Last Updated on 29 April 2024 by gerry

After such a successful jaunt down the coastline between Caldes and Sant Andreu yesterday we were fired up for a bigger expedition into Barcelona to see how the coastline into the city fares as a ramble. We got the train as far as Sant Adriá, which is on the northern outskirts of Barcelona and walked down to the beach. It is very industrial in this neck of the woods, but this is the last coastal train station heading into Barcelona on the R1 line and we had hopes that we could navigate ourselves on foot all the way into the first beaches of Barcelona proper.

Alas, it was not to be. Almost immediately we found our path blocked by the River Besòs and we had to make a large detour. We were beginning to see the bigger picture now, that this was not territory for a coastal ramble, so we cut our losses and found the nearest tram stop, which was on the T5 line. It suddenly dawned on us that we just had 2 days left of the 30 days validity on the T-usual tickets we bought in our first week here. In hindisight we didn’t get anywhere near our money’s worth, but the tickets were still better than paying for singles every time.

Our next hurdle was the realisation that the T5 trams were not running today on this part of the line due to onoging work, so to cut a long story short by the time we had found our way to the T4 line, we were almost back to where we started in Sant Adrià. Then we jumped on the first tram that came which was actually a T6 tram that took us further from the coast than we wanted. Talk about novice Barcelonistes! By the time we made it back to the coast we had walked so much more than if we had just kept on course from the outset.

We ended up at a shopping mall called Diagonal de Mar in the Sant Martí district of the city and it was actually quite a nice change to be in such generic surroundings and to take advantage of the plethora of mall food options.

By the time we’d finishing lunch, had a beer / wee look around the shops, we barely had energy for exploring the beaches. We did take a look at the first one Platja Llevant and then decided to make a last use of our T-usual ticket on the correct T4 tram this time to get back to the Sant Adriá R1 station and then home.