I visited one of the world’s great cities for eight hours and loved every minute

The clock is ticking. Barcelona, in eight hours. It’s a laughable challenge in many ways, clearly impossible. How could anyone feel they’ve adequately “done” an entire city, one of the world’s greats, in the time it takes to get through a single workday?

But sometimes this is all you have. Your cruise ship arrives, it deposits everyone onto the dock, and at some point in the evening you will all pile back on again and depart.

So how can you feel you’ve experienced a place in such a short time? How can you enjoy yourself, while also coming to know a city and its culture and its heart, and maybe even checking off a few big-ticket items, in the space of eight hours?

First piece of advice: do not, under any circumstances, attempt to do it all. You just can’t. Even attempting to do a lot of things will be a nightmare, an unenjoyable rush from one place to the next, with no time to take any of it in.

You could look at Barcelona and think: OK, I have to do all the Gaudi stuff. La Sagrada Familia, up to Park Guell, call past Casa Batllo. Whip through the Picasso Museum, walk around the Gothic Quarter, eat tapas for lunch, stroll Las Ramblas, have a dip at the beach in Barceloneta, ride the cable car across to Montjuic, take the Teleferico (another, more modern cable car) to the top of the mountain at sunset, jump in a taxi and be back at the port in time for the ship’s departure.

Phew. That itinerary is genuinely possible. But it would be a nightmare.

So the second and very much related piece of advice is: kill your darlings. This is a literary term for getting rid of elements of your story that you love – characters, scenes, even single sentences – that just don’t work, that don’t push the plot forward or do anything useful for the work as a whole.

In your single-day holiday planning, you are going to have to kill a few darlings, particularly in a city like Barcelona. So take that dream itinerary and slice and dice, get rid of the experiences that don’t make sense either geographically or thematically or even financially. You need to be ruthless, pare it back to the bare bones.

The way to do that is to decide on your priorities, and this will be entirely personal. What brings you joy? Is it art, food, architecture, people, the opportunity to learn, the chance to wander aimlessly and see what you stumble upon?

All of these will determine your final itinerary. You’ve only got eight hours, this is no time to be doing things just because you believe you should. Do it because you love it.

So here’s how I would spend eight hours in Barcelona. Straight off the ship and over to La Sagrada Familia, Antoni Gaudí’s masterpiece. Book tickets well in advance, get there early before the bulk of the crowds arrive, take some photos from outside and then have a good hour or two inside to look around.

From there I would take the metro to Passeig de Gracia, a point at which Barcelona splits into some of its most interesting and enjoyable neighbourhoods: the Gothic Quarter, El Born, Raval and L’Eixample.

This is the ideal area to explore on foot, to just wander and see where it takes you, to call in for coffee somewhere that looks nice, check out a few shops, stroll with no agenda.

And then have lunch. This is a key area of interest of mine, and it’s also a lovingly observed ritual in Spain, so I’m reserving, frankly, a silly amount of time for lunch. We’re talking three hours here: sit down, relax, take it slow.

This is the key, I think, to exploration of this limited style. It’s far better to do a few things well than to do many things poorly.

Part of the joy of a city, for me, is having the space to just sit or wander and take it all in. The chef and travel-show host Rick Stein calls it “mooching around”, the act of forgoing famous attractions and formal tourist behaviour in favour of doing very little for a while, just sitting in the sun with a beer or drinking a coffee and reading a book.

The clock might be ticking but the idea of this sort of travel is to ignore that clock, to just forget about it for a while, pretend it doesn’t exist and enjoy yourself.

And so I’m off to El Xampanyet, an old-school tapas bar in El Born, with tiled walls and old wine bottles lining the shelves. I’ll drink vermouth and eat anchovies and watch as the crowd ebbs and flows and the day creeps by. Hours and hours well spent.

The Picasso Museum is close, so that could be worth a wander later. Or maybe I’ll have a drink somewhere else, or walk narrow streets, or check out Santa Caterina Market before it’s time to head back to the ship. Barcelona, experienced and understood. I couldn’t be happier.