home airport from Barcelona and Madrid, anyway. Check on Google Flighrs to see what is available. Unless your cruise is a transatlantic one, you'll be looking for a multi-city flight into your cruise departure point and returning from your chosen airport in Spain.

Yes there are hop on hop off buses in Barcelona. We used them for transportation as Barcelona is very spread out, like LA. We got off on top of Montjuic to visit Museo Mirò and to Olympic sites for example. It stopped at BARCA soccer stadium and a lot of passengers got off there. It is bargain to use it as transportation and avoid paying for taxis. Get your tickets online for historic sites, Gaudi houses, La Sagrada Familia well in advance. Two nights is not near enough time for Barcelona. We spent five nights and did not see it all.
Use high speed trains or fly south from Barcelona. South of Spain to me means the beautiful, historic cities of Sevilla, Cordoba, Granada in Andalusia which you do not mention. Malaga and Marbella are coastal of course, beaches, resorts, history.
Skipping Madrid too?

How much time do you have, I would agree there are a lot of places I would put above south coast destinations. You can watch Rick's Spain videos for free on YouTube, linked to from this site before committing to a guidebook. I have never been there but there are also beach towns a lot closer to Barcelona that you might research. Barcelona is worth at least three full days.

We stayed at the Ibis Sagrada Familia. It a block or so from the church and between two subway stations. When you get off your ship, you will see dozens of taxis and a very efficient person guiding their loading. No matter where you end up, take a cab. Especially with 2 couples, the cost will be minimal.

I did some dummy flight testing (early June this year and early April next year) for Houston and Dallas airports from Malaga but either the price or travel time were quite unrealistic, so plan on a return to Barcelona for a flight.
Malaga may be considered an underrated city by some. It has vast history and was voted international city of culture in 2017. I suspect one needs to include it with a positive attitude and a mental plan to seek out the pluses of the city. I remember learning a lot about it in 4th grade and it was THE place I wanted to go to. Granted that was eons ago...though the Roman ruins and museums are still there.
For determining travel times and options, I like to use Rome2Rio for first layer logistics and seeing average times and what travel options I have. Given a similar length of time, I would suggest traveling by train from Barcelona to Malaga (the coast is lovely to view) and fly back putting you at the airport for your home flight. If you decide to fly back the night before your flight home, I can recommend Salles Hotel Ciudat del Prat for an airport hotel near BCN airport.

Since you are already on this website, you can begin your research right here. In the menu top left, click Explore Europe, then follow the links to Spain and Barcelona. Lots of info and suggestions waiting for you there.
Barcelona and Madrid are the major international gateways for air travel although other places do have some international service, including Bilbao. Best to fly into one city and home from the other using a multi-destination search function.

We were just in Barcelona for four days, and the sites that we booked in advance were: Sagrada Familia, Palau Musica de Catalonia, Casa Mila, and Park Guell. Except for the Palau Musica, where all tours are limited to a manageable size, we found that booking the first tour in the morning and being in line about 15 minutes before opening really gave us a chance to see everything before crowds built up. In May, you can probably wait until about a week ahead to see the weather forecast before locking in your Park Guell tickets. That's what I did due to some rain in the forecast and we had no problem getting tickets --but I monitored the website to be sure tickets were not selling out. There are many more sights in Barcelona that we would love to explore in future, but based on the recommendations of others on this forum, we settled on the four above, plus additional sites that didn't require advance booking. We enjoyed walking the neighborhoods as well, especially El Born.