Much is written for the general public about Madrid and Barcelona. They are mentioned in numerous articles about politics, football and entertainment as well as science and research. Furthermore, in the context of general tourism discourse they compete for the role of Spain’s top tourist destinations. This study offers an academic contribution to these general publications and simultaneously fills a gap in the small body of existing research concerned with tourism discourse which has previously only contained a comparison of major cities in different continents (Wu, 2018). In this study, the official tourism websites for Madrid and Barcelona are analysed and compared quantitatively and qualitatively using Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) and the computer software Sketch Engine. The aim is to see how the cities are portraying themselves as tourist destinations, especially with regards to content themes, and visitor and destination orientation. Previous comparative research has shown a scale from destination orientation with factual descriptions of the place, to visitor orientation with focus on the tourist and the activities that can be done during their visit (Manca, 2016 for United Kingdom, Italy and Australia and Wu, 2018 for London and Hangzhou). This study concludes that Barcelona is more visitor oriented than Madrid and that the cities have distinctive content themes. Most noteworthy is the distinctive use of personal pronouns, imperatives and the modal verbs ‘can’ and ‘will’. However, the analysis also points to some similarities, mainly regarding the use of native language integrated in the English text.