Revisiting Barcelona: Is it a city worth returning to?

The last time I stood here, looking up at Barcelona's famous La Sagrada Familia, it was 2006 and my three girlfriends and I were making a pact: let's never return to this city, as long as we all shall live.

Yet here I am. The shards of a broken promise at my feet, as 12 years peel away to reveal the distressing situations that led to our oath. The make-your-own-sangria-fuelled cooking class. The accidental splitting of our group on Las Ramblas. The swiping of my friend's bag at dinner. My other friend and I hiding from some undesirables in a nightclub bathroom.

That our youthful foolhardiness was as much to blame as the city was a fact that took me more than decade to admit. As author Alain de Botton rightly reflects in his philosophical tome The Art of Travel, "a danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connection chain".

Realising that perhaps I wasn't ready for Barcelona back then, I decided it deserved a second chance. This time around, however, I'd do it right, putting myself in the hands of luxury tour experts Abercrombie & Kent, to present Barcelona to me in her most flattering light.

As we enter the neo-classical facade of the El Palace Hotel, and wander through the gilded lobby, I'm visited by the ghost of poor accommodation choices past. Back in 2006, a grande dame hotel with a fancy doorman was something my friends and I could have only dreamt of. In those pre-Airbnb days we'd rented an apartment, sight unseen, off a strange man at the train station. We'd headed to the city's outer limits to find our digs were flea-infested and had cockroaches in the coffee. It hadn't gotten us off to the best start with the Catalonian capital, I realise as I sip tea on the El Palace rooftop pool terrace with 360-degree views over the city.

Soon, my travel compadres and I are wandering old Barcelona's sun-splashed laneways in search of the city's most impressive architecture, something I couldn't have cared less about at 22. Our first stop is the Palau de la Musica Catalana concert hall, one of Barcelona's best examples of Modernista architecture, created by architect Domenech i Montaner in 1908. Studying the stone pillars covered in intricate floral mosaics embellishing the facade, I realise I probably walked right past this extraordinary building 12 years ago. More fool me if I did. Because entering the upstairs auditorium, a kaleidoscope of ceramic roses, chandeliers, sculptures and stained glass, feels like walking inside a life-sized music box. I understand our guide perfectly when she says you can feel that this structure, originally built for the Orfeo Catala musical society, was the love child of people united by music. Some may find the building over the top, but to me it is music in physical form.

As we continue walking, I wonder how I could have once overlooked the psychedelic mosaiced facade of Antoni Gaudi's Casa Batllo as we pass it, and the wave-like stone balconies of La Pedrera. Perhaps I hadn't matured enough to find these buildings worthy of appreciation. Or maybe I was so cranky at the city by that point that I'd simply had my blinkers on.

The real star of Barcelona's architectural show however, Gaudi's Sagrada Familia, I did see 12 years ago – although only for the three minutes it took to snap a selfie in front of it. I knew nothing about Gaudi the man, or the significance of his avant-garde masterpiece, which attracts 3 million tourists annually. Today, happily, we have Abercrombie & Kent's art expert Maria Teresa Farriols accompanying us, a petite, animated, Gaudi-obsessed blonde. "There are three men in my life," she tells us, "Gaudi, Dali, and my son."