Our Story
- Guillermo
- Sep 23
- 4 min read
Our story begins when we, Cristina and Guillermo, founders of Barcelona Slow Travel, met back in 2011. Our passion for travel and food brought us together, and our wanderlust only grew stronger as we lost ourselves in conversations about all the places we wanted to visit together.
It wasn’t long until our conversations became a reality. In the summer of 2012, we both quit our jobs, left our shared flats and bought a one-way ticket to Kathmandu, Nepal.
Slowing Down
During our first month of traveling, we did things by the book - following the usual tourist trail.
But once we arrived in Burma, we decided to try something a little different.
Getting off the beaten track became our priority.
We met a local family in Yangon and stayed with them for a few nights. Although we only spent a short time with them, we felt so involved in local life that it served as an awakening for both of us.
We were sad to leave them, but we were leaving with our hearts filled with love and a new taste for travel.
It was then that we decided to make the most of this trip…
We wanted to share as many authentic moments with local people, discovering their customs, and truly immerse ourselves in each destination.
We hadn’t realized it yet, but we had started to slow travel.
We stopped filling our days with must-sees.
Instead, we slowed down and enjoyed each day as it came.
We used slow means of transport like boats, buses, and bikes, and took in the views along the way.
Looking back on almost a year of traveling, the best experiences we had were when we shared genuine moments with local people, especially when these experiences involved food.
Our journey also opened our eyes to the effects of climate change, which, sadly, were visible in every place we visited.
These two learnings put our way of living “back then” into perspective.
Coming Home
In 2013, we came back to Barcelona with a new dream.
We wanted to offer authentic and sustainable cooking classes to travelers from around the world.
We wanted them to discover Catalan culture, just as we had discovered the cultures of the local people who hosted us during our trip.
Our dream meant making some adjustments to our lifestyle.
We wanted the environment to play an important role in all of the decisions we would make in our personal and professional lives.
So, we started by recycling some old furniture to create a unique chemical-free cooking school in our new home. And we integrated local, sustainable utensils and appliances into our kitchen.
Before we knew it, we were ready for our first cooking guests.
Together, we cooked traditional Catalan and Spanish dishes, using Cristina’s family recipes and fresh local ingredients from our neighborhood market.
Stepping Out of the Kitchen
We started to take trips to the Catalan countryside to look for small, local organic suppliers.
By the end of 2015, we had already sourced incredible local, seasonal and artisan products: olive oils, fleur de sel (sea salt), wines, herbs, cheeses, meats, and vegetables, which helped us gain a strong reputation as we were preparing delicious farm-to-table dishes!
What started out as a need to improve the quality of the produce used in our classes soon turned into a new passion.
To this day, we are constantly looking for new, independent artisan suppliers to work with, and spend at least 1 day per week searching for new projects in the countryside and visiting them.
Plenty of our cooking guests shared our passion for small-scale, quality organic produce, and wanted to meet our farmers and makers.
It was then that we understood that we could offer much more than just authentic cooking classes in Barcelona.
We decided to create a stronger connection between travelers and all those wonderful projects in and around Barcelona.
We started creating new experiences to visit local food artisans, either in Barcelona with our gourmet private food tour, or out into the countryside, like meeting winemakers on our private Penedes wine tour, or olive oil producers on our Barcelona olive oil tasting experience.
Slow, Steady and Sustainable
Barcelona Slow Travel has evolved, and we now have a carefully curated selection of private food tours & experiences in Barcelona and the surrounding countryside, which we personally designed and created. We have a small team of dedicated guides and often host experiences ourselves, even today.
Over the years, we have discovered hundreds of incredible projects worth visiting, and in our Barcelona Slow Travel experiences, we’ll only take you to the finest small-scale boutique artisans of our region, always customizing the experience to your needs and interests.
If you’re interested in experiencing Catalan food in Barcelona like never before, then contact us now to get to know some of these amazing projects we have selected for you!
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