Skip Barcelona: Valencia, Tarragona and Siurana Instead

Seeking alternatives to Barcelona today isn't a snobbish traveller's whim: it's an increasingly sensible choice. The Catalan city has announced an end to short-term rental licences by 2028, a cut in cruise terminals from seven to five and a doubling of the docking tax, while Catalonia has for years faced a drought that puts the hotels of the Costa Brava under strain. Translation: high prices, queues at the Sagrada Família and a welcome that has cooled. The good news is that the Spanish Mediterranean has many other cities with the same light, the same sea and a fraction of the chaos. Here's where to go.

The coastal cities

The most obvious substitute is Valencia. Spain's third city, it long lived in the shadow of Madrid and Barcelona, and precisely for that it keeps a more relaxed Mediterranean energy: the Ciutat Vella can be walked without a crush, Calatrava's Ciudad de las Artes y las Ciencias offers the spectacular architecture many seek at the Sagrada, and the urban beach of Malvarrosa is broad and airy. Further north, Tarragona is the perfect alternative for history lovers: the Roman amphitheatre overlooking the sea, the circus and the aqueduct of Tárraco are worth the trip, and it's just half an hour by high-speed train from Barcelona. Halfway to the Valencian Community there's then Peñíscola, a walled village on a rocky promontory, often compared to Dubrovnik but with far more contained crowds.

Towards the interior

If instead you really want to leave the crowded coast and head up into the Catalan and Aragonese interior, the leap in quality is remarkable. In the heart of the Priorat, wine country, there's Siurana, the village suspended on a sheer cliff: a handful of houses, a dizzying viewpoint and a silence unthinkable in Barcelona. Just over the regional border, in the province of Teruel, Albarracín unrolls its pink-ochre lanes above the river Guadalaviar, one of the best-preserved medieval centres in the whole peninsula. And if you like cities sculpted by geology, Cuenca hangs its casas colgadas on the precipice between two gorges: pure spectacle, but without the siege of the coaches.

Pushing inland you'll find other stops that break up the coastal itinerary. Maderuelo, a fortified village facing the water, is a quiet stop between Madrid and the north, while in western León Las Médulas reveals the red mountains carved by the ancient Roman gold mine, a UNESCO landscape few Italians associate with Spain. These are destinations that require a car, but they repay you with empty roads and restaurants where you eat well at half the Barcelona price.

The hidden Barcelona

And if Barcelona stays in your plans anyway, perhaps for a single day, it's worth seeking out its silent sides instead of joining the usual queues. On the southern slope of Montjuïc, the modernist cemetery offers stairways and mausoleums overhanging the port, a museum of funerary art that's almost deserted; not far off, the Jardins de Mossèn Costa i Llobera gather a collection of monumental cacti with a view over the Mediterranean. In the Barri Gòtic, the four columns of the Temple of Augustus hide in the courtyard of a building, Roman witnesses ignored by the crowd a few metres from the Cathedral, while the Romanesque church of Santa Anna opens a peaceful cloister a step from Plaça Catalunya. For those wanting to understand the city beyond Gaudí, the Refugi 307 preserves the air-raid tunnels of the Civil War, dug by hand in Poble-Sec.

Two urban gems

If you want to extend still further, the interior offers two urban gems far from the bustle: on the outskirts of Madrid El Capricho is the romantic garden commissioned by the Duchess of Osuna, and in Malasaña San Antonio de los Alemanes hides an elliptical vault entirely frescoed. None of these destinations asks you to give up the best of Spain: it only asks you to choose cities where travel is still a pleasure, not an obstacle course between selfies and turnstiles. Barcelona will always be there; in the meantime, the rest of the Iberian Mediterranean awaits you with more space and less noise.