Barcelona lies between 90 minutes and 2 hours drive from Chateau La Tour Apollinaire. Head south from Perpignan across the Pyrenees to Spain through magnificent mountain scenery, past Figueras (home of the Dali museum) and Girona. Arriving in Barcelona you will find a confident, avant garde city, looking towards the rest of Europe for its inspiration and its innovations the classic tourist images of Spain seem firmly out of place in Barcelona's bustling central boulevards and stylish modern streets. And style is what brings many visitors here, attracted by enthusiastic newspaper and magazine articles which make much of the outrageous architecture, user-friendly city design, agreeable climate and frenetic nightlife. Even the medieval Gothic quarter and has been swept up by the citywide renovation programme, which is still running at full tilt.

Barcelona is the capital of Catalunya (Catalonia in English), and has an historical identity going back as far as the ninth century, when the first independent County of Barcelona was established. Between the 12th and 13th centuries Barcelona was part of the Kingdom of Majorca which had Perpignan as its capital, so the two medieval towns have strong ties to each other which will grow even closer when the new high speed train reduces the journey time to 45 minutes between Barcelona and Perpignan.

Barcelona has long had the reputation of being at the forefront of Spanish political activism and of radical design and architecture, but these cultural distinctions are rapidly becoming secondary to the city's position as one of the most dynamic and prosperous commercial centres in the country. As the money and tourists continue to pour in, the economic transformation of the city continues at a remarkable pace: entire districts, from the harbour to the suburbs, have been re-planned and rebuilt; historic buildings and museums have been given face-lifts; and roads and communications have been upgraded. In part, this progress is due to the huge psychological shove that the granting of the 1992 Olympics gave to Barcelona.

When the Games had finished, the city was left with an entirely new harbour development containing the futuristic Olympic Village. And along with a construction programme that touched every corner of the city, went the indisputable knowledge that these had been Barcelona's Olympics, and not Spain's an important distinction to the Catalan people, who, bolstered by the gradual integration of immigrants from other parts of Spain, endow the city with a character distinct from Spain's other regional capitals.

Since 1992, the developments have continued unabated; indeed Barcelona's drive for self-improvement and self-promotion seems to know no bounds. The commercial port continues to expand, and is now dominated by a futuristic World Trade Center set in the central harbour, while the airport is given a new runway and the city anxiously awaits the arrival of a high-speed train (AVE) line.

There's a pride in the city which is expressed in a remarkable cultural energy, seen most perfectly in the glorious modernista (Art Nouveau) architecture that studs the city's streets and avenues. Antoni Gaudí is the most famous of those who have left their mark on Barcelona in this way: his Sagrada Família church is rightly revered, but just as fascinating are the (literally) fantastic houses and apartment buildings that he and his contemporaries designed. In art, too, the city boasts a stupendous legacy, from important Romanesque and Gothic works to major galleries containing the life's work of the Catalan artists Joan Miró and Antoni Tàpies, and perhaps the greatest draw of all a representative collection of the work of Pablo Picasso.