You haven’t been to Barcelona recently? Odd. This year everybody on a boat, a plane, or a running tour was in Barcelona. It is the happening city in Europe. Its soaring success is the result of a work ethic combined with encouraged creativity; Spain is hungry and Barcelona is a shining example of what it is offering visitors who come to see it. It has some of the most exciting modern design in the hotel and restaurant world, and va-va-voom beaches with hip places to lunch and cool chatty bars where you can listen to music day and night. Art is booming all over town — some of it pops up in surprise spots like the big golden fish Frank Gehry beached outside the Hotel Arts, or Jean Nouvel’s startling but unashamed phallic tower for the water company. (It changes color throughout the day.) Barcelona is about serious enterprise combined with serious partying — it loves the new, it’s young again, it’s in love again, it feels good.

It is now so popular that you can find dozens of travel books recommending hotels and restaurants, but those books are in the travel business so they have to be kind. I don’t. I was there six weeks and checked most of it out. Here is the best, as seen through the eyes of a woman born in Ohio who had a successful career in New York — you can identify with that!

One of the two big whoopdeedoo hotels is the Arts, built for the Olympics in a style that is wild and all over the place, but still charming; it’s what you would expect to check into on Mars. It sits — well, it climbs around and over the beach, all of its girders and armature criss-cross its masses of glass and its great views, including Frank’s big fish. The hotel has attractive restaurants, but there are also really good independent restaurants below on the long stretch of beach, especially the smart Agua and the equally smart Bestial. Rooms at the Arts are comfortably minimalist but I wouldn’t stay at the hotel. It is just too big.

Any hotel that big loses romance and it is hard, no matter how you try, and the Arts does try, to keep a mammoth dazzling. One big exception, if you are very rich — the apartment-duplex suites on the top of the Arts are as good as hotel suites can get. Wow duplexes. Wow design. Wow views in all directions. Wow rates for them too. And those suites do dazzle.

The other whoopdeedoo hotel is the pretty Gran Hotel La Florida, but it’s on Mount Tibidabo — to me that’s out of town and for Hollywood love affairs.

I want to be in the middle of the fun and the buzz. My first choice is the Hotel Omm, two steps off the Passeig de Gracia (avenues of choice). The façade looks as if it has been coolly peeled back to give sexy privacy to balconies that are tucked in. Or as if waves from the Med had rushed up and splashed it. There is a calm spaciousness and sophisticated comfort about this hotel — it made me think of a good space-age movie set and it made me feel beautiful, as most of the guests are. The lobby becomes a bar that eventually becomes an exciting restaurant called Moo. Yes, Moo. Moo is full of wonders including plates designed by a lot of Barcelona’s leading artists, and it takes serious discipline not to steal one.