Barcelona's squares and parks: a guide to everything you can see for free

The four squares below fit into a two-hour walk and cost nothing. They are listed from least to most interesting, which is the exact reverse of the order most visitors take them in.

• Plaça de Catalunya — the hinge. Five hectares of paving between the old city and the Eixample, laid out for the 1929 International Exposition, with fountains, sculptures — including Josep Clarà's La Deessa — and a legendary pigeon population. Let us be blunt: this is an interchange, not a destination. Metro lines L1, L3, L6 and L7 converge here, along with Rodalies trains to the Maresme coast and the airport Aerobús; La Rambla and Passeig de Gràcia both begin at its edges. Best hour: whenever you happen to pass, because you will. Metro: Catalunya (L1, L3). Nearby: El Corte Inglés, the Portal de l'Àngel shopping street and the walk up to the modernista block. One practical warning: this is textbook pickpocket territory, especially at the metro entrances.
• Plaça Reial — the courtyard with columns. Designed by Francesc Daniel Molina and opened in 1848 on the site of a Capuchin convent, this is the old city's only arcaded square built at monumental scale: neoclassical porticoes, tall palms, the Three Graces fountain in the middle and, flanking it, the two six-armed lampposts Antoni Gaudí designed in 1878 and which were installed on 24 September 1879. They were his first commission from the city council, almost half a century before he died with the Sagrada Família unfinished; look at the bases, where serpents coil around Mercury's caduceus. Best hour: 9 am, while they are sweeping and nobody is about. Metro: Liceu (L3). Nearby: La Rambla and Palau Güell, two streets away. After dark the square becomes something else — bars, live music, expensive terraces — and one of the city's worst spots for theft: a phone left on a table here does not stay long.
• Plaça del Rei — the genuinely medieval one. A stone rectangle enclosed by the Palau Reial Major, the watchtower of King Martí, the chapel of Santa Àgata and the 14th-century Saló del Tinell. There is not a single café terrace, and that is precisely why it works: it is the one square in the Gothic Quarter where you can hear your own footsteps. Beneath the paving lies the MUHBA excavation, several thousand square metres of Roman Barcino — streets, dye works, a garum factory — crossed on walkways. Price: €7 general, €5.20 reduced, free on the first Sunday of the month and every Sunday from 3 pm. Metro: Jaume I (L4). Nearby: the cathedral and the rest of the central museums.
• Plaça de Sant Felip Neri — the one to visit in silence. A small baroque square with an acacia and a fountain, hidden a minute from the cathedral. The church façade is pitted with holes, and not from age: on 30 January 1938, Italian aircraft allied with Franco bombed this spot. The first bomb fell shortly after nine in the morning on a shelter full of children; a second, roughly two hours later, struck the rescue teams. Forty-two people were killed, most of them children. A plaque has marked it since 2007. Best hour: not mid-morning on a weekday — there is a school on the square and the yard belongs to the pupils. Come first thing or late afternoon. Metro: Jaume I (L4) or Liceu (L3). This is a memorial, not a backdrop: look, read the plaque, lower your voice.

The Arc de Triomf commemorates no battle at all, and that is the point of it. Josep Vilaseca i Casanovas raised it in 1888 as the entrance gate to the Universal Exposition, which is why it is built of exposed red brick rather than noble stone: it is an arch of welcome, in a Moorish-revival vocabulary, with glazed ceramic and a front frieze — Barcelona rep les nacions by Josep Reynés — in which the city literally receives its guests. It stands about 30 metres tall and, unlike its cousins in Paris or Rome, was planted in the middle of a tree-lined promenade with no traffic circling it.

That promenade, Passeig de Lluís Companys, is half a kilometre of plane trees, benches, skaters and runners leading straight into the park. Walk it: it is the best urban transition in the city and the reason the arch makes sense where it stands. Best hour: early morning, when the eastern sun hits the red brick full on and there is no queue of people taking the same photo. Metro: Arc de Triomf (L1).

At the far end begins Parc de la Ciutadella, and with it a less comfortable history: this was the site of the military citadel Philip V ordered built after the defeat of 1714, flattening an entire neighbourhood so the city could be watched from within. Barcelona spent a century and a half campaigning for its demolition; from 1869, Josep Fontserè turned the cleared ground into the city's first great public park. What to look for:

• The Cascada fountain. Built between 1875 and 1888 to Fontserè's overall design and inaugurated in 1881. Behind the theatre of rocks, grottoes and bronze quadrigas sits a water tank that fed the park's lakes — and the structural calculations for it were signed by Antoni Gaudí while he was still an architecture student, working with Fontserè on the hydraulic side. It is, quite literally, the first Gaudí you can touch in Barcelona, and it costs nothing.
• The rowing lake. Boats for a few euros per half hour, with the Cascada behind you. With children it is the best money spent in the park.
• The Parliament of Catalonia. It occupies the old arsenal of the Bourbon citadel, the one military building spared in the demolition. In front of it, the pond with Josep Llimona's sculpture El desconsol.
• Castell dels Tres Dragons. The café-restaurant Lluís Domènech i Montaner built for the 1888 Exposition, a pioneering piece of modernisme in exposed brick and iron. Beside it stand the Hivernacle and Umbracle, two iron-and-timber glasshouses that are the most photogenic corner of the park.
• The Barcelona Zoo entrance. It takes up the south-east corner and has its own ticket office: the park is free, the zoo is not.

On Sunday afternoons the park fills with drum circles, jugglers and people lying on the grass; mid-morning on a weekday it is quiet and full of the city's screeching monk parakeets. If you want the context delivered on the ground, there is a walking tour of Barceloneta and Ciutadella Park that ties the park to the old fishermen's quarter and the beach, ten minutes away on foot.

This route costs nothing beyond a metro ticket, covers a thousand years of city and ends with a show. It is built for a spring or autumn day; in August, shift everything an hour earlier.

Times are indicative. Magic Fountain days and hours are seasonal and can change without notice; verify on barcelona.cat.