Six days. Five overnight stays in five cities in Spain. Lunch in Paris. Stopover in Barcelona. Then Córdoba, Seville, Granada and Málaga. An Andalusia Whirlwind Tour where we visit the Mezquita and the Alhambra. We’re touring Andalusia in October 2023 to follow the trend of travelling to hot spots outside summer, as we did with Italy in 2022.
Travelling all the way to Spain from Belgium by train is quite cumbersome, you can´t get much further south than Barcelona in a single day.
The main problem being that there are only 2 daily TGV´s directly from Paris to Barcelona. The morning TGV with a departure of 9:42 in Paris leaves too early to offer enough and safe options to get to Paris from Belgium and further north, while the afternoon departure only arrives in Barcelona at 21:25 which doesn’t provide much more onwards connectivity.
Nowadays there is the AVE from Lyon to Barcelona which provides a somewhat better connectivity at both ends, but at the time we were reserving our travels this train was temporarily not running. So we decided to book a morning sparkling Eurostar from Antwerp to Paris, have a lunch at the famous Le Train Bleu in Paris and continued our trip with the afternoon TGV to Barcelona. Arriving after 21:00 meant spending the night in Barcelona before continuing onto Córdoba with the morning AVE.
The best hotel option when spending the night transferring trains in Barcelona-Sants Station is without doubt the Barcelo Sants hotel, located on top of the station. When you exit the station at the south end you can walk along the pavement of the taxi rank towards the middle of the building where you can find a small door leading to a set of escalators and stairs taking you one floor up to the main lobby.
The main lobby is located on the first floor above the station, alongside the car drop-off point for the hotel. The entire hotel is decorated in a space theme, there is a big round table in the reception area from which you can imagine the entire spaceship being run. There is also some other space relics and even the ATM and elevator doors are decorated in a space theme.
For check-in we had to wait a bit as we weren’t the only passengers coming off our TGV to stay the night at the Barcelo Sants. The staff however knew how to deal with people having short layovers at the hotel and did all the administration and payments at check-in, meaning you didn’t have to go to the desk for check-out and could go straight from the room to the train.
We had booked a standard room, which was also decorated in the space theme. In the middle there where 2 separate beds, with plug sockets at both sides. A TV was hanging on the opposite wall. A small desk and seat where located at the window. Storage options where provided in the entrance corridor. We liked that they provided 2 moveable tables to put in bed, if you want to work or have breakfast there.
The room also had tea and coffee facilities as well as a fridge with complimentary water bottles. Both tucked away in the combined bathroom/bedroom dividing furniture piece.
The design of the bathroom was semi-open. The 2 sinks and storage areas where located in the main room, together with all towels and amenities. They provided everything you could need including a comb, shaving kit and toothbrushes.
The toilet and the shower where behind a sliding door, giving them some privacy. The shower was nice and big with a fantastic rain shower head. The power of the water felt like you were being jet washed. The biggest downside of the wet-cell was a lack of somewhere to hang your towels or clothes to prevent them from getting wet.
As we had an early morning departure we only had a short night at the hotel and didn’t try out the breakfast nor the gym. All in all we had a great stay at the Barcelo Sants and it makes us want to stay at more Barcelo properties in the future. It certainly is the best option to stay at if you are changing trains overnight, maybe the location isn’t the best if you are visiting Barcelona as a destination.
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