Barcelona. A Day. A Life. (Short Film & Photo Series)

Last updated on March 3, 2022

I found an old hard drive recently from 2017/18 and it was like finding a wormhole back to my life in Barcelona, Spain. If you love Barcelona too, this is for you!

If you’ve been to Barcelona then you’ll already know that it’s the sort of place you never forget. It isn’t perfect, but, well… I don’t know, maybe it is.

It has it all: the beaches, the culture, the architecture, the history, the food & wine, the art, the people, the Mediterranean climate – I really could go on!

I first moved to Barcelona aged 25 in August, 2009 and lived there on and off until 2019.

Needless to say I miss my life in the Catalan capital, but now I’m home (and happily so I would like to add), I’ve realised something amazing… that my youth is not some abstract concept buried somewhere in the past, but a physical place I can visit whenever I want (post-Covid anyway). I don’t need a time machine, just a cheap airline ticket!

Anyhow, back to the point of this blog post…

As one does as they realise they are closer to 40 than to 30 (or even 20!), I’ve felt the desire to travel back in time, back to Barcelona. I’ve been dreaming of wandering around the city with my camera, from bar to bar as I used to, and waking up the next morning with a full memory card of photos on my camera that I can hardly remember taking.

But of course, it’s been impossible to visit Barcelona for over a year now. It’s been one of the longest periods of time I’ve ever spent without being able to visit my beloved España, and the heartache is definitely setting in.

In an attempt to assuage my pangs, I started delving into old archives and dusting off hard-drives that I hadn’t looked at since leaving Barcelona in 2018. What I found was quite incredible, a true reminder of how important photography is to me.

What I found was hundreds, if not thousands of photos of Barcelona that I never published here on my blog, or on Instagram / Facebook.

There’s a good reason I didn’t share many/most of them – they’re simply no good! But a few of them take me straight back to the day-to-day of my life as an ambitious young travel blogger living in Barcelona.

These are photos I took “in between” destinations, on my way to restaurants or bars or events or more famous landmarks. They’re photos of nothing in particular, of news stands and locals sitting on benches in the afternoon soon. They’re photos of my actual life in Barcelona, photos that mean more to me than many of the photos I have posted of the iconic Gaudi buildings or famous restaurants and beaches.

What I also found were hundreds of video clips that I had never even looked at. Again, most of them were unusable, but with my newfound video editing skills I’ve managed to string them together to tell a story about my old life in Barcelona (see above).

So here you go, my fellow Barcelona lover, my fellow hispanophile… just for you, here’s a little glimpse into a life well-lived in Barcelona.

 

What do you miss most about Barcelona and Spain – and travel in general?

Please do leave a comment below or on Youtube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to Let me know if any of it resonates with you.

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Now Watch the Film

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So You Want to Move to Barcelona ~ A Happy Expat’s Guide

Moving to Gijón, Asturias (Northern Spain) & Why I Left Barcelona

‘An Update About Leaving Spain’, or ‘The Future of Driftwood Journals’