I returned to Barcelona after a decade and its magic still took my breath away

On the doorstep of my Newcastle home sits a small ceramic lizard, a replica of "El Drac", the dragon at the entrance to Park Guell overlooking Barcelona, and a symbol of my enduring love for the city that was once my second home.

Hooked on Barcelona's flamboyant allure since my first dalliance with it in the late 1980s, I returned regularly for the two decades that my brother lived here with his Catalan family.

At first it was mere infatuation. Blessed with smouldering looks, an enviable Mediterranean setting and captivating culture and cuisine, Catalonia's capital seemed a sassy supermodel, one of a coterie of international glamourpusses including Paris and New York. Peppered with major works by arguably the world's greatest ever architect, modernist Antoni Gaudi, seven of which are UNESCO World Heritage sites, it was the most visually splendid city I'd visited.

However, the main draw was everyday Barcelona pleasures: sipping vermouth and grazing on tapas outside city bars; hitting Barceloneta beach then sitting down to a seafood feast; family dinners beginning at 10pm; long nights bar-hopping in a city that felt inclusive and open until dawn.

After the successful 1992 Olympics, much of the world was smitten too, visitor numbers surging through the nineties and noughties, until annual tourist arrivals were five times the 1.6 million population.

There were soon also signs that Barcelona was growing weary of mass adulation.

As early as 2009, residents of the Old Town, popular with stag parties, wrote to city officials complaining about tourist behaviour. By 2014, its future mayor Ada Colau warned: "Mass tourism can kill a city; just ask the residents of Barcelona."

It was around this time, following a difficult long stay typified by spats with tourist-weary waiters, that I shunned Barcelona, put off by what seemed its preening, almost Parisian, self-regard.

So it is that I trepidatiously arrive into Barcelona's Sants station after more than 10 years away, unsure what to expect. It's a decade in which "tourist pollution" has become more marked here, with COVID-19 merely a speed hump to the growth in visitor numbers. In 2024, 15.5 million tourists stayed overnight and locals were nearly outnumbered by 1.6 million visiting cruise passengers.

In recent months there have been demonstrations against overtourism, protestors holding signs proclaiming "your Airbnb used to be my home" and calling for a ban on giant cruise ships. City authorities have responded by announcing a veto on short-term tourist rentals, from 2028.

Yet for me and my teenage daughter, Freya, the welcome couldn't be warmer. This is partly because we've arrived in a heatwave, and partly because greeting us at Sants are my beaming Catalan niece Emma and her nine-year-old, April.

As Emma drives us to the quiet neighbourhood of Horta at the foot of the surrounding Collserola hills, where I've secured a flat using house-swap agency homeexchange.com, I catch glimpses of two Gaudi masterpieces: the rib-like facade of Casa Mila, in the trendy Eixample district, and the soaring towers of La Sagrada Familia church.

My heart flutters, it's like reconnecting with a first love, familiar but, after a long hiatus, thrillingly new.

This feeling stays with me over the next five days as we use the spacious, air-conditioned Horta flat as our base, and the excellent metro and bus system to rediscover beloved Barcelona haunts and take in places, like Mount Tibidabo above the city, I've never been to.

Our first move, suggested by first-time visitor Freya, and something I'd not previously countenanced, is taking an open-topped tourist bus circling the city. As Freya absorbs the new city, eyeing landmarks like Joan Miro's 21-metre-high Woman and Bird sculpture, near Placa Espanya, I recover my Barcelona bearings.

We alight the bus at the central Placa de Catalunya then, hackneyed though it feels, join the throngs flooding down Las Ramblas, the tree-lined pedestrian thoroughfare running to the port, passing human statues including a rusty-looking Don Quixote and an all-green Gaudi.

We soon detour into La Boqueria, open since 1836, and one of the planet's most sensorily inviting markets, with more than 200 stalls selling everything from macaroons through exotic seafood to rows of chorizo. It's still, I'm reassured to see, where locals source their dinner ingredients.

We also have a drink in Placa Reial, across the way in the Gothic quarter, with its ornate Gaudi street lamps. I often dwelt into the early hours here but it has long since been commercialised.

Barceloneta's seaside restaurants are now also famous, so with evening queues developing outside many, we continue along the coast to Bogatell beach where we share a seafood paella at Can Fisher on the esplanade, as local cyclists and skaters scoot past. From here, we catch a bus "home" to Horta.

Next morning we take another local bus to Park Guell, where I once roamed freely but where access is now by reservation only, part of Barcelona's ongoing commitment to managing tourism.

However, the 18 euro ($32) entry fee to this World Heritage Site, designed as an English-style garden city by Gaudi for industrialist Eusebi Guell, in the village of Gracia, is good value. Freya loves the open hypo-style hall near the entrance, with its 86 columns underpinning the Plaza de la Natura above, and I'll never tire of the mosaic-encrusted bench - designed by Gaudi associate Jujol - curling around that square's perimeter.

Rendezvousing with my Catalan family, we head further into the surrounding ranges by car, winding up Mount Tibidabo with its amusement park rides splayed across the hillside.

That's packed, but the adjacent Temple of the Sacred Heart is empty, and has a lift running to the top, for 5 euros. It's the bargain of our entire visit, with Barcelona laid out beside the Mediterranean below, and the Neo-Gothic temple's huge open-armed statue of Jesus floating above, backlit by high cloud.

The following day is Sunday and time for our pre-booked visit to La Sagrada Familia, begun by Gaudi in 1882, and finally due for completion in 2026, the centenary of his death.

There is no better word for this building than staggering - in its scale, the detail etched into its facades and the audacious vision behind it. Having explored the Basilica's exultant interior, we take another elevator inside a church, up one of its towers, to more goose-bump-inducing views, including close-ups of its steeples topped by ceramic clusters of Catalan fruit - a classic Gaudi nature symbol. To descend, we follow narrow spiralling stairs, their helix design mimicking a seashell's interior.

Leaving the Basilica around midday, we see no sign of anti-tourism protests held regularly by residents here and head into the metro to meet with the family to take the Montjuic cable car. This is another tourist attraction I've previously eschewed, but we all love the 750-metre ride up, the view over Barcelona widening as we climb. At the top, Montjuic castle, built in 1640, lords it over the coastline, disclosing a disturbing history of imprisonment and executions, notably during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39.

Back in the centre, we seek out Entrepanes Diaz, a highly-recommended gourmet sandwich bar in Eixample, a showbiz-y joint that's surprisingly quiet when we arrive. Recalling the 1960s, with booth-like leather seating and walls decorated by black-and-white photographs of the era's celebrities, its real stars are the bocadillos, open sandwiches featuring toppings like low-temperature cooked egg with sweet paprika sausage.

By now Freya is pining for the beach. However, rather than squeeze onto city beaches like Barceloneta or Sant Sebastia, we travel 20-kilometres south to Platja de Castelldefels, the train trip constituting one journey on our 10-ride (12.55 euros) transport passes.

The rest of our day is dedicated to the master himself, starting at Casa Batllo, one of Gaudi's most beguiling concoctions. Here, however, faced by jostling crowds and officious staff, we exit quickly, contenting ourselves with ogling its facade from Passeig de Gracia below, its skull-like balconies protruding through a sea of luminous blues and greens.

By contrast our visit to La Pedrera, or Casa Mila, an Eixample apartment block built between 1906 and 1912, is a crowd-less joy. Although ridiculed during Gaudi's life, with its stone facade resembling a weathered cliff-face, apartments drenched in natural light and wavelike rooftop upheld by 273 ribs in the extraordinary attic, this remains one of his greatest achievements and my favourite building on earth.

For our final dinner, we settle into buzzy tapas restaurant Anxoita Bodega, on Rambla Catalunya, with my Catalan family, perching around upturned wine barrels and hoeing into succulent gildas (green olives, chilli and anchovies skewered on toothpicks), tender Bacalao salted cod with honey aioli, and jugs of sangria.

It's taken just five days to renew my passion for this exuberant, theatrical city, and as we begin our journey back to that ceramic lizard on our doorstep, I can't help thinking that, crowded or not, I've been away from Barcelona too long, and hoping that it can get its tourism strategy right, so that people like me don't smother it with love.

The writer had assistance from Home Exchange and Barcelona Tourism