Category: Budget Hotels

By STUART EMMRICH for The New York Times
INITIAL signs were not promising. As I emerged from the Sant Antoni metro station on a warm Barcelona afternoon in search of the Market Hotel, a place I had booked a few days earlier on the Web, I was confronted by a busy commercial thoroughfare anchored on one corner by a ramshackle market selling everything from espadrilles to salted fish and on the other by an unpromising-looking cafe populated by a lone elderly man sipping coffee and flipping idly through a newspaper.