Barcelona to San Sebastian and back, 9 days

Olite is a nice small town that has an outstanding Royal Palace/castle. Another small town is SOS del Rey Católico. Both towns are good to use as a base if taking day trips. We stayed at the Paradors in each location.

With only nine days your itinerary contains a lot of travel time. How you plan to travel should determine where you stay on day 2. I’m not certain about the public transportation options for the towns I mentioned. One small city well served by public transportation is Logroño.

Between Barcelona and San Sebastian is a long way and many interesting places of all shapes and sizes, it really depends on what you want to do/see? Castles, National Parks, mountain villages, historic towns etc. Also know that the weather can be quite unpredictable during April in the area, you can still find plenty of snow up in the mountains. I assume you will have a car? I also assume you will have more than one day in Barcelona?

That's an awful lot of driving(?) for two days in the Basque Country; you won't really have time for the very nice, less touristy towns and cities, such as Bilbao and Hondarribia. Weather in that area is iffy even in mid-summer, so I'd rethink this itinerary for an April trip. I like to visit places at a good time of year.

Since you haven't been to Spain before, I'll suggest Andalucia. April is usually a very good month to be there; the area is horribly, oppressively hot in the summer. If you don't have to spend too much time getting away from and back to your gateway airport(s), you'd just about have time for Seville/Cordoba/Granada (though I'd like a few more days) or for Madrid/Cordoba/Seville or Madrid/Toledo/Cordoba. Madrid and Toledo would probably be noticeably cooler than Seville and Cordoba--actually similar to San Sebastian, temperature-wise, but much, much less rainy.

Thank you for the thoughts!

Acraven, if we modified to fly out of san sebastian so that we had something like 3 nights barcelona, 2 or 3 nights in the towns you mention, and 2 or 3 in san sebastian, would that make it much more reasonable/enjoyable from a traveling perspective? And just how iffy is the weather likely to be? Dont at all mind 60 degree or so temps, but is it typically really rainy 1st of april? Thank you

I'd always prefer to spend less time traveling back and forth, so yes, I'd prefer the revised itinerary.

I suppose because of the moderating effect of being on the coast, San Sebastian isn't usually cold. The issue is that it is so often cloudy or rainy. Wikipedia tells me to expect an average of 13.4 rainy days and 5.61 inches of rain in April. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Sebasti%C3%A1n

There's good food in southern Spain, too, even if places like Seville aren't as foodie-famous as San Sebastian.

Donostia-San Sebastian has, as all northern Spain, a very unreliable weather and you may have the four seasons in just one day. It may rain for a week in a row, it may be sunny for five days...you never know, that´s the way our weather is. Winds change direction frequently and rain is a frequent possibility, but it´s also true that it´s rained much less this year. By the way, I would not skip Bilbao on this trip.

In Spain we have a saying - "en Abril aguas mil" which means "in April a thousand waters", which means prepare for rain, especially in north around San Sebastian, Bilbao, and east to Barcelona too.