Sweet Home Barcelona blog

Most people fly to Barcelona from the UK, but if you have a fear of flying, or just fancy a change and a possible stopover in Paris, then one option for getting to Barcelona is to catch the Eurostar from London Waterloo station (soon to change to Kings Cross) to Paris Gare du Nord station.  Then cross Paris to the Gare d’Austerlitz and catch the overnight Elipsos sleeper train, the Trenhotel “Joan Miro” to Barcelona França station (which is better located from the tourist point of view than Barcelona Sants).  Elipsos also runs trenhotels between Barcelona and Zurich, Barcelona and Milan and also between Madrid and Paris.  The train stops at the French/Spanish border to change the axle widths for the Spanish track gauge, but you should be asleep when they do this!

There are four different accommodation classes available on the trenhotel.  A Grand Class “roomette” is for one or two people and includes a shower and complementary dinner in the restaurant, breakfast, newspapers, toiletries.  The Club Class roomettes are also for one or two people but don’t include the shower or the dinner.  Tourist class is for four people to share and doesn’t include the breakfast.  Finally, the cheapest option is for reclining seats.  I’d recommend the Club Class or Grand Class rooms if you are travelling as a couple, and the dinner and breakfast are very good considering that it is a train.  You arrive in Barcelona around 9am ready to start a full day of sightseeing or business and also arrive around 9am in Paris on the return journey.

I’d recommend the journey and would probably use this option more often if flights weren’t so competitively priced.  If you have a tight schedule, the train is probably a safer bet in winter when UK airports can get fogbound.

For a comprehensive guide to the trenhotels and train travel in Europe in general, take a look at The Man in Seat Sixty-One.

Note: We have had problems crossing Paris before, including one nightmare trip where the computers were down for the Paris metro and none of the automatic ticket vending machines were available.  The queue to buy metro tickets from the kiosks was over 30 minutes and we didn’t have that long to make our connection (it takes around 30 minutes by metro from Gare du Nord to Gare d’Austerlitz).  There were also huge taxi queues as a consequence of the metro problem.  I ended up walking to another metro station to buy tickets and we just managed to get to Gare de Austerlitz, breathless with a couple of minutes to spare.  If you have a lot of luggage I’d recommend taking a taxi rather than using the metro.