The 10 apps you actually need in Barcelona

Somebody will tell you to get Bizum in your first week. Then you'll search the App Store, find nothing that looks official, and assume you misheard the name.

You didn't. Bizum is not a download. It's a payment rail built into Spanish banking apps — CaixaBank, BBVA, Sabadell, whoever you end up with — and you switch it on in there. If your account is still pending, there's nothing to install and nothing you're missing.

Right. The ten that really are downloads. Nothing here costs anything and nothing here is iPhone-only, but several do nothing at all until your NIE arrives — so treat it as a month's list rather than an afternoon's.

Cl@ve — the login for every state website

Spanish bureaucracy has one front door and this opens it. Register once and Hacienda, Seguridad Social and SEPE stop demanding a digital certificate installed on one particular laptop.

Registering usually costs an appointment at a Hacienda office, or nothing at all if you already hold a certificate. The PIN then arrives in the app rather than by SMS, which matters the first time you file something from abroad on a foreign number.

There is no English in it and nobody involved has ever pretended otherwise.

T-mobilitat — your travel card, minus the plastic

You'll pick up the card in week one; the transport how-to covers that part. The app keeps it loaded without you hunting down a machine that accepts your card.

Put a T-usual on it for unlimited zone 1, or a T-casual while you work out where you'll actually be commuting. Either way, check the balance somewhere other than the barrier with six people behind you.

Do the registration on the sofa. It's fiddlier than it should be and you don't want to be doing it on a platform.

Citymapper — the clearest read on the metro

The metro here is good enough that there are usually three or four sensible ways to make any journey, and Google Maps will pick the one with the worst interchange every time. Citymapper handles the L1-to-L5 changes better, shows live Bicing docks, and works in English, which TMB's own app does not.

It won't sell you a ticket. That side stays with T-mobilitat.

Rodalies de Catalunya — trains out of the city

Half of what this app does is tell you how late Rodalies is running, which given the reputation is a service in itself.

The other half is weekends. Sitges in forty minutes, Girona in an hour and a bit, the Costa Brava within reach for a day. Anything inside zone 1, the R2 to the airport included, comes out of the pass you're already carrying.

Freenow — hails a real taxi

Barcelona isn't the Uber city you may be used to. Ride-hailing is restricted here, and the black-and-yellow taxis are metered, regulated and perfectly good. Freenow puts one outside your door and lets you pay in the app.

Cabify works too. At El Prat, though, neither beats the rank — walk out, join the queue, and you're moving inside five minutes.

idealista — the whole market, duplicates included

The biggest portal in Spain, so almost every agency posts here, including the ones posting the same flat four times at three different prices.

Alerts on a saved search are the whole game. Anything decent goes on the day it appears.

Spend an evening in the map view before you view anything, though. It's the quickest way to understand why the flat in Gràcia and the flat in Poblenou aren't the same money for the same thing, and it stops you overpaying out of enthusiasm. And if anyone wants money before you've seen the place, you've found the scam rather than the flat. The scams guide has the local variants.

La Meva Salut — Catalan healthcare in one place

Register at your CAP and get a CatSalut card — the health how-to walks through it — and this becomes where your health lives: appointments, prescriptions, vaccination record, test results.

The feature worth knowing about is eConsulta. You write your GP a question, they write back, no appointment and no waiting room. For "is this rash anything?" it changes the calculation entirely.

Catalan by default, Spanish if you go looking. Neither is friendly, though you're mostly tapping through the same three screens.

SMOU — Bicing, parking, and the rest

The city council's own app, and mainly how you use Bicing. Around €50 a year makes it the cheapest way to move around Barcelona, and the electric bikes take the sting out of anything above Travessera.

It handles AREA street parking too, if you've decided to keep a car.

One catch, and it's a real one: Bicing wants a NIE and a Spanish account. Month two, not week one.

Wallapop — how the flat gets furnished

Second-hand everything, and the reason nobody here needs a €900 Ikea trip. Filter by distance, message the seller, carry a table home the same afternoon.

Barcelona's turnover does the rest of the work. People leave this city constantly and list a whole flat's contents in one go, usually in the last week of the month.

Meet somewhere public and pay when you collect. If a seller starts arranging a courier and a bank transfer, that's the one scam on the platform and it always looks like that.

Too Good To Go — what the forn has left

Restaurants and forns put whatever's left into a bag for €3 to €6. The Eixample and Gràcia are dense enough with them that it's a fair way to eat.

You don't choose what's in it, and the bakeries — the ones you want — are gone by mid-morning, so it's a night-before decision.

What to leave alone

A Bizum app. Still doesn't exist, still lives in your bank. Worth saying twice because it's the most common week-one confusion here.

TMB, FGC and the rest individually. Each covers a slice. Citymapper covers all of them and T-mobilitat handles the money.

Anything offering to book your cita previa. Some scrape free appointments and charge you for them; some just want your data. Book on the official site.

City passes. The Sagrada Família will still be unfinished next year.

Glovo you'll get anyway, probably within a fortnight, and you don't need me for that.