Currency exchange in Barcelona. Where and how?

In this post we tell you about the currency suppliers in Barcelona and everything you need to know about currency exchange in Barcelona.

Barcelona

Barcelona is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, the second most important city in Spain, and first in tourism, with 12 million tourist visits each year, many surprises await you.

It is a modern, cosmopolitan city, with a lot of foreign influence due to its proximity to France and other Mediterranean countries. Barcelona, above all, is a city with the sea!

This city is absolutely incomparable with any other city because it has its own identity. The one that gives it its majestic monuments, its quality restoration (20 Michelin star restaurants), its Gothic quarter, its marina and its people.

Much of this reputation is owed in part to the generation of artists and architects of the early 20th century who participated in its current physiognomy. We are talking above all about Antoni Gaudí, whose unforgettable buildings are like nothing you will see anywhere else.

Gaudi´s architecture

Antoni Gaudí (1852-1926) was an architect from the late 19th century who began to design lampposts and other street furniture for the city. But he also created movie theaters, bars and restaurants.

In 1882 he began to devise the construction of the now unfinished Sagrada Familia under the direction of Francisco del Villar. But it was from 1883 when he began his first major project of his, Casa Vicens (1883-1888), with influences from oriental architecture, which fascinated the Vicens patron who had commissioned it as a summer house in the old villa of grace.

This is Gaudí’s first masterpiece and one of the first modernist buildings in Europe.

In that year, 1883, Gaudí’s tutor, Joan Martorell, introduced him to a wealthy Catalan, Eusebi Güell, who encouraged him as a patron to give free rein to his “orientalist stage”. The works that follow in Gaudí’s artistic production are El Capricho (1883-1885) and Park Güell (1900-1914).

Later he built the Baroque-style Casa Calvet (1898-1900) and the spectacular Casa Batlló (1904-1906), for which he was inspired by the Mediterranean Sea. He also highlights the construction of Casa Milà (1906-1912), a “modern house” rather than modernist.

In the period from 1912 until his death in 1926, Gaudí dedicated himself exclusively to the Sagrada Família (he had already been working on it for 30 years). So much so that he settled in it, leading a life of austerity and religious mysticism (he was extremely Catholic). For this reason, many know him as “the architect of God.”

What to see in Barcelona

Among the corners of Barcelona that you should not miss, we highlight:

Las Ramblas

Las Ramblas in Barcelona are a sequence of walks that go from Plaza de Catalunya to the Columbus Monument, ending at the seafront, the Maremagnum shopping center and the Barcelona Aquarium.

A walk along the bustling Ramblas under the shade of banana trees, postal kiosks, living statues of street artists, bird and flower stalls. Las Ramblas is a place very frequented by tourists, and for this reason, they gather a multitude of exchange houses in Barcelona where you can compare prices, since they are very close in price to each other.

The Sagrada Familia, Casa Batlló and La Pedrera

The minor basilica of the Sagrada Familia is an ambitious project, still unfinished today. It is estimated that 140 years after the start of its construction, the Gaudí temple is three quarters built.

When the spires are finished, it will be the tallest church in the world and will hardly resemble any religious structure the tourist has ever seen in his life. The Sagrada Família combines several architectural styles, such as modernism, art nouveau, and Spanish late Gothic.

Panoramic view of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona

For its part, the Battló house is another masterpiece by the famous architect. It is the result of the remodeling of an apartment block at the end of the 19th century. The roof of the building has original resources such as tiles in the shape of the scales of a great dragon. Its façade is sinuous, with few straight lines and dazzling attention to detail. Notice the mushroom-shaped fireplace in the upper area.

La Pedrera or Casa Milà (1912) is Gaudí’s third most recommended building. It is another Catalan modernist work listed by UNESCO, the fourth and last building that Gaudí built on Paseo de Gracia. It was designed as the home of the industrialist Pere Milà i Camps.

The boqueria market

The San José Market (Mercat de Sant Josep), or La Boquería, is a municipal market on the Rambla in Barcelona. Its more than 300 stalls spread throughout its more than 2,500 m² offer you a variety of local and exotic products.

The gothic quarter of Barcelona

The Gothic Quarter of Barcelona is the old part of the city, its historic center. It is made up of different neighborhoods with their own personality, such as the Jewish Quarter, Santos Justo y Pastor, Santa María del Pino, the Cathedral, Santa Ana, La Merced and the Palace.

Gothic quarter of Barcelona

The structure of the neighborhood remained intact until the 19th century, when it saw great transformations in the structure and morphology of the neighborhood. Currently, pieces of the first wall are preserved in the Plaza de la Seo, in front of the Barcelona Cathedral. In Ataúlfo street there is a Gothic chapel that belonged to the Royal Menor Palace of Barcelona and is known as the Palace chapel.

Barcelona in tourist figures

According to figures from the Barcelona City Council, the Barcelona-El Prat airport received more than 41.6 million passengers in 2022. Next in traffic is the Sants train station, which receives AVE trains from Madrid with more than 4 million passengers in 2017 and 800,000 on other international trains. And the port of Barcelona with 2.7 million cruise passengers that year.

In 2017, 8 million hotel reservations were made for around 12 million overnight stays. 67% visited the city for tourism and 20% for work. Each traveler left an average of 400 euros in the city.

Currency exchange in Barcelona

If you are going to exchange currency in Barcelona, you are in luck because it is one of the cities with the most options at your disposal. And therefore with more opportunities to make a good change and save money, whether you are going to buy foreign currency or if you want to buy euros with foreign currency.

From least to most interesting, we tell you the 4 options you have for your currency exchange in Barcelona: airport, banks, online currency purchase and exchange houses in the city and province.

Currency exchange at Barcelona airport

El Prat airport in Barcelona offers you a currency exchange service in the departure and arrival offices in terminals T1 and T2 provided by the Spanish currency supplier Global Exchange.

We recommend you use it only in the event that you have to travel now and do not have time to get foreign currency online or pick it up at an exchange office close to your location.

Here we explain how the currency exchange works at the airport and here how the change works at the Barcelona airport specifically.

Currency exchange at banks in Barcelona

If you are a resident of Barcelona and have a bank account, you can go to your bank to request currency for your trip.

But the vast majority of entities (Caixabank, Sabadell, BBVA, Santander) charge you an exchange margin for your currency and also a commission of close to 3% of what you exchange, with a minimum of 6 to 9 euros. Here we explain the currency exchange at your bank.

Online currency exchange

Another option is to order your currency online and get it delivered at home with Ria or iCambio.

Both exchanges collaborate with Cambiator, which shows that they are transparent about their prices and don’t mind competing with each other when it comes to offering you a good price.

Of course, in addition to comparing daily exchange prices, do not forget to also check the home delivery costs so that you can compare pears with pears and apples with apples, you know…

Currency exchange supplier Barcelona

Barcelona is a tourist destination with many foreign currency exchange houses. You have cheap exchange houses next to the Sagrada Familia, in the Las Ramblas and Avenida del Paralelo areas. Cambiator tells you where you do best every day and at no cost to you.

Although initially they are offices designed to buy currency for tourists who visit Barcelona (English, American, Argentine, etc.), in exchange for euros, these offices also offer you the sale of foreign currency for your trips abroad or if you have money left over of a journey already completed.

If your currency is different from the US dollar or the pound sterling, we recommend you reserve online in advance to ensure stock before going to the office.

Always compare before changing currency

Regarding the rates, if you live in Barcelona and you are going to travel abroad, we recommend you always compare the rates at currency suppliers with those of your bank and not change currency at the El Prat airport in Barcelona.

The reason is simple, the city center currency suppliers are cheaper than the airport and they should not charge you a commission (at least if you reserve the currency online and pick it up at the office later), something that banks and some suppliers do , so watch out for high commissions as well as rates.

And if you are a tourist who arrives in the city from abroad, we also do not recommend changing at the airport because the supplier there has to charge you more to earn a living and also pay a commission to the airport management body (AENA in the Barcelona airport) for being there.

Therefore, we recommend you use our Cambiator comparator to check the rates of the day for your specific currency.

Barcelona in a sentence

Who better than Carlos Ruiz Zafón from Barcelona, one of the most famous modern writers, author of the award-winning “La sombra del viento” (selected in 2007 by 81 Latin American and Spanish writers and critics as one of the 100 best books in Spanish of the last 25 years), he defines his city as follows:

The search for history is always present in Barcelona. I see cities as organisms, as living creatures. For me, Madrid is a man and Barcelona is a woman. And she is an extremely snooty woman.

And you, what do you think of Barcelona?