As my boyfriend and I stand under the Arc de Triomphe in Barcelona, it occurs to us that we may not enjoy the next few hours. We are waiting for Lisa Richardson, a total stranger, to come and take us shopping. This is a surprising thing for us to do — neither of us is a big shopper, he particularly dislikes high street fashion, we don’t have much money to buy things, and we are in Barcelona for only a couple of days, so should perhaps be following the other tourists to the Gaudi houses or into the Picasso museum.
But we are not, because we’ve decided to take a chance on an incredibly personalized type of tour, one in which a local tailors a tour of their city to your own specifications, using their knowledge to show you the kinds of things you just can’t find in a guide book — an idea that is spreading all over the world. You can now buy the services of a trendy local in just about any city you choose to take a break in, and we’ve asked Richardson to come up with a tour that’s heavy on vintage and second-hand clothes as well as furniture.
We found her online through the company that owns the apartment we are staying in, an airy, bare-bricked art deco studio furnished in one-off modernist pieces, with a balcony overlooking a quiet, pretty alleyway, just a stone’s throw away from the bars and restaurants of Passeig del Born. (The furniture is actually so special that the owners leave you a little note with instructions about how not to damage it — we spend the weekend nervously spreading out tea towels before putting any drinks down.)
The guides can also set up foodie tours, taking you to out-of-the-way tapas bars and food shops or just the famous Boqueria food market, or even a tour on which you buy your ingredients in town and are taught how to cook them in your apartment. Also on offer are wine tours and haute couture fashion tours, or there’s Barcelona by Night, a crawl through bars and traditional cabaret shows.
It’s the Internet that has made all this possible. Couchsurfing.org arguably started the trend when it launched in 2004, with the aim of helping cash-strapped travelers stay with locals. It has since grown into an international network with members in 62,000 cities.
The expectation now is that members show their guests around their cities and introduce them to their friends. In return, surfers do the same for people coming to visit their own hometowns. The site allows couch-surfers to describe their interests and post profiles to ensure they are matched with like-minded people.
Facebook is home to lots of city tours run by locals — in places such as Rio de Janeiro, Milan and New York. Most are free, including the excellent daily New Rome Free Tour (newromefreetour.com). Another great site is blacktomato.co.uk, currently offering a tour of Venice in a kayak and an insider’s day in Bucharest. You could also take a look at the Global Greeter Network (globalgreeternetwork.info), which is a coalition of volunteer guides in cities from Lyon to Melbourne.
These are not the kinds of tours where you follow a retired historian grasping a large umbrella. The point is to experience the city as a local. There’s no faffing about with tourist-office maps if you’re following someone who knows where he or she is going. Plus, most of the people who take on this kind of guiding are either volunteers or doing it as a sideline job — Richardson used to work in fashion in Milan, and still does style consultancy and trend forecasting. In fact, she decided to start her guiding company because so many acquaintances visiting Barcelona would e-mail her asking where the best shoe shops were, or how to find the best antique furniture.
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