Barcelona is a sexy, seductive city. Like all good courtesans, it will yield up its most treasured secrets to those who can explore beyond the superficial hedonistic image it has acquired since its transformation to celebrate the 1992 Olympic games. Yes, there are phalanxes of drunken hen and stag parties who conga up and down Las Ramblas and in and out of Antoni Gaudí's glorious buildings, but look beyond and you will understand a little of the Catalans' fierce desire to preserve their first city's cultural status. I can't possibly do my favourite European city justice, but here are a few recommendations.
Favourite place to stay
I rarely stay in the same hotel. When I was writing my novel, I chose an ultra-modern cheap and chic quirky hotel called Gat Raval, which manages to flawlessly integrate lime green decor, neon-lit reception areas and minimalist contemporary furniture into two townhouses in the seedy narrow streets of El Raval, the city's old brothel district and favoured stamping ground for the likes of Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dali and Federico García Lorca when they lived and worked there. It has a magnificent rooftop suite with great views of the city. The Banys Orientals is its only rival – more expensive but one of the great boutique hotels of the world.
• Gat Raval, c/Joaquim Costa 44, +34 934 816670
2. Favourite restaurant
Café de L'Acadèmia is the best lunchtime restaurant in Europe and has a simple three-course daily table d'hôte lunch menu, including a mini carafe of wine, for about a tenner – a throwback to a pre-Civil War law requiring restaurants to make a good cheap local midday meal for factory workers. I have never eaten the same meal there – it's always fresh Catalan food – and I love the counter area as much as the outside tables that sprawl across Plaça Sant Just towards a tiny medieval church. It's about two minutes' walk from the ancient Ajuntament, the magnificent City Hall in Plaça de Sant Jaume where Catalans are still battling to peacefully wrench their state from Castilian political and economic control.
• Café de l'Acadèmia, c/Liedó 1, +34 933 198253
3. Favourite tapas bar
One evening, after a couple of cavas in the faded art deco splendour of the London Bar (frequented by Dali, Picasso and Hemingway) and a long aimless stroll around El Raval's shadowy passages and the city's red-light district, Barri Xinès – backdrop for the seediest and most evocative section of Jean Genet's Journal du Voleur – I came across Mam i Teca, a minuscule bar close to the Palau Güell (currently closed for restoration), arguably Gaudí's most celebrated masterpiece. Run by a charming English-speaking gastronome, the bar has about four tables and three stools and its patron serves exquisitely cooked authentic tapas, light pastas, fresh meats, fish and a great selection of Catalan wines and malt whiskies.
• Mam i Teca, c/de la Luna 4, +34 934 413335. Closed on Tuesdays
4. Favourite museums
The great art critic Robert Hughes's classic account of the city's cultural history, entitled simply Barcelona, led me up to the National Art Museum of Catalonia, which charts 1,000 years of national cultural heritage. It is surrounded by a faux grandeur of fountains and gardens which are part of the Palau Nacional, built for the 1929 International Exhibition. In particular, this incredibly spacious museum now houses the greatest collection of pre-medieval Romanesque frescoes in the world. These were all but lost to the world until after the first world war, when enlightened Catalans relocated and restored those that had survived years of mutilation and neglect in the tiny villages in the Pyrenees. Also utterly unmissable is the Museum of Contemporary Art, in La Raval.
Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, (MNAC), Palau Nacional, Montjuic.
Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcleona (MACBA), Plaça des Angels
5. Favourite festival
On St George's Day, the entire city, from the New Town boulevards of the Eixemple, down the centre of Las Ramblas (and across La Ribera to the fisherman's houses on the Barconeleta) metamorphoses into a magnificent floral literary festival, when the men of Barcelona give their loved ones roses, and the women return the compliment with a book. Appropriately enough it was on St George's Day a few years ago that I was lucky enough to meet Carlos Ruiz Zafón, the Catalan author of The Shadow of the Wind. As a literary introduction to his home town, the novel is unparalleled, and a perfect fictional companion to Robert Hughes's cultural bible.
6. Favourite cathedral
I have spent hours in La Seu, an amazing example of Gothic architecture, studying the paintings, the side chapels, the tombs, the statues and one of the most beautiful cloisters I have ever seen – 13 white geese have inhabited it for over 400 years. La Seu has been Barcelona's iconic cathedral since the dawn of European Christianity, and the remains of one of the city's patron saints, the teenage girl martyr Santa Eulàlia (Laia is her local name), are interred in the crypt underneath the exquisite altar. She was martyred brutally in the fourth century and was the inspiration for a famous painting by John William Waterhouse, one of the great pre-Raphaelites. Legend has it that she was rolled up the hill close to the cathedral in a wooden barrel filled with broken glass. Plaça de la Seu in front of the Cathedral is the venue for an unmissable ritual performed every Saturday at 6pm – the sardana, which is Catalonia's national dance. If you are there, you will be forced to join in.
• Plaça de la Seu s/n, Barri Gotic. Metro: Jaume 1
7. Favourite theatre
Barcelona is famous for contemporary dance and vibrant fringe theatre, but it also has a magnificent opera house, the Gran Teatro del Liceu, which runs programmes of opera and classical music performed by leading international singers, musicians and conductors. Lorca and Genet staged their work in this grand auditorium on Las Ramblas. (Lorca called this broad artery "the one street in the world I didn't want to end".) Its stage door is next to the Mercat de La Boqueria, the city's ancient food market, where you can eat tapas and drink solo (espresso) before entering the grandeur of the Liceu.
8: Favourite cemetery
The setting for a key chapter in my book is the Cementiri del Sud-Ouest, where thousands of graves, tombstones, mausoleums and chapels are literally carved into the stark cliffs that loom above the vast industrial seaport opposite the south face of the little mountain called Montjuic. Thick stone columns guard rows and rows of memorials and coffins encased in carefully marked square sealed cabinets, the final resting place for thousands of Barcelona's dead. Tiny square plaques are neatly sculpted into walls of stone which stretch up and down the undulating hillside like strange vestiges of an ancient civilisation. Dried flowers, faded photos, and effigies of the Holy Virgin sit in small sealed glass protuberances, which give each cubicle, (not unlike the cubicle in a morgue), a poignant idiosyncratic atmosphere – a little personal identity which keeps them from being desperate and uniform. I adore this place, which also overlooks the Mediterranean.
9: Favourite late-night bar
There are hundreds of great bars, particularly in the La Ribera district, but my top choice is Gimlet, an art deco haven. The bar itself is shaped like a piano, and the cocktails are as good as any mixed in Manhattan. La Ribera's main street, Passeig del Born, also has several chic boutiques, the Picasso Museum, another great Catalan Gothic church – Santa Maria del Mar – and the vast Parc de la Ciutadella, where you can see Gaudí structures, fountains, a zoo, sculptures and monuments left there since the Universal Exhibition of 1888 – some would say the catalyst for modernism.
• Gimlet, c/Rec 24, La Ribera.+34 93 201 5306
10: Favourite plaça
Nobody could come to Barcelona and fail to enjoy the experience of sitting at one of the cafes or outside restaurants which surround Plaça Reial. It is surrounded by tall palm trees, and peppered with wrought iron lamps designed by a youthful Gaudí. A fountain in the middle has a statue of the Three Graces, and all of Barcelona at one stage or another passes through this sublime 19th-century square. There are the inevitable street entertainers, refugees from Las Ramblas, which is a minute's walk away, and it is crammed with tourists but as in Venice, its faded elegance survives all this. Within a short walk you can be strolling along the beach of the Barceloneta, stalking El Raval's bars or visiting the eccentricities of the Pipa Club in the corner of the square, where everyone smokes a pipe and drinks late into the night. Life at its most amusing.
• Don Boyd is a film producer, writer and director. His debut novel, Margot's Secrets, is published by Ziji (£12.99)
