Where to live · Esade
Where to live for Esade students
Esade teaches its bachelor degrees in Sant Cugat del Vallès and its MBA, Law School and executive programmes in Pedralbes. Those are two different housing problems, and picking the wrong one puts a mountain between you and your timetable.
- 2 campuses
- 8.4 km apart at the widest
- 1 off the city network
The short answer
Start with your campus, not with the university.
Two picks per campus, on rules you can check against the tables further down: the shortest modelled journey by metro and bus, and the cheapest room within 10 minutes of it. Room prices are for one person in a shared flat.
Esade - Sant Cugat
Sant Cugat del Vallès · Sant Cugat (FGC S1/S2/S6/S7)
- Shortest modelled commute
- Sant Cugat
18 min door to door, train included, rooms around €600.
- Cheapest room within 10 minutes of it
Also Sant Cugat. Nothing within 10 minutes of this campus is cheaper, which is unusual and worth knowing.
ModelledcommuteEstimatedrent
Esade - Pedralbes
Barcelona · Palau Reial (L3) / Reina Elisenda (FGC)
- Shortest modelled commute
- Pedralbes
10 min by metro and bus, rooms around €700.
- Cheapest room within 10 minutes of it
- Maternitat i Sant Ramon
13 min, rooms around €570. That is €130 a month against Pedralbes, for 3 minutes more each way.
ModelledcommuteEstimatedrent
The campuses
Where they actually are.
Your programme decides this for you, and it is the single most expensive thing to get wrong on this page.
Esade - Sant Cugat
Av. de la Torre Blanca 59, 08172 Sant Cugat del Vallès
- Station
- Sant Cugat (FGC S1/S2/S6/S7)
- Taught here
- BBA and all bachelor business degrees, all MSc, PhD, summer school. If you study business here as an undergraduate, this is your campus - not Pedralbes.
- Modelled as
- Outside the city transport network. Your journey is three legs: get to a railhead, take the Sant Cugat train, walk 17 min at the far end.
Address and coordinates: esade.edu/en/about-us/campus-services/sant-cugat + esade.edu/en/contact (programme→campus map); coords ICGC address portal, corroborated by Esade's own map embed (215 m spread) Checked 2026-08-07.
Esade - Pedralbes
Av. Pedralbes 60-62 / Av. Esplugues 92-96, 08034 Barcelona
- Station
- Palau Reial (L3) / Reina Elisenda (FGC)
- Taught here
- Law School, MBA and Executive Education.
- Modelled as
- Inside the city transport network, so the ordinary metro, bus and bike model applies.
Address and coordinates: esade.edu/en/about-us/campus-services/barcelona; coords OSM university POI 'ESADE Edifici 1 Campus Barcelona Pedralbes' Checked 2026-08-07.
The commute
Every neighbourhood we profile, ranked, by mode.
Door to door, measured from the centre of each neighbourhood. Modelled from published average speeds, not routed: there is no timetable in this and no live disruption, so treat it as a way of comparing neighbourhoods rather than as a departure board.
To Esade - Sant Cugat
ModelledThree legs: to the railhead, the published train time, then a 17 minute walk.
| Neighbourhood | Total | Via | To the train | On the train | Bike | Car | Room |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sant Cugat | 18 | n/a | n/a | n/a | 8 | 16 | €600 |
| Bellaterra (UAB) | 30 | Sarrià | 45 | 17 | 25 | 30 | €420 |
| Les Tres Torres | 45 | Sarrià | 11 | 17 | 41 | 51 | €700 |
| Sarrià | 47 | Sarrià | 9 | 17 | 37 | 50 | €650 |
| Sant Gervasi | 49 | Sarrià | 14 | 17 | 47 | 54 | €700 |
| El Putxet i el Farró | 56 | Sarrià | 15 | 17 | 49 | 50 | €620 |
| Gràcia | 58 | Sarrià | 17 | 17 | 54 | 54 | €700 |
| Sant Gervasi - la Bonanova | 59 | Sarrià | 13 | 17 | 45 | 49 | €680 |
| 30 more neighbourhoods between these and the slowest three. | |||||||
| Poblenou | 82 | Plaça Catalunya | 17 | 30 | 68 | 66 | €750 |
| Diagonal Mar | 86 | Sarrià | 36 | 17 | 73 | 69 | €800 |
| Provençals del Poblenou | 87 | Plaça Catalunya | 20 | 30 | 68 | 65 | €620 |
Scroll sideways for the other modes and the room price.
Train time is FGC’s own published figure, not ours. Walking does not appear because there is no walking route to this campus, and the model says so rather than printing a number.
To Esade - Pedralbes
ModelledRanked by metro and bus, fastest first.
| Neighbourhood | Metro and bus | On foot | Bike | Bicing | Car | Room |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pedralbes | 10 | 8 | 5 | 10 | 14 | €700 |
| Sarrià | 11 | 13 | 7 | 13 | 16 | €650 |
| Maternitat i Sant Ramon | 13 | 24 | 11 | 17 | 19 | €570 |
| Les Corts | 13 | 24 | 12 | 17 | 19 | €650 |
| Sant Gervasi - la Bonanova | 15 | 34 | 15 | 21 | 22 | €680 |
| Les Tres Torres | 22 | 21 | 11 | 16 | 18 | €700 |
| Eixample Nova Esquerra | 29 | 43 | 18 | 25 | 24 | €600 |
| Sant Gervasi | 29 | 37 | 16 | 22 | 23 | €700 |
| 30 more neighbourhoods between these and the slowest three. | ||||||
| Poblenou | 60 | n/a | 44 | 52 | 45 | €750 |
| Diagonal Mar | 64 | n/a | 52 | n/a | 51 | €800 |
| Provençals del Poblenou | 65 | n/a | 47 | 56 | 48 | €620 |
Scroll sideways for the other modes and the room price.
n/a means the model does not treat that mode as a real option for that journey: over 75 minutes on foot, or over an hour on a Bicing.
The honest part
What the numbers say not to do.
Sant Cugat is the campus that gets underestimated: on a map it looks like a suburb of Barcelona, and in practice it is a train journey. Every minute of it is spent reaching the Vallès line, so the neighbourhoods that feel like the obvious student choice are the ones that pay for it twice.
The default shortlist
The names on every student housing list cost 46 to 58 extra minutes to Esade - Sant Cugat.
These six have the highest share of international residents of the 41 we profile, which is why they dominate every list of where to live in Barcelona. Measured against Sant Cugat, the fastest neighbourhood to Esade - Sant Cugat at 18 minutes:
- The Gothic Quarter64 min (+46)€650 a room
- El Raval65 min (+47)€550 a room
- Fort Pienc67 min (+49)€580 a room
- Poble-sec68 min (+50)€550 a room
- El Born73 min (+55)€680 a room
- Barceloneta76 min (+58)€620 a room
At the far end of that list it is 58 minutes each way, which is 580 minutes a week if you go in five days. That is the real price of the postcard, and it is worth paying only if you know you are paying it.
The cheap end
Going cheap costs you real minutes at Esade - Sant Cugat.
The three cheapest neighbourhoods in the dataset, measured against Sant Cugat at 18 minutes and €600:
- Bellaterra (UAB)30 min€420 a room, -30% against that median
- Vallcarca67 min€480 a room, -20% against that median
- Santa Eulàlia (l'Hospitalet)77 min€480 a room, -20% against that median
Bellaterra (UAB) saves you €180 a month and costs you 12 minutes each way. Whether that is a good trade is yours to make, but make it with both numbers in front of you.
One room, two campuses
A room chosen for Esade - Pedralbes is number 18 of 41 for Esade - Sant Cugat.
Pedralbes is 10 minutes from Esade - Pedralbes and 66 minutes from Esade - Sant Cugat, a difference of 56 minutes each way from the same front door.
If your degree puts you at both sites, or if you might transfer, pick for the harder one. An average of two campuses describes a commute nobody actually makes.
The train to Sant Cugat
From Sarrià it is 17 minutes on the train. Everything else is how you reach Sarrià.
There is another way in, 30 min from Plaça Catalunya. Every neighbourhood pays the train, and then a 17 minute walk from Sant Cugat. What varies is the first leg, which is why the totals in the table above run from 18 minutes in Sant Cugat to 87 in Provençals del Poblenou: a spread of 69 minutes created almost entirely by how long it takes to reach the railhead.
It also means the usual instinct is wrong here. Moving further out to save rent only helps if the further-out neighbourhood is closer to the line, and mostly it is not.
The rent
What the recommended neighbourhoods cost.
Room prices are in the picks above. A whole flat goes for €1,476 in Sant Cugat, €2,210 in Pedralbes and €1,176 in Maternitat i Sant Ramon. The median room across the 41 places we profile is €600.
Estimatedrent
Whole-flat rent and average surface: INCASÒL fiança registry, 2026-Q1, published quarterly as "Lloguers Barcelona per districtes i barris" on habitatge.gencat.cat and re-keyed per barri. Room prices are triangulated from district medians, platform snapshots and press (no public series exists below district level), and are indicative, not measured. Whole-flat rent: the municipal figure from the INCASÒL fiança registry via habitatge.gencat.cat and the Dades Obertes Catalunya municipal series, 2026-Q1. There is no barri-level row outside Barcelona, so no €/m² or average surface is published and none is estimated here. Room prices are triangulated from operator and platform listings, and are indicative, not measured. Figures are for 2026-Q1. Every competitor page we checked states neighbourhood rents without a source or a date; this is ours, and the label above says how far to trust it.
What this page does not know
- These minutes are modelled, not routed. They come from published average speeds: metro at about 27 km/h commercial speed including station dwell, buses at 11.8 km/h across the lines analysed in 2024. No timetable, no service frequency, no live disruption, no interchange modelled inside a rail leg.
- They start from the centre of a neighbourhood. A flat at the far edge is worth about five minutes either way, in both directions.
- Neighbourhood rent is indicative. City-level rent comes from the deposit registry. The neighbourhood figures do not: they are re-keyed by hand from a quarterly publication, which is why they carry an estimated label wherever they appear.
- We profile 41 neighbourhoods, not all of Barcelona. A place that is not in the table is not being judged. It is not in the dataset yet.
- Campus coordinates carry the date we checked them. Every campus here was verified on 2026-08-07. Each campus card above names the source. Universities move buildings, and a stale coordinate is a wrong commute.
That is the commute answered. If you want it narrowed by budget, by how quiet you need it and by what you cannot live without, the quiz does that in 6 questions and shows its working.