16 Nights - Southern Spain and Barcelona - May 2019

My husband and I spent 2 weeks in Madrid and south in 2017. It was our first trip to Spain and we loved it. We've spent a lot of time in Europe but had never been on the Iberian peninsula. You are in for a treat.

We divided our trip this way:

Madrid - 5 nights. We left the day after Thanksgiving and, like a fool, I drank an entire bottle of wine the day before our flight. I will never do that again. For the first time ever I was exhausted upon arrival. We did book the extra day to do a daytrip to Toledo. Coincidentally, it was the only day it rained during the entire trip.

Seville - 4 nights, with a day trip to Cordoba. I LOVED Seville and could easily live there. This was my favorite part of the trip and I would love to return.

Granada - 3 nights. This was the perfect amount of time for us. We spent a 2/3 of a day at the Alhambra and another day seeing the other Granada sites.

Malaga - 3 nights. This was the end of an active trip and it was nice to have some time to laze around. Malaga has great museums and a ton of restaurants. It is very walkable. Had it been warmer, we would have made our way down the coast to other coastal towns. The Museo de Malaga was a really nice surprise. I think this is an underrated small city and worth spending time here if you like Picasso.

We did not go to Barcelona. We used AirBnB's in each place - wonderful experience.

I would imagine you're set on visiting the South of Spain, right? Just saying so because the region of Catalonia, where Barcelona is the capital of, offers an equally impressive range of sites, places and activities to keep you busy for far more than 16 days... and that without having to move about like a headless chicken :)....

Catalonia is the size of Maryland and has all the landscapes you can imagine, from endless golden beaches to high mountain ranges with peaks surpassing 10,000ft, to an impressive rough coast (Costa Brava) with a multitude of picturesque little towns, to several natural parks -a couple of which is one of the most important biosphere reserves in the South of Europe-, etc... And this is only landscapes, then you have all the heritage and history spanning several thousand years all condensed in this "small" patch of land.

If you either have limited time or rather not to be wasting much time driving/moving from one end of the Iberian peninsula to the other, may I recommend you to have a look at these brochures? maybe they "open up" new possibilities for your trip :))

Welcome to Catalonia
Catalonia Experience
Map of roads in Catalonia
Routes and getaways

Enjoy!

I would start in Seville and end in Barcelona, so you follow kind of a west-to-east route. I believe Seville's airport has the most flights of any Andalusian airport.

The Andalusian leg of your trip would end in Granada, from where there are plenty of cheap flights to Barcelona.

I think 5 nights is more than enough for Seville. You could easily fit another destination in there.

Out of those three, Cordoba would be my pick, if only to see the Mezquita.

So that would be...

Seville -- 4 nights
Cordoba -- 2 nights
Ronda -- 2 nights
Granada -- 3 nights
Barcelona -- 5 nights

I'm not sure if it would be easier to visit Cordoba before Ronda or vice versa. Perhaps someone else in the forum could help with that.

Added:

We are just outside NYC so we fly out of JFK. We frequently use Aer Lingus, and fly through Dublin. We flew direct with Iberia into Madrid and flew out of Malaga through Dublin, and back to the US. Easy peasy. Do open jaw. Spain is easy to get around, and we used a combo of trains and buses. Don't be scared of the buses- the Spanish use them all the time for longer distances. When you see how mountainous the country is, you will see why trains aren't always the practical option.

Thank you all so much for your helpful replies.

Enric, we're not completely set and are open to other possibilities. We prefer quiet hill towns and figured that Andulacia has more of that. Of course, you would know far better than us! Thank you for all those links. We're looking into them. Now, we really don't know for sure! It's all part of vacation planning - never being certain, I guess. We don't know if we should focus only on Catalonia or Andulacia and include Barcelona towards the end. Decisions!

Question for anyone who knows and erdogreg: Is it possible to travel within Spain by train, plane, and rental car only? The reason I ask is that I really don't do well on buses for long-distance travel. I can handle them for an hour or so, but any longer, and it's sheer torture for me.

Thank you all again.

"Is it possible to travel within Spain by train, plane, and rental car only?"

That depends on where you're going. A rental car can go almost anywhere, although some cities have parking restrictions, and driving in big cities like Barcelona and Madrid is never fun. The train network is not as developed in Spain as in some other European countries, and the high speed train network is skeletal. However, where it does go, high speed trains are usually the best way (Barcelona to Madrid to Cordoba to Seville, for instance). These are denoted AVE (for longer segments) and AVANT (for shorter segments - cheaper than the AVE on the same route, like Seville to Cordoba).

A common issue is that buses are faster than trains because they're more direct (for instance, from Cordoba to Granada). Right now, there are no trains to Granada because they're building the high speed service. Trains go as far as Antequera, where you get a bus (right from the train station) to Granada's train station.

If you don't want to take buses, you can certain rent a car for sections of the trip. Just be sure to investigate parking beforehand (I remember Granada has particularly restrictive rules, and I believe it even has a zone where cars are not allowed, the way many Italian cities do).

If this will be your only trip to Spain, then the itinerary nathanboley8 gave would be my choice. If you plan on returning to Spain, then I’d stick to northern Spain (Catalonia, Paris Vasco, Cantabria, Asturias and Navarra ) and do Andalucia separately. One could easily spend 2-3 weeks in any single region and still not see everything it has to offer. I’ve always had a rental car in Spain since my wife and I go to a lot of really small towns and villages that don’t require a long time to see and are not regularly served by public transportation. Since you’re only going to large cities or towns, trains or busses should work fine. Other than Ronda, parking in cities is pricey and you’d be paying for a vehicle you wouldn’t be using, and paying to park something you’re not using. Parking can cost up to €20 a day.

@Bookaholic indeed, decisions, decisions...

As I've mentioned several times in the forum, Spain is not really "a country" but it's rather like a bunch of countries, four to be exact. The reason being is that four very different cultures co-exist in it -and not in harmony I must say :) For historical reasons, this "thing" called Spain came to be, in the 18th century, but the intended uniformity that one of them wanted to impose over the others hasn't been achieved (thank God!) and, if you travel to different parts of this territory, you do find very different ways of life, values, heritage, etc. ... even language! From the tourist point of view, this tends to be an unexpected plus because you think you're visiting one country -and hence you don't take into account the differences I mentioned before in your planning- and you end up discovering that you've visited more than one and that often the time assigned to each "area" feels far too short as there's much more to discover.

And this is only related to people and culture... when it comes to nature and landscapes this is yet another surprise. Many countries, larger in territory than Spain, do not have as much diversity and in those that do -like the US for example- it requires travelling large distances to radically change from one landscape to another. Well, this is not the case here.... take my homeland for example, Catalonia, as I said in the other post, you find very different landscapes in a small area the size of Maryland which means that, if you rent a car, you could be visiting this in the morning, and this just three hours later. As a curiosity: in a normal day in the middle of Winter, Barcelona and those cities/towns along the coast might be having a temperature of say 50F, and just 60 miles inland, at the same hour they might be having 20F or less.... sixty miles only! This offers a variety of plants and trees and colours worthwhile seeing -hence the reason we have so many natural parks and reserves, and so different among them!

A bit the same happens say for example in Andalucia, you have this in Cadiz and merely three hours away you have this near Granada, in the Sierra Nevada -yeah, in BOTH cases it was April, honest to goodness! :)

As per "small quaint villages"... once again, that's something you'll find all over for the reason I mentioned earlier... the variety of landscapes. Taking again my homeland for example, here some examples: Castellfollit de la Roca, Peratallada, Cadaqués, Pals, Sitges, Besalú, Tossa de Mar... just to name a few. And this is, for example, Vielha, in the north-westernmost tip of Catalonia.

All of these are "relatively" close by car (can't possibly visit them all in one day though, not by a long shot!)

Just sayin'

Enric

Thank you all so very much for such helpful replies.

Harold, thank you for taking the time to explain all that. We seldom rent a car within cities. Public transport is ideal then. Obviously, I would prefer to avoid buses as much as possible!

jaimeelsabio, thank you so much for your reply. I imagine that the only part where we'll rent a car is for the hillside towns such as Ronda.

Enric, thank you for your wonderful reply. Wow! Those links are unbelievable. I visited Spain a few times as a child. We went skiing on one of those trips. I knew that it was quite varied and diverse, but you have explained it wonderfully. I never thought of it like that. We may very well have to visit a few times! Such a rich and diverse country.

We spent 2 weeks in Spain last week of May and first week of June this year. It was our first trip to Spain. We did not do Barcelona (next trip).
Flew into Madrid - 3 nights AirBnB - palace, cathedral, museums, (enjoyed Madrid)
AVE train to Malaga - booked 60 days ahead (1st day it opened) via Loco2.com (easier than Renfe and same price).
1 week in Benalmadena (20 minutes west of Malaga)with a rental car. Day trip to Ronda and Bodega Hildago Garcia winery; day trip to Caminito del Rey (45 minutes north of Malaga) - marvelous hike through gorge on the side of a cliff; day trip to Granada - booked our Alhambra tickets 90 days in advance (would have been nice to stay overnight; it was a 2 hour drive but an easy drive); day trip to Gibraltar; 2 days in Malaga (fort is worth the hike up the mountain); did a Devour tapas tour which was worth it; took a bus day trip to Morocco (it was ok/not great);

Took middle distance train (booked day before but did not need to) to Seville - 2 nights in AirBnB; book tickets online for palace as the que is long. Fun city, did a Devour tapas tour there also which was good.
Did a flamenco show (1 cited by Rick Steves);
Took MD train to Cordoba / 6 hours for Mesquite / AVE train to Madrid (booked 60 days ahead to get best price). Flew home from Madrid.
AVE trains are very reasonable if you book ahead. Even with a senior discount, it is cheaper to book ahead. MD trains are readily available and usually no reservation needed.
Rental car was cheap and fun. We did not drive in any cities (drove directly to Alhambra parking lot, then walked downtown and through the Albyzin) (drove to parking garage in Malaga and then walked)

We loved Spain - food, atmosphere, sights, people, etc. Will go back in a heartbeat and consider Barcelona and Northern Spain next trip.

tdweaver, thank you so much. That sounds like a wonderful itinerary. We may end up doing something similar also. Fitting in Barcelona and the northern part for another time.

Enric-You have helped me make my decision to go to Spain on our next trip! OMG the places you posted, thank you so much!

This would be my recommendation...

Fly in to Madrid – 3 nights (with a day to Toledo)
Train to Seville – 4 nights (with a day to Córdoba)
Train to Ronda – 2 nights
Train to Granada – 2 nights
Fly to Barcelona – 5 nights
Fly home from Barcelona

David, thank you so much for that. We had pretty much ruled out Madrid, but we're considering it more and more. This itinerary looks quite appealing!

Letizia.... me now.