Barcelona in May: 12 Things to Do, From Girona in Bloom to the Dancing Egg

May is the month Barcelona’s spring stops promising and starts delivering. The jackets come off at midday, the sea turns from backdrop to invitation, the roses open in Pedralbes, and the calendar runs the full range of Catalan strangeness — museums open until one in the morning, a herb fair that has filled the same street for five centuries, an egg that dances on a fountain for Corpus Christi. It is also the hinge of the season: the last month when the great sights are merely busy rather than besieged. If April in Barcelona is the headliner, May is the encore nobody should leave early for.

The practical shape of the month: it opens on a holiday weekend — Saturday 1 May is Labour Day, and the April Fair’s last nights spill over the Fòrum. Free-museum Sunday lands on 2 May, Girona flowers from 8 to 16 May, Museum Night takes 15 May, Whit Monday gives a bonus holiday on the 17th, and Corpus Christi closes the month, 27–30 May. For the Girona week, one booking solves the logistics: From Barcelona: Girona, Figueres, Dalí Museum, and Cadaqués — 11 hours by coach, free time in Girona for the flowers, then Dalí’s museum in Figueres and a swim stop in Cadaqués, rated 4.7/5 across 2,418 reviews, from $44 per person, free cancellation up to 24 hours ahead. In festival week, when Girona’s trains groan, that matters.

What follows is the month in calendar order — fair first, dancing egg last — with honest notes on the early-May sea and the two 2027 date sets nobody has published yet.

The Short Version

Short on time? Here is May in five lines:

• The shape: A holiday opening weekend (1–2 May), then four stacked spring weekends — flowers, museum night, a bonus Monday holiday, Corpus Christi.
• The headline trip: Girona’s Temps de Flors, Saturday 8 – Sunday 16 May — a whole medieval old town turned into a flower exhibition, 40 minutes from Barcelona.
• The headline night: La Nit dels Museus, Saturday 15 May — 90+ museums and cultural venues open free from 19:00 to 01:00.
• The weather: Proper late spring — highs around 22–23 °C, evenings near 15 °C, sunset after 21:20 by month’s end. The sea climbs from about 16 °C to 18–19 °C — swimmable by the last fortnight.
• The strategy: May is the last easy month at the Gaudí sights. Book them ahead, but book them like a person, not a siege — that changes in June.

May’s only real traps are the two unpublished date sets (both hedged honestly below) and assuming the month is quiet. It is not quiet. It is simply, gloriously, not August.

What May Weather Is Really Like

May is when Barcelona’s weather grows up. The month starts where April ended — mild, bright, the odd spring shower — and finishes on the edge of summer: the first afternoons when the shade side of the street is the correct side.

May in Barcelona	The numbers
Daytime highs	Around 22–23 °C (about 21 °C in the first days, 24 °C by the end)
Night-time lows	Around 14–15 °C
Sea temperature	About 16 °C at the start, climbing to 18–19 °C by late May
Rain	Roughly 5 days in the month — spring showers, usually short
Daylight	From about 14 hours on 1 May to nearly 15 on 31 May; sunset slides from ~20:52 to ~21:21

Pack the summer wardrobe with a safety net: t-shirts and light trousers do the days, a light jacket still earns its place after dark and on the seafront breeze, and the swimsuit — unlike April’s — genuinely belongs in the case this time, at least for the month’s second half. The sea deserves the same honesty as always: 16 °C in the first week is a brisk dip; 19 °C in the last week is a pleasure — sunbathing from the 1st, swimming in numbers from about the 20th. Our best time to visit Barcelona guide sets May against the year — people who can pick any month increasingly pick this one.

1. Catch the April Fair’s Last Nights (1–2 May)

May opens mid-party. The Feria de Abril de Catalunya — Seville’s April Fair transplanted to the Parc del Fòrum by the Andalusian families who made Catalonia home, and now one of the largest popular festivals in the region — runs about ten days across the end of April, so its closing nights — traditionally its liveliest — land on the first weekend of May. Expect the full apparatus: rows of striped casetas pouring rebujito, sevillanas danced by grandmothers and toddlers alike, a fairground by the sea, and entry free.

The weekend comes with a second gift: Saturday 1 May is Labour Day, a public holiday across Spain. Barcelona handles it in two registers — the morning’s union marches fill the centre (finished by lunchtime) and the rest of the city takes the day as the first true holiday of the warm season: terraces full, beaches colonised by noon, the fair building toward its final nights. Museums mostly open on the holiday, many on Sunday hours — but check your specific target before crossing town.

⚠ One piece of honesty about the fair: FECAC, the federation that organises it, had not published the 2027 dates at the time of writing. The pattern is one of the most reliable in the Catalan calendar — ten days from the last week of April into the first days of May, closing on the month’s first weekend (the 2025 edition ran 25 April–4 May; 2026’s ran 24 April–3 May) — so a trip covering 1–2 May 2027 should catch the fair’s final nights at the Fòrum. Keep an evening free, and confirm the exact closing dates before you travel. If your trip starts later in May, you have not missed the month’s party; you have merely swapped the first of five.

2. Free-Museum Sunday on a Holiday Weekend (Sunday 2 May)

May’s free Sunday arrives gift-wrapped: Sunday 2 May, in the middle of the opening holiday weekend. Under the long-running scheme, many of Barcelona’s civic museums open free all day on the first Sunday — and a wider list joins free from 15:00 on Sunday afternoons generally — but May adds what January could not: weather for the walks between them, and Montjuïc in full spring green.

Build the day around one giant and one jewel. The giant is the MNAC in the Palau Nacional above Plaça d’Espanya — a thousand years of Catalan art under the vast oval dome of 1929. The jewel is whichever small museum your trip keeps postponing: the Museu Picasso’s Gothic palaces, the Fundació Joan Miró’s white terraces on the hill, the design museum at Glòries. Two rules still apply: the famous names run timed entry even when free, so reserve online the moment May’s slots open; and two museums done properly beat five done at a run.

One more piece of timing: 2 May is also Mother’s Day in Spain, which is why the florists and restaurant terraces do the best business of the spring — book the day’s long lunch early, or make it a picnic: market supplies, a bench with a view. Our guide to free things to do in Barcelona maps the scheme museum by museum — and in May the map comes with weather to match.

3. The Gaudí Sights in Their Last Easy Month

Every month of this series has made the same promise in a different tense — January’s “no queues”, April’s “book ahead” — and May’s version is the pivot: the last month in which the great Gaudí sights are busy in the ordinary way rather than the siege way. From June, the famous time slots close out many days ahead and the crowds take on their summer density. In May you must still book — spontaneity at the big houses died years ago — but you book like a person choosing, not a person competing.

The sights themselves are at a spring peak. Park Güell’s public park — the pine woods and viaduct paths outside the ticketed Monumental Zone — is in flower, rosemary and broom yellow; the Monumental Zone’s first slot still buys you a terrace with elbow room. Casa Batlló and La Pedrera get May’s clear, kind light, and the Sagrada Família’s morning sun through the east glass — the cool blues and greens — now falls on a square framed in full leaf.

Strategy, briefly: pick your two or three Gaudí priorities and book them the week before you travel, first slots where possible; put the Sagrada Família on your clearest morning; hold one house back for a weekday. The travellers who suffer in May are the ones who imported June’s panic or January’s casualness. May rewards the middle way — planned, then relaxed.

4. Day Trip: Girona Dressed in Flowers (8–16 May)

For nine days in May, Girona does something no other city attempts: it hands its entire medieval old town to the florists. Temps de Flors — “flower time”, running since 1954 — fills the Barri Vell’s squares, cloisters, courtyards and normally locked private patios with more than a hundred floral installations. In 2027 the festival runs Saturday 8 to Sunday 16 May — the finest day trip of the Barcelona spring.

The headline sights: the Cathedral’s great staircase — ninety steps under the widest Gothic nave in the world — dressed in a new installation every year; the Arab Baths with flowers reflected in the cold plunge pool; the Pujada de Sant Domènec, where the steps up to Sant Martí disappear under pots; and the Onyar’s ochre houses mirrored in the river. Between the set pieces, the real pleasure is access: patios and gardens that are private property eleven months a year open their doors for nine days, each holding its own small, perishable artwork.

Logistics decide whether the day delights or exhausts. Go midweek if you possibly can — the two weekends, especially the first, draw the whole region — and take an early train: the fast AVE/Avant services from Sants reach Girona in about 38 minutes, slower trains in 1 hour 20 — and festival-week trains fill. The guided alternative folds the day into a bigger arc: From Barcelona: Girona, Figueres, Dalí Museum, and Cadaqués gives you free time in Girona for the flowers, then the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres and an hour in whitewashed Cadaqués, where the schedule even allows a swim. Eleven hours, from $44 per person, rated 4.7/5 across 2,418 reviews, free cancellation up to 24 hours before — the flexible way to bet on a festival day. Our Girona day trip from Barcelona guide covers the independent version in full. Either way: be in Girona before ten; let the flowers set the route.

5. Barcelona’s Own Roses: The New Rose Contest (Mid-May)

Girona does not hold a monopoly on May flowers — Barcelona answers with roses, and with a competition the world’s rose breeders take seriously. Since 2001, the Roserar de Cervantes in Pedralbes — four hectares, some 10,000 rose bushes and around 2,000 varieties — has hosted the Concurs Internacional de Roses Noves, the International New Roses Competition, where breeders from a dozen-plus countries present varieties never sold anywhere, and an international jury scores them for beauty, fragrance and vigour. The top prize, fittingly, is simply called “Barcelona”, and its winner is planted in honour among the past champions.

For the visitor, the contest is an excuse layered on a pleasure. The garden is free, open daily, and at its absolute peak in May — tens of thousands of blooms open at once, the perfume standing in the paths like weather — and on the contest weekend the public joins the judging, voting for the “Citizen Rose” alongside the experts. Even without the contest, the morning pairs naturally with the royal gardens of the Palau de Pedralbes nearby and Gaudí’s dragon-gated Pavellons Güell on the same avenue.

⚠ The honest diary note: the 2027 contest dates had not been published at the time of writing. The pattern is a mid-May weekend — the 2025 edition ran Friday 9 to Sunday 11 May, and 2026’s ran Friday 8 to Sunday 10 May — so expect the 2027 judging across the month’s second weekend and confirm before planning around it. Nothing is lost if your dates miss it — the contest merely crowns a garden in full, free flower all month. Our best parks and gardens in Barcelona guide puts the Roserar in its citywide context.

6. Sant Ponç: Herbs, Honey and One Packed Street (Tuesday 11 May)

On 11 May, a single street in the Raval goes back five hundred years. The Fira de Sant Ponç — the fair of Saint Pontius, patron of herbalists and beekeepers — fills Carrer de l’Hospital, beside the old Hospital de la Santa Creu, with stall after stall of the countryside’s pharmacy: fresh and dried herbs, honey in every shade of amber, candied fruits, preserves, cheeses and mató, the fresh Catalan curd cheese eaten drizzled with honey. The fair’s roots run to the 16th century, when herb-sellers gathered here to supply the hospital; the street has never really stopped.

It is a small fair with a perfect sense of occasion. Sant Ponç is a working Tuesday in 2027, and the fair wears that lightly: the crowd is office workers on lunch hours, grandmothers with strong opinions about thyme, and school groups learning what rosemary looks like. Arrive in the morning for the full street and the best of the herbs, buy the honey — the real, single-valley article at city prices — and try the classic pairing on the spot: mató with a spoon of rosemary honey, standing still in a fragrant crowd.

Geography makes the day easy: Carrer de l’Hospital runs from La Rambla into the Raval, two minutes from the Liceu and the Boqueria — pair the fair with a market picnic. It costs nothing to attend and little to leave carrying something. Of all May’s events, this is the one that has changed least in five centuries.

7. La Nit dels Museus: Museum Night (Saturday 15 May)

Once a year, Barcelona’s museums keep the hours of its bars. La Nit dels Museus — the Night of the Museums, the city’s edition of the European museum night — falls in 2027 on Saturday 15 May, when more than ninety museums, galleries and cultural venues across the city open free from 19:00 until 01:00, with concerts, workshops and the simple novelty of standing in a Romanesque cloister at midnight. It is built around International Museum Day (18 May) — one of the great free nights of the Barcelona year.

Plan it like a festival, because it behaves like one. The famous names — the Museu Picasso, MACBA, the Fundació Joan Miró, the MNAC, the CCCB — draw queues that form before the doors open; many venues run free-but-booked entry; the sensible play is three or four stops in one neighbourhood, not a greatest-hits dash. The Raval cluster (MACBA, CCCB, the Filmoteca) and the Montjuïc cluster (MNAC, Miró, CaixaForum) both reward the strategy. The veterans’ secret: the second tier — the Museu del Disseny, the music museum, the maritime museum’s great hall of ships — often delivers the night with half the queue.

The date stacks the weekend further: Automobile Barcelona, the motor show, fills the Fira halls below Montjuïc the same fortnight (8–16 May), and International Museum Day follows on Tuesday 18 May with free entry in daylight too. A trip covering 14–18 May gets the city’s culture at full stretch and mostly at €0 — the strongest argument in this guide for choosing the month’s middle.

8. Whit Monday: The City’s Bonus Holiday (Monday 17 May)

Two Mondays a year, Barcelona simply declines to work, and the lovelier of them is this one. Monday 17 May 2027 is Whit Monday — the Segona Pasqua, the “Second Easter”, Dilluns de Pasqua Granada in Catalan — a local public holiday in Barcelona and much of Catalonia, fifty days after Easter Sunday. In practical terms: most shops close, restaurants run Sunday hours, and the whole population treats the day as a gift of warm weather to be spent outdoors.

Spend it the way the city does. The Parc de la Ciutadella — the green lung thrown over the old citadel’s ruins — fills with picnic blankets, slacklines and rowing boats on its little lake. The beaches run their first true holiday of the season. And half the city executes the traditional move: the excursion. Families decamp to Montserrat, to the coast, to grandparents in the countryside — which makes Whit Monday the one day of May when a visitor should not improvise a day trip in the same direction at the same hour, and the perfect day to enjoy the city’s parks and seafront instead. If you are day-tripping, go early or go against the flow.

Two practical notes. First, the museums mostly open on Whit Monday, several on holiday hours — and International Museum Day follows on Tuesday 18th with its own free programmes, so 15–18 May gives you museum night, a holiday and museum day in four days. Second, the 17th is the hinge of the month’s hotel pricing: the holiday weekend (15–17 May) is one of May’s two peak stretches, alongside the Girona festival weekends. Book it as you would a festival — the city is treating it as one.

9. Montserrat When the Mountain Is in Flower

If one day trip belongs to May above all others — Girona’s flowers aside — it is Montserrat in walking season. The serrated massif, an hour from Plaça Espanya, spends May at its greenest: the Mediterranean scrub in flower along every path, wild rosemary and thyme perfuming the warm rock, and the long days opening the upper walks to anyone with ordinary fitness. This is the month the locals choose for the mountain — before June’s heat makes the exposed paths a midday punishment.

Shape the day in three acts. The abbey first: the basilica, the Black Madonna — La Moreneta — in her camarín above the altar, and the Escolania boys’ choir, which sings in the basilica on most days around 13:00. Then ride up: the Sant Joan funicular climbs to the trailheads, where waymarked paths run from an easy half-hour viewpoint stroll to the full ascent of Sant Jeroni, at 1,236 metres the highest point of the massif, with the Pyrenees on clear days. Then down, slowly: the Santa Cova funicular to the chapel of the apparition, or the farmers’ stalls by the square for mató and honey.

Getting there is part of the ritual — our Montserrat monastery guide walks through the train-and-rack-railway route step by step, and May’s advice differs from winter’s in one detail: start early not for the crowds but for the walking — the paths are the point, best before the sun is high. Fold it into the wider menu with our day trips from Barcelona guide — and if your dates include Whit Monday (17 May), take Montserrat on any other day; the whole of Catalonia has the same idea that Monday.

10. First Real Beach Days

May is when the honest answer about Barcelona’s sea changes. April’s 15 °C was a paddle and a story; May starts at about 16 °C and climbs steadily to 18–19 °C by the last week, and somewhere mid-month the city’s behaviour flips — the first full family beach days, the first swimmers doing lengths rather than dashes, the chiringuitos in full operation, lifeguard cover building through the month. The season’s genius is its elbow room: the same sand August negotiates towel by towel is, in May, a choice.

Choose your stretch by temperament. Barceloneta is the classic — the old fishermen’s quarter at its back, the promenade theatre in front — and busiest on the holiday weekend. Eastward, the Poblenou beaches are the locals’ series: Bogatell for space and beach volleyball, Mar Bella and Nova Mar Bella for the widest sand and the youngest crowd, the Fòrum end for near-silence. The water honesty: May’s first week still rewards the brave; by the final fortnight a normal swim is a pleasure rather than a dare. Wind is the variable — go late morning, when the sea breeze is youngest.

Our Barcelona beaches guide walks the whole seafront beach by beach. May’s footnote: this is the last month its quieter recommendations are actually quiet. Savour that.

11. Eat May: Cherries, Strawberries and the Last Artichokes

May is the month Barcelona’s markets change their colours. The winter oranges and artichoke hearts give way to the red season: cherries arrive in punnets from the orchards of the Baix Llobregat — the plain across the river grows some of Catalonia’s sweetest, celebrated in cherry fairs as the month turns — strawberries come down from the Maresme coast, and the last sweet green peas, broad beans, asparagus and the first apricots crowd the stalls. A May market shop is the cheapest sightseeing in the city.

Build one morning around it properly. La Boqueria, off La Rambla, is the famous one — go before ten, head past the front stalls’ theatre to the fish and produce aisles at the back, and let breakfast happen at a market bar. The neighbourhood markets are the quieter joy — Sant Antoni’s great iron hall, Santa Caterina under its coloured wave of a roof, the Mercat de la Llibertat in Gràcia — and our Barcelona markets guide routes between all of them. The month has a second act for the sweet-toothed: mató i mel, fresh curd cheese with honey, is the Sant Ponç pairing (§6) and May’s dessert; and the old town’s ice-cream counters flip from winter politeness to summer intent around the middle of the month.

Eat the cherries while standing in the market, the way everyone else is. Some travel experiences improve with cutlery. This is not one of them.

12. Corpus Christi and the Dancing Egg (27–30 May)

May saves its strangest and sweetest tradition for last. Corpus Christi — Thursday 27 May in 2027, sixty days after Easter Sunday — brings out L’Ou com Balla, the Dancing Egg: a hollowed eggshell, balanced on the jet of a fountain, spinning and bobbing on the water as if alive. Barcelona has performed this trick since at least the 17th century — cathedral accounts record buying eggs in 1636 — and for four days the fountains of the Gothic Quarter’s cloisters and courtyards are dressed in flowers and cherries, each with its egg dancing at the centre.

The classic stages are all within a few lanes of each other: the Cathedral’s own cloister, where the egg dances above the fountain among the resident geese; the courtyard of the Casa de l’Ardiaca next door; and a trail of quieter patios — the Frederic Marès Museum, the Ateneu, the Palau del Lloctinent — each free, each with its small crowd of the delighted. The feast builds to Sunday 30 May, when the Corpus procession — one of the oldest in Europe, running since 1320 — carries the festive giants and the great monstrance through the old town’s streets after mass at the Cathedral. It is solemn and it is a street party, in proportions only Barcelona attempts.

Two extensions for the same weekend: the neighbourhood festa major season opens around Corpus — the Dreta de l’Eixample’s festival traditionally wraps around these dates, programme published nearer the time — and down the coast Sitges answers Corpus with its famous carpets of flower petals, worth the 40-minute train if the weekend has a spare day. Then the month hands over: Primavera Sound’s 25th-anniversary edition opens at the Parc del Fòrum on Wednesday 2 June (main days 3–5 June, lineup already announced) — so a trip spanning May’s last days catches the city dressing for its biggest party of the year. May begins with one fair ending and ends with another beginning. In between, it barely sits down.

Which of the 12 Fits Your Trip?

You are…	Start with
A first-timer with 3–4 days mid-month	3 (Gaudí’s Last Easy Month), 4 (Girona in Bloom), 7 (Museum Night), 12 (Corpus)
A flower lover	4 (above all), 5 (the Rose Contest), 12 (the Corpus fountains)
A culture completist	2 (Free-Museum Sunday), 7, 12, 9 (Montserrat)
A romantic, or travelling as a couple	5 (the rose garden), 4, 10 (First Real Beach Days), 7 (museums at midnight)
A family	1 (the fair), 8 (Whit Monday in Ciutadella), 10, 2
On a budget	2 (€0 museums), 5 (€0 garden), 6 (€0 fair), 7 (€0 night), 10 (€0 beach) — May is the freest big month of the year
A food traveller	11 (Eat May), 6 (Sant Ponç), 1 (the fair’s food stalls)
Chasing the local city, not the sights	6, 8, 12, 1 — herb fairs, bonus holidays, dancing eggs, fairgrounds

What May in Barcelona Costs

May prices like the first month of high season — above April, below June — with two spiky stretches (the Girona festival weekends and 15–17 May) inside an otherwise fair-priced month. A realistic 2027 budget sketch:

Item	May figure
Central hotel, per night	€140–180 in ordinary weeks, pushing past €200 on the festival weekends — book those first
Girona, Figueres & Cadaqués day trip (guided)	From Barcelona: Girona, Figueres, Dalí Museum, and Cadaqués — from $44 per person (about €41), 11 hours, rated 4.7/5 across 2,418 reviews, free cancellation up to 24 hours ahead
Girona independently	From around €13 each way on Media Distancia trains (about 1h20); the fast AVE/Avant services take ~38 minutes and cost more — book festival-week trains early
Montserrat independently	Around €40 for the combined train + rack-railway Trans Montserrat ticket, bought at Plaça Espanya
La Nit dels Museus	€0 — free entry everywhere, 19:00–01:00 on 15 May; some venues need a free reservation
The rose garden at Cervantes Park	€0 — the garden is always free; the contest weekend adds the judging
Sant Ponç fair	€0 to attend; honey and mató priced by the stall
The beach	€0 — and by late May, genuinely swimmable
Corpus Christi	€0 — the egg dances for free

Three money rules for May. Book the two spikes first — Girona’s festival weekends and 15–17 May — and let the ordinary weeks price kindly around them. Spend the free calendar without guilt: no month of the Barcelona year offers more €0 headlines, which is exactly why the one splurge — the guided Girona day, the long market lunch — lands so comfortably. And let the trains do the work: nearly every headline sits within a short regional hop.

Final Thoughts

May is the argument’s closing statement. April claimed to be the best month in Barcelona; May presents the evidence — a medieval city an hour away wearing a hundred thousand flowers, a rose garden holding a world championship, ninety museums open past midnight for free, a bonus holiday nobody outside Catalonia has heard of, a sea that finally means it, and an egg, dancing on a fountain, as it has for four hundred years. The crowds have not yet reached their summer weight and the heat has not reached its summer temper. Come in May, book the festival weekends like you mean it, and leave one evening unscheduled for a terrace at 21:15, watching the city enjoy itself.

FAQs

Is May a good time to visit Barcelona?

It is one of the two or three best months of the year: settled late-spring weather (highs around 22–23 °C), the longest evenings so far, the sea turning swimmable, and a calendar that runs from Girona’s flower festival to Museum Night to Corpus Christi. The caveat is popularity: May is no secret, and its festival weekends book like it.

When is Girona’s Temps de Flors in 2027?

Saturday 8 to Sunday 16 May 2027 — nine days, two weekends, more than a hundred floral installations across Girona’s old town, all free to wander. Go midweek if you can (the weekends are the region’s day out), take an early train from Barcelona Sants, and be at the Cathedral steps before ten. It is the strongest single reason to day-trip in May.

Can you swim in the sea in Barcelona in May?

Yes — increasingly, and on a sliding scale. The sea starts May at about 16 °C — a brisk, brief swim for most people — and reaches 18–19 °C by the last week, when full beach days with proper swimming become the norm. Lifeguard cover builds through the month, the chiringuitos are in full operation, and the sand still has space on it. See §10 for the beach-by-beach breakdown.

Is there a Formula 1 Grand Prix in Barcelona in 2027?

No — and it catches people out. The Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya has moved to a rotation with Belgium’s Spa circuit: Barcelona hosts in 2028, 2030 and 2032, but there is no Barcelona Grand Prix in 2027. The 2027 Spanish Grand Prix runs instead at Madrid’s new Madring circuit on 10–12 September 2027. Montmeló still stages other racing all year, but if Formula 1 is the point, aim at Madrid in September or Barcelona in 2028.

When is Primavera Sound 2027, and does it affect a May trip?

The festival’s 25th-anniversary edition runs Wednesday 2 to Sunday 6 June 2027 at the Parc del Fòrum (main days Thursday 3 to Saturday 5 June), with the lineup already announced. It falls just outside May, but a late-May trip catches the build-up and hotel prices stepping up from about 31 May. If you want the festival, book it as a June trip; if you don’t, let the Corpus weekend (27–30 May) be your finale and leave before the rush.

What should I pack for Barcelona in May?

The summer wardrobe, plus respect for the evening: t-shirts, light trousers and dresses for the 22–23 °C days; a light jacket and one warm layer for 14–15 °C nights, the beach breeze and air-conditioned museums; comfortable walking shoes — May is a month you walk. The swimsuit is finally a yes, at least for the month’s second half; add a light waterproof for the odd short spring shower.