Unless you are a fashionista or a football fanatic, buying a second home in a continental European city is a heroically stupid thing to do. Cities are expensive, unfriendly, bad for children and the weather is usually too cold in winter and too hot in summer. Milan in December anybody? Seville in August? Thought not.

But one city is bucking the trend. Barcelona is emerging as the place for Britons to buy second homes in Spain. A city that echoes to the sound of late-night salsa is getting used to a new sound — the Anglo-Saxon vowels of the new breed of “Barça Brits”.

You can hear them converting square metres into feet as they ogle the property brochures and nibble tapas around the pool at the fashionable Hotel Arts. They are the first on the streets viewing properties, making the most of the morning cool. At night you can hear them celebrating their good fortune in Comerç 24, the city’s most chic restaurant.

The number of Britons buying and looking to buy holiday homes in the Catalan capital has risen more than five-fold in the past 18 months, according to Spanish Property Insight (SPI), a company that helps foreigners buy in Spain by introducing them to companies and professionals. Prices are rising by a London-like 20% a year and by up to 50% in the most fashionable districts.

Mark Stucklin, who runs SPI, says: “Britons used to head straight for the Costa del Sol or the pueblos blancos of Andalusia without thinking, but they are realising that the real gem of Spain is Barcelona. Barcelona is enjoying a cracking overseas property boom and Britons are big players.”

Richard Lander, editorial director of Citywire, a London-based financial publishing group, is one of the new UK investors. He “fell in love” with Barcelona when he saw Manchester United win the European Cup final in the city’s Nou Camp football stadium in 1999. “Sitting in the glorious evening sunshine watching Montserrat Caballé sing Barcelona, with Freddie Mercury on video, I decided there was something special about the place.”

Last year the Landers spent almost £200,000 on a one-bedroom flat in the newly hip Borne district. They visit four or five times a year. Among the neighbours are Stephen Kaufmann, a 50-year-old advertising recruitment executive from rural East Sussex, who has invested a similar sum in a three-bedroom modern flat in a converted 19th-century tenement block, and Declan McDermott, a 40-year-old oil industry executive who uses his £220,000 duplex flat “to thaw out after trips to the Russian oilfields”.

The Landers, the Kaufmanns and McDermott have little in common but all say Barcelona is “the perfect second-home city”. Budget airlines (EasyJet, BMI and Air Scotland) and, soon, TGV fast-train connections make it cheap and easy to get to. “My son studies, works and plays here, while my wife and I can enjoy terrific culture, good shopping and lazy days on the beach. Paris in August it ain’t,” says Kaufmann.

Lander describes Barcelona as “the Sydney of Europe, a place that the citizens and visitors love equally. Everything works, everything is very open — you can eat, drink and move around for half the price you can in Britain. Even the noisy Las Ramblas seems significantly less tatty and tawdry than the touristy parts of other major cities”.

McDermott praises Barcelona as “a proper international city, not a holiday resort”. The city beats the costas any day, they say. “We’ve all seen the unspeakable, football-shirted trash that gathers in the concrete jungles of the Costa del Sol and we don’t want any of that,” says Lander. Kaufmann adds: “I’d never invest down south. We’ve had some great holidays in Marbella, but two weeks of sun, sand and sangria is quite enough.”

“Besides,” says McDermott, “the best beaches in Spain are now a boat ride away from Barcelona, on the island of Formentera. Kate Moss rents a place there every summer.”

Over lunch in Taktika Berri, one of Barcelona’s most fashionable modern tapas restaurants, Stucklin, 35, chuckles into his chorizo at the Barça Brits’ criticism of the Costa del Sol resorts, where holidaymakers have enjoyed kids’ menus, jet-skis, golf, shopping malls and Robin Hood pubs since Franco opened up Spain to the world in the 1960s.

“Ah, the penny has finally dropped,” he says. “People now realise that if you sit around all day in a manicured, culture-free golf resort, reading the Daily Express and drinking beer with a bunch of perma-tanned expats, you end up a miserable old alcoholic. Barcelona isn’t for everybody but it’s perfect for sophisticated people looking for a Mediterranean climate, beautiful architecture and a stimulating cultural environment close to great beaches and mountains.”

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