Every official district of the city, coloured green, amber or red, with the reasoning and a real quote behind each verdict. No listicle, no sponsored picks.
This is a real entry, Eixample in Barcelona, rendered by the same component the city page uses. Nothing about it was arranged for this page.
01
The verdict
Green, amber or red, decided against the same five questions in every city.
02
The summary
One or two sentences. If it could describe any city, it gets cut.
03
The cons
Written before the case for the district, not after it.
04
The quote
Somebody else's words, verbatim, checked against the source and linked.
05
The link
Booking.com with our affiliate id. This is the only way the site earns.
Under the panel, most districts run to several hundred more words. This is the part you read at midnight. The rest is there for the morning you start comparing two of them.
Barcelona · district
Eixample
01Recommended
02The grid. Wide pavements, the best-value four-star hotels in the city, and you can walk to almost everything worth walking to.
First-timersCouplesLonger stays25 min to the Gothic Quarter
Walk to Sagrada Família and to the old town, both in under 25 minutes
Quietest streets of any central district after 22:00
03Blocks are 113 m, so 'two streets away' means fifteen minutes on foot
Very little is open on a Sunday, including most of the restaurants
04
It's an enormous field of rectangular blocks in a continuously repeating layout, with the constant threat of getting lost
We earn a commission if you book. It costs you nothing.
Four rules, three of them enforced in code
01
Boundaries nobody drew for us
Districts are the city's own administrative areas, fetched from OpenStreetMap. That is why the shapes are awkward: a boundary that flattered a verdict would be a boundary we invented. No two districts overlap, and none of them stop where the good part stops.
02
The cons are written first
The downsides go in before the case for the district, and nearly every entry lists some. We earn a commission when you book, so the rule that pushes the other way is the one enforced in the software: a district rated below green does not publish without a quoted source behind that verdict.
03
Quotes we are not able to invent
Every quoted traveller is verbatim from the Wikivoyage page it links to. The text is checked against the fetched source, in code, before it can publish. A reworded quote fails the same check an invented one does.
04
Nothing here reports your visit
No analytics, no pixel, no cookie banner, because there are no cookies to consent to. Even the map tiles are served from this site instead of a tile company, so the only thing that learns you are planning a trip is you.
Extracts from the sources behind six of the verdicts, exactly as they were published, each one linked back to the page it came from.
Be cautious in the Red-Light District. All kinds of people walk around there during the day, including families with children, but the area does attract seedier visitors and vagrants after sunset.
Rooms of 12-16 square metres (which is roughly half of standard hotels rooms e.g. in the USA) are the norm in central Paris, regardless of hotel standards.
One part of Porto, near the Tourist Information Office between the cathedral and the steps to the small church, often has drunk people that could cause you trouble.
On the things that change a short stay: how far you walk to the centre, what a room costs relative to the rest of the city, noise after midnight, how the district reads after dark, and what people who stayed there actually said. Green means book it without thinking about it. Amber means it suits some travellers and is wrong for others, and the entry says which is which. Red means cheap for a reason.
You earn commission. Why would the red ones stay red?
Because a site that recommends everywhere is an advertisement, and readers work that out inside one paragraph. The commission is the same wherever you book, so there is no district we are paid more to like. The rule that an amber or red verdict must carry a quoted source is enforced at ingest, not at the point where somebody is tempted.
Are the quotes real?
Yes, and that is checked rather than asserted. Source pages are fetched and committed to the repository, and a quote only publishes if it appears verbatim in one of them. A quote may drop its middle with an ellipsis, in which case the remaining parts still have to appear in order.
Why are the district shapes so strange?
They are the city's own administrative boundaries from OpenStreetMap, not areas we drew. Real districts have panhandles, islands and edges that run down the middle of a park. A tidy shape would mean somebody had adjusted the map to fit the verdict.
Green means book it. Red means read the cons first.