October 31 in Barcelona is two parties in one night! La Castanyada is the Catalan one: hot roasted chestnuts, sweet potatoes and panellets (little marzipan sweets). Halloween lands on the same night, so lots of neighborhoods do both, with costumes and chestnuts side by side. And this year it's a Saturday, so the whole weekend is yours. Here's what we checked, from free street parties and pumpkin patches to PortAventura.
Halloween is one of our family's favorite holidays of the year :). In Barcelona, we get to celebrate with a local twist. Here's my list of places to take the kids.
Granja Aventura Park is a farm and outdoor adventure park. For Halloween it adds spider webs, a pretend cemetery, and friendly witches, vampires and chestnut sellers in costume.
The spooky touches lean silly rather than scary, and the same ticket covers the farm animals and the adventure circuits in the trees. Nearly everything is outdoors, so bring shoes that can get muddy.
The Halloween side of PortAventura Park is gentle for younger kids: Sesame Street shows, Truco o Trato (a walk-through with friendly ghosts that ends in candy), a soap-bubble show and an evening lake show with fire and fountains.
Admission covers the whole park and the haunted passages cost extra, so it works best as a full day.
Món Sant Benet is a medieval monastery in the Bages countryside. Its Castanyada story is about an old chestnut seller who put a spell on her recipe book, so the ingredients now read like troll nails, giant dandruff and bat blood.
Kids follow the clues to decode the recipe, then turn it into a panellet, the small almond sweet of the season. It is spooky in a silly way.
Joan's parents have an unusual worry: their son has never been scared of anything. So they book a weekend in a haunted house, hoping the ghosts, monsters and curses will finally teach him what fear feels like.
What follows is a comic musical in Catalan from La Roda Produccions, full of songs, dance numbers and spooky characters who can't quite rattle him. The scares are played for laughs.
Every autumn the old amusement park on top of Tibidabo dresses up for Halloween. The moment kids remember is nightfall, when a new zombie show called The Last Dance (L'Últim Ball) takes over the Plaça dels Somnis, with a dance number that nods to the King of Pop.
Between rides, younger kids can look for the park mascots Ti, Bi, Da and Bo in their Halloween outfits.
Alella Green Tech runs this on its Can Picard farm. The patch sits on an open hillside, so kids walk out among the vines, pick a pumpkin, cut it themselves and carve it at the long wooden tables.
The Halloween party is the big version, with the whole hillside busy and a scary tunnel. Quiet-day picking is not announced this year.
October 31 in Barcelona is two parties in one night! La Castanyada is the Catalan one: hot roasted chestnuts, sweet potatoes and panellets (little marzipan sweets). Halloween lands on the same night, so lots of neighborhoods do both, with costumes and chestnuts side by side. And this year it's a Saturday, so the whole weekend is yours. Here's what we checked, from free street parties and pumpkin patches to PortAventura.
Halloween is one of our family's favorite holidays of the year :). In Barcelona, we get to celebrate with a local twist. Here's my list of places to take the kids.
Granja Aventura Park is a farm and outdoor adventure park. For Halloween it adds spider webs, a pretend cemetery, and friendly witches, vampires and chestnut sellers in costume.
The spooky touches lean silly rather than scary, and the same ticket covers the farm animals and the adventure circuits in the trees. Nearly everything is outdoors, so bring shoes that can get muddy.
The Halloween side of PortAventura Park is gentle for younger kids: Sesame Street shows, Truco o Trato (a walk-through with friendly ghosts that ends in candy), a soap-bubble show and an evening lake show with fire and fountains.
Admission covers the whole park and the haunted passages cost extra, so it works best as a full day.
Món Sant Benet is a medieval monastery in the Bages countryside. Its Castanyada story is about an old chestnut seller who put a spell on her recipe book, so the ingredients now read like troll nails, giant dandruff and bat blood.
Kids follow the clues to decode the recipe, then turn it into a panellet, the small almond sweet of the season. It is spooky in a silly way.
Joan's parents have an unusual worry: their son has never been scared of anything. So they book a weekend in a haunted house, hoping the ghosts, monsters and curses will finally teach him what fear feels like.
What follows is a comic musical in Catalan from La Roda Produccions, full of songs, dance numbers and spooky characters who can't quite rattle him. The scares are played for laughs.
Every autumn the old amusement park on top of Tibidabo dresses up for Halloween. The moment kids remember is nightfall, when a new zombie show called The Last Dance (L'Últim Ball) takes over the Plaça dels Somnis, with a dance number that nods to the King of Pop.
Between rides, younger kids can look for the park mascots Ti, Bi, Da and Bo in their Halloween outfits.
Alella Green Tech runs this on its Can Picard farm. The patch sits on an open hillside, so kids walk out among the vines, pick a pumpkin, cut it themselves and carve it at the long wooden tables.
The Halloween party is the big version, with the whole hillside busy and a scary tunnel. Quiet-day picking is not announced this year.