Skip map, read the zones as text
StayZones
15 cities · 171 districts rated

Which district to book,
and which one to regret.

Pick a city and see every district on one map: green where it is worth staying, amber where it depends, red where it is not. Each one comes with its downsides and what travellers actually say about it.

Barcelona · 6 districts231
How it works

Three colours, three steps

Recommended
Book here without thinking about it.
Mixed
Fine for some travellers, wrong for others.
Avoid
Cheap for a reason. Read the cons first.
  1. Step 1

    Open a city

    One map with every district, already coloured.

  2. Step 2

    Check the red first

    It takes twenty seconds and tells you where not to book.

  3. Step 3

    Pick from the green

    Each district says who it suits, how far it is from the centre and what it costs.

An example

What you get for every district

This is Eixample in Barcelona, exactly as it appears on the Barcelona page.

  • A colour, so you know at a glance
  • Who it suits and how long the walk to the centre is
  • What is good about it, and what is not
  • What travellers say, with a link to where they said it
  • A link to rooms in that district
Barcelona · district

Eixample

Recommended

The grid. Wide pavements, the best-value four-star hotels in the city, and you can walk to almost everything worth walking to.

First-timersCouplesLonger stays25 min to the Gothic Quarter
  • Walk to Sagrada Família and to the old town, both in under 25 minutes
  • Quietest streets of any central district after 22:00
  • Blocks are 113 m, so 'two streets away' means fifteen minutes on foot
  • Very little is open on a Sunday, including most of the restaurants
It's an enormous field of rectangular blocks in a continuously repeating layout, with the constant threat of getting lost
Wikivoyage · CC BY-SA 4.0

Why you can trust the colours

  • Real district borders

    We use each city's official districts, so nobody can quietly move a border to make a district look better than it is.

  • The bad parts come first

    Every district lists its downsides before its good sides. Anything we rate amber or red is backed up by a quote from a traveller or a travel guide, or by a number we counted.

  • Real quotes, with links

    Every quote is copied word for word from its source, like Wikivoyage or Travel Stack Exchange, and links back to the original page.

  • No cookies, no profiles

    No ads and no cookies. We count visits and hotel-button clicks as plain totals, never who made them. Nobody finds out you are planning a trip.

How we rate a districtWho makes this

FAQ

Questions

What do the colours mean?

Green means you can book there without a second thought. Amber means it suits some travellers and not others, and the district says which. Red means it is cheap for a reason. We look at the things that matter on a short trip: how far you walk to the centre, what a room costs compared with the rest of the city, noise at night, how it feels after dark, and what people who stayed there said.

Are the quotes real?

Yes. Every quote is copied word for word from Wikivoyage, Wikipedia, Travel Stack Exchange or the UK Foreign Office, and the link under it takes you to the original page. If a quote was written in another language, we show our translation and say so.

Why are the district shapes so odd?

They are each city's official district borders, not areas we drew ourselves. Real borders are messy: they cut through parks and follow old boundaries. A neat shape would mean somebody had tidied up the map.

Have you stayed in every district?

No. Each verdict is put together from travel guides, first-hand accounts, transport maps and prices, then checked by a person before the city goes live.

Green means book it.
Red means read the cons first.