Bordeaux

What are your interests? How many nights do you have available? What time of year?

Madrid is a lot larger and has some fabulous side-trip options--arguably Europe's most impressive list of possibilities. Bordeaux has an attractive historic center but is for many people mainly a jumping-off spot for the Dordogne/Lot. That area is best with a car; seeing it by public transportation requires a good bit of extra time.

What has drawn you to those two specific cities? What other places have you been in Spain and France? I see from your posting history that you've been to Paris.

We will be meeting my 2 brothers and their spouses in Pomplona, then 1 couple will be going to Bordeaux, and the other couple to Madrid… we may simply go our own way after Pomplona… but thought I’d pose the question in the event we go along with one couple. Putting those to places aside, what would you recommend to either see by train or car from Pomplona if we were to break away and do our own thing for a few days before going home?

Here is a copy/paste from a previous question on what to do in Bordeaux:

I thought the Museum of the Aquitaine was awesome. I was with a tour group (Road Scholar) and for my taste we did not spend enough time there. I wish I'd gone on my own on one of my days ahead of the tour. SO much to see and they have a very well done history of slavery as Bordeaux was a major center for the slave trade.

I also enjoyed the Bordeaux Cathedral (Cathedral of Saint Andre) which is where Alienor d'Aquitaine married the future King Louis VII (his dad died 2 weeks after they married and he acceded to the French throne then) although only one wall in the nave is from her time frame.
The Musee des Beaux Arts is pretty good if you enjoy art.

I also loved walking along the promenade along the Gironde River. I was surprised at the banana plants along with hibiscus and Palm Trees there! There is an interesting statue there of Modeste Testas, an Ethiopian woman, captured as a slave and transported to Haiti via Bordeaux. One of her grandsons became President of Haiti.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modeste_Testas

I'm not a foodie, so no recommendations on food although with the Road Scholar group and we did have a quite good group meal at La Belle Epoque at 2 Allee des Orleans.

BTW, Bordeaux was the first place I ran in to where several restaurants I went to had only QR codes on the table for menu access so if you are not used to that, have data for your phone and practice scanning things before you go, lol!! This was on Oct 2021 and we were coming out of the pandemic so they may hav3 added paper menus back in.

I'm also not much of a wine drinker but that is something many enjoy when they visit the area.

Tome whether you choose Bordeaux or Madrid would depend on which location is more interesting to you. How long will you stay in either area?

The hill town of Laguardia is very atmospheric. It's in/near the Rioja wine country. There's bus service from Logrono, but a car would make it a lot easier. It would still be over a one-hour drive, according to Google Maps. (I'd check that against ViaMichelin.com.)

Olite is an excellent suggestion. It's closer than Laguardia (about a half-hour drive, due south) and had almost no tourists when I was there in 2016. The royal palace is definitely worth a visit--and I say that as someone usually bored by palaces. The town doesn't have a well-developed tourist infrastructure. In the words of a travel writer, "You may starve, but you will not be bored." A word to the wise: Take snacks, just in case. Renfe.com indicates only 3 trains a day from Pamplona to Olite. They take only 30-40 minutes, but I wouldn't count on being able to take the train in both directions. I'd guess there are also some buses, but I haven't researched that. I simply don't remember whether I arrived by train or by bus. A car would be nice.

San Sebastian/Donostia is as little as 70 minutes away from Pamplona by bus. Again, there are so few trains that it would be difficult to plan a trip around them. SS is worth at least a solid day, maybe two if you want to spend a lot of time pintxo-bar hopping. Be prepared to be surrounded by thousands of other pintxo-lovers. The historic area is rather small and extremely touristy, but it's a pretty town on an even prettier beach.

I really liked the interior capital of the Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz. It has a good-sized medieval quarter on top of a hill, with outdoor escalators to make the climb much easier. There are a couple of art museums and a playing-card museum. Very few tourists find their way to Vitoria-Gasteiz. It appears a car is the only practical way to get there from Pamplona unless you wanted to spend the night. Public transportation would eat up too much time on a day trip.

If you were willing to ditch the others entirely, you could spend your nights up in the Basque Country, seeing all of San Sebastian, Bilbao (too far for a day trip, I think) and Vitoria-Gasteiz. Bilbao is my favorite of the three, but others would vote for San Sebastian.

Unless headed for the Dordogne/Lot, I wouldn't be inclined to bypass both the Spanish and the French Basque Country to go all the way to Bordeaux--though I realize it puts you a short TGV ride from Paris. To me, going just to Bordeaux without time to see the lovely area to the east would be akin to going to Nice without enough time to see any of the coastal towns or hill villages.

In addition to the Spanish Basque cities I've already mentioned, there's Hondarribia (near San Sebastian), and in France you have Bayonne (my favorite), St-Jean-de-Luz and Biarritz. There are small mountain villages in France others have liked, and pretty coastal spots in Spain (Lekeitio, Zarautz/Getaria/Zumaia and Bermeo).