It depends what you mean by nightlife. The streets are full of people, but they're all sober, even at 3am on a Saturday night. Weird. But as for the clubs I don't know as I was only there a week. I think Barcelona probably has a good club scene, it's a very big city, and as I say there were plenty of tourists in December, so you can imagine what it's going to be like in the summer ... beautiful meditteranean city, nice women, hot weather, it'll be absolutely rammed! And lots of tourists usually means lots of events, but also higher prices. Tourists can be a good or a bad thing depending how you look at it - they sure are annoying, but at the same time clubs put on events for them and put better stuff on if they know they will fill the place.

We arrived on a Saturday evening and people were doing their shopping at 10pm. And by people I mean bloody millions! I've never seen so many people out shopping, even for December (xmas) it was incredible. Back home in Newcastle people had been starting drinking about 6pm, some at 7pm, some at 8, and the city is definitely full of people by 9 getting tanked up. A lot of people say Barcelona has a great club scene, and it looks like it probably has, but all the stuff I read or was told about it being some sort of super carnival city was frankly nonsense. There is lots of street entertainment on La Rambla and a few other areas throughout the day but unless you're 5 years old it's pretty boring! Just street theatre mainly. The people were more interested in going for a midnight bite to eat than get shitfaced, and that's on a Saturday night. Pubs don't really exist in Barcelona except the Irish pubs, and they are just full of British, Irish, Aussie, Canadian and American tourists too lazy to learn the local language or even attempt to say anything in Catalan There are a lot of bar-eaterie type places, because the Spanish seem to love to eat and also eat very late (often lunch is eaten in the afternoon and dinner at about midnight). But I don't think getting absolutely shitfaced is really a culture in Spain like it is in the rest of Europe.

The Irish pubs and Spanish bar-eateries tend to close at 2 or 3am, clubs (according to the listings) stay open until anything from about 6-10am generally, obviously there will be places close earlier and others later, but I didn't get a chance to sample them

I don't mean to sound too negative, I'd like to go again some day and see more of the city, and the only thing which I found really expensive was 'going out' (ie pubs, clubs, restaurants etc). If you can budget wisely I don't see why it should be more expensive than any other big city