Getting Around Barcelona in 2 Days

By Joan. I have lived in Barcelona for 16 years and I have watched a lot of visitors pay twice for the same journey, always in the same two places.

Transport is the part of a short trip people plan last and regret first. It is also the easiest part to get right, because Barcelona is small, the metro goes almost everywhere a visitor wants to go, and there are only about four decisions to make. This page makes those four decisions with you and then sends you to the page that has the detail.

Quick answer: if you are taking the metro to or from the airport, buy the Hola Barcelona Travel Card, from €12.50, because it covers the airport journey that the ordinary cards do not. It is sold by duration and the operator only publishes the price of each duration in its own shop, so check yours there before you buy. If you are arriving any other way, buy a T-casual, €13.00 for 10 journeys, which works out at €1.30 a ride against €2.90 for a single. One card per person in both cases, because neither of those two can be shared. Fares change, so check the current one before you budget.

The short version

• The T-casual is the cheapest normal ticket at €13.00 for 10 journeys, and it is not valid at the two airport metro stations, which is the single most expensive thing most visitors do not know.
• The airport metro has its own fare of €5.90 each way, so a T-casual plus two airport rides comes to €24.80, and the Hola Barcelona card includes those two rides instead of charging them.
• Neither the T-casual nor the Hola Barcelona is shareable, so a couple buys two of whichever it picks. There is one ticket in the city that several people can share, the T-familiar, and it is on the tickets page.
• Four metro lines cover almost every sight in this guide, and the old city is quicker on foot than underground.
• The Barcelona Card and the Articket are bundles of museum entry, not transport tickets, so that decision sits outside everything on this page.

How I am ordering this: by the order you will actually face the decisions, starting at the airport and ending at the things you might not need at all. Not by price, and not by what pays a commission, because the two cards at the top of this page pay me nothing.

The four decisions, in the order they hit you

1. How you get in from the airport

This one comes first and it quietly decides the next one. El Prat sits outside the city and the right way in depends on where you are sleeping rather than on the fare. The important detail for everything below is that the airport metro, line L9 Sud, has a station under each terminal and is charged separately from the rest of the network, so if you take it, your ticket decision changes. The full comparison of the Aerobus, the metro, the train, a taxi and a private transfer is in my Barcelona airport to city centre guide.

2. Which ticket you buy on the first morning

This is where the money is, and it is a two-line calculation once you know whether the airport metro is in your plans. A T-casual at €13.00 gives 10 journeys, a Hola Barcelona from €12.50 gives unlimited travel plus the airport for a fixed block of hours, and a T-dia at €12.00 gives one day of unlimited travel that almost nobody needs. I have put every current fare, the sharing rules and the two traps in Barcelona transport tickets and travel cards.

3. How you ride the metro once you have the ticket

Four lines are the only ones you will really use. L3 for Las Ramblas and Park Guell, L5 for the Sagrada Familia, L4 for Barceloneta and the Gothic Quarter, L2 as the useful alternative to both. From my own line in Poblenou almost everything in this guide is one change or none, which is the part of living here that I would most like to hand over to you. The station-by-station detail, including which exit puts you where, is in my Barcelona metro guide.

4. Whether a city pass changes any of this

It does not, and that is the useful thing to know. The Barcelona Card and the Articket are bundles of museum entry, not transport tickets, so whether one of them pays is a question about how many paid museums you plan to walk into, answered with the entry prices of the places on your own list. It is not answered with the fares above, and the ticket you buy on the first morning is the same either way. I am not putting a figure on it here, because the prices I could find for those bundles did not agree with each other and I would rather say that than hand you one I cannot stand behind.

Two cases that need their own page

1. You arrived by ship

The cruise terminal is a different starting point with a different set of options, including a port surcharge that surprises people at the other end. My Barcelona cruise port guide covers the ride into town and what fits in a port call.

2. Your hotel is not in the centre

If you are still choosing where to sleep, or you have already booked somewhere the metro reaches awkwardly, the walking distances and the line that serves each area are in getting around from your hotel.

What I would actually do

If the budget is tight, one T-casual per person, walk the old city, and take the Aerobus or the airport metro rather than a taxi. If you are two people arriving by air on the metro, two Hola Barcelona cards and stop thinking about it. If you are travelling with children, check your route before you commit to a pushchair, because not every central station has a lift. If you only have 48 hours, the honest answer is that you will make fewer journeys than you expect, because the things you came to see are closer together than the map suggests.

Before you buy anything

• Decide the airport question first. Every other ticket decision follows from it.
• Buy one card per person, unless you are two or more and go for the T-familiar. Neither card at the top of this page can be shared, and that is the detail that catches out couples.
• Buy at the machine when you land, not when you are already late for a timed entry.
• The TMB fares here are the exact published ones, revised on 15 January 2026, and the tour prices are starting prices that change. Check the current one at the machine rather than trusting a web page.

Tours that solve the transport for you

If you would rather not manage any of this, a few things do the moving as well as the guiding. The hop-on hop-off bus, from €33.00 and rated 4.0 across 5,425 reviews, is the one I would consider on a first visit with bad weather, and I would not buy it as a way to save money on transport, because it is not one. A private arrival transfer, from €28.00 and rated 4.7 across 361 reviews, earns its money with a group and a pile of cases, not on your own.

Get the ticket right on the first morning and transport stops being a thing you think about for the rest of the trip. That is the entire goal here, and it takes about five minutes at a machine.