The Barcelona garden that's older than Park Güell, and far quieter

The garden older than Park Güell

Everyone queues for Park Güell. Almost nobody makes it to Park del Laberint d'Horta, which is older, stranger and usually close to empty.

It was built in the late 1700s for the Marquis of Llupià, a neoclassical garden centred on a hedge maze of clipped cypress, with a statue of Eros at its heart. In the 1850s a second, wilder romantic garden was added around it, with a small lake, a waterfall and a neo-gothic chapel. The two styles sit side by side, formal geometry giving way to winding paths and ivy, which makes walking through it feel like moving between two different centuries.

The park limits how many people can be inside the maze section at once, which is part of why it never gets the crowds of Park Güell: there's no incentive for tour groups to build a stop around somewhere that can't absorb coachloads. Go on a weekday morning and you may have the cypress maze to yourself.

A neighbourhood that still feels like a village

The park sits in Horta, a district that was its own separate town until it was annexed by Barcelona in 1904, and it has kept that character. The streets around Plaça d'Eivissa and Carrer Aiguafreda are narrow and sloped, lined with low houses rather than the apartment blocks of the Eixample.

Horta grew up around water: the area had natural springs and was known for its public wash houses, where women did laundry for the whole city well into the twentieth century. You can still find one of these old lavaderos, Can Mariner, tucked into the hillside. It is now a small museum piece rather than a working laundry, but it remains a reminder of what the neighbourhood actually did for a living.

For lunch, skip the main avenues and head for the covered Mercat d'Horta, where the bar stalls serve the kind of plain, good cooking aimed at locals rather than tourists: botifarra amb mongetes (sausage with white beans), or a simple plate of calçots in season. It's the sort of meal that costs what a Barcelona lunch used to cost before the Rambla found out about tapas.

The walk up to the bunkers

From Horta, it's a steady uphill walk, or a short bus ride, to Turó de la Rovira, better known as the Bunkers del Carmel. The anti-aircraft gun emplacements were built here during the Spanish Civil War to defend the city against air raids, and after the war the site became the base for a shantytown that stood until the 1990s, when residents were rehoused and the hill was turned back into open ground.

What's left is a set of concrete platforms with the single best free view over Barcelona: the whole grid of the Eixample laid out below, the sea beyond it, Tibidabo and Montjuïc marking the two edges of the city. It has become known locally as a good spot to watch the sunset, so locals do turn up for that, but it's nothing like the queues at Park Güell or the cable car up Montjuïc.

Putting the maze, the market and the bunkers together makes a loose but logical day: downhill garden, village lunch, uphill view, all within walking distance of each other and well away from Las Ramblas.

When to go

Spring, from March to May, is the best stretch for the Laberint d'Horta itself. The romantic garden's magnolias and wisteria are out, the cypress hedges are freshly trimmed, and the midday heat that makes Barcelona's hillier walks uncomfortable in summer hasn't arrived yet.

Autumn works almost as well, particularly October, when the light is softer for the view from the bunkers and the market stalls are into the calçot and mushroom season that Catalan cooking takes seriously.

Avoid August if you want Horta's village streets to feel lived in rather than shuttered: like much of residential Barcelona, a lot of local life empties out for the summer break.

If you're mapping out a few days in the city and want this kind of detour built in alongside the obvious stops, it's the sort of thing worth planning for rather than hoping to stumble on.

Planning a visit? Our Barcelona guide has the essentials, and decide can plan the whole trip in about a minute.