Hotel Ciutat Vella

This hotel opened on Sept 17, 2007, so we were among the first guests of the week. On the third day of our stay, I discovered the contents of our hotel room safe were missing. I couldn't open the lock, my code wasn't working. So the receptionist came up with the master code and unlocked the safe...all gone! 1,700 euros and my husband's passport missing. We were incredibly shocked and shaken. Hours of police report and investigation, the staff were fingerprinted, our room brushed for fingerprints.
We suffered not only from this theft but also the aftermath, primarily dealing with the hotel manager, who also manages Ciutat Barcelona Hotel, who was not only elusive (he refused to meet us in person, only accessible by telephone through his staff), but evasive about how, when and if we would be compensated. In the end our euros were returned to us on the day of our departure from Barcelona (we were going on to Venice that weekend) but would not compensate us for the costs of recovering the passport (my husband's nationality is Korean so we had to go to Madrid to get a new temporary passport -- a 9 hour+ return trip, another wasted day).
After the theft, our belongings never felt secure in the hotel..
To add insult to injury, upon check out we were informed that our hotel bill was payable in full ("the robbery is one thing, and the hotel bill is another." When I balked at this, he offered 25% reduction. When I refused, he threatened to call the police for not paying our hotel bill! I told him we would have gladly paid the entirety of our hotel bill if our trip went just as planned, without such an incident caused by the hotel's negligence (lack of security, insecure locks) that completely marred our stay in Barcelona. In the end, we had a plane to catch, and paid for the nights up until the robbery and gladly left this hotel.
There are a wealth of good hotel rooms in Barcelona (and the city itself is fabulous) - this is not one of them.

Directions: Raval, just west of Las Ramblas