Tarragona; Sunday, 08 February, 2026

I had a bit of a lie in and a later breakfast, which did confirm my suspicion that the hotel restaurant struggles a little bit when the majority of guests all want to eat around the same time, but I wasn’t in much of a rush.

With the experience of getting the train here from the airport I’d decided it was a bit too risky to rely on the train to get me back, especially with having to make a connection in the centre of Barcelona and then getting the transfer bus between terminals at the airport, so I’d booked a ticket with the local bus company for the coach directly from the bus station in town to Terminal 1 at Barcelona which my flight would be leaving from, with that scheduled to only take just over an hour.

For an 20:00 flight I’d had the choice of a bus that got me to the airport (if it was on time) at just after 16:00 or just after 18:30, and I’d decided that it was probably best to get the earlier bus, which meant I needed to be at the bus station by 14:30 reducing the time I had to complete my exploration of the city down to just a couple of hours and I decided to spend that time focussing on the one part of the city I’d missed out on so far – the coastline and beach.

The main beach of the city, the Playa El Miracle stretches for just over a kilometre from the edge of the harbour round to a headland that is protected by two different forts. I started by heading down from the hotel through the streets of the town to the headland with the plan to walk back along the beach to the centre of the city.

At the eastern end of the beach are two forts – Fortí de Sant Jordi and Fortí de la Reina. The former was recently refurbished but is still closed to the public. The latter doesn’t look like it’s been touched for many years, but you can still walk around the outside of both to at least appreciate the engineering that went into building them.

Fortí de la Reina backs onto the headland and sits on the very edge of the low cliffs that form the headland here, with the seas of the Mediterranean pounding into the rocks below the walls of the fort – in early February, with the seas still heavy from a series of recent storms, it was impressive the pounding that the rocks were taking.

From the two forts I headed down onto the coastal path and followed that back along the sea front to the centre of town and then headed back up through the amphitheatre park to my hotel to pick up my bags and then walk the 20 minutes to the central bus station, arriving a couple of minutes head of the bus pulling in to pick us up.

The bus journey was smooth, with us arriving at Barcelona Airport on time to the minute, proving I probably could have taken the later bus, but I’d rather have three hours in the lounge rather than the stress of rushing through the airport.

The flight back to the UK was uneventful and actually early with the plane pulling up on stand a good 15 minutes ahead of our scheduled arrival time, but sadly back into the miserable drizzle of England that had been going on almost continuously since the start of the year, rather than the clear blue (and warm) skies of the Catalan coast.