Day trips from Barcelona and Madrid and Lisbon

From Madrid - Segovia and Toledo. From Barcelona, Girona, Figueres and Montserrat.

Barcelona is the capital of an old small European nation: Catalonia -now ruled by Spain- with a distinct culture, heritage and traditions, and it has a whole trove of sites you might enjoy, whether you're a coastal girl or a mountain girl, whether you like art, history, gastronomy, etc. Just get acquainted with Catalonia and then I'm sure you'll find dozens of ideas:

• Welcome to Catalonia
• Infocatalonia
• Routes and getaways
• Barcelona Tourism Board
• Barcelona City Hall Tourism
• TimeOut Guide Barcelona
• Girona City Hall Tourism
• Tarragona City Hall Tourism

There are literally dozens of other resources. Virtually every city/town in Catalonia has its own tourism website displaying what you can do/see in that city/town... just google the name of the town/city plus the word "tourism" (or "turisme", in Catalan, the local language).

As per some suggestions for day escapades, check this other post.

Enjoy!

I can only speak to the trip from Madrid to Toledo, which my wife and I just took last Friday. It is easy, quick (30 minutes by train) and so worth it. Madrid is wonderful, but Toledo provides delightful contrast, amazing history and views. We decided to do this last minute and found some of the trains were full, so we didn't get our preferred times going to Toledo, so consider booking the trains of your choice a little while ahead of time. Of course, the morning any remaining tickets are discounted as last minute sales, so we happened to save some money on the day trip. If you can stay a night in Toledo, it is recommended (we wished we did). If you only have a day trip from Madrid, you'll enjoy that too. Happy travels.

Another great option from Madrid, though I don't know what the weather would be like, or the atmosphere, early in your trip: Cuenca. It's on the AVE line running toward Valencia and can be reached in about an hour. This is a trip you'd want to book soon after the tickets go on sale, otherwise you might end up paying for full-priced AVE tickets. That would make for an extremely expensive day-trip.

From Lisbon you have the obvious choices of Sintra (palaces) and Cascais (former fishing village, now touristy beach town). And Belem, but I tend to think of it as part of Lisbon. There are a lot of attractive small towns not too far from Lisbon, each needing perhaps 2 hours, but the bus and train schedules are such that it would be hard to visit more than one per day. I'd consider a one-day bus tour to a few of those towns that are hard to reach via public transportation--places like Obidos and Batalha.

If you haven't already done so, take a look at weather stats for your proposed destinations. Early spring may not be as warm as you are expecting. Wunderground.com has actual historical temperature data going back a number of years, shown on an hour-by-hour graph.

I'm in Lisbon right now. Depending on how long you will be here (I'm doing a week with Lisbon as my base), you could easily do day trips to Sintra and Cascais. I'm ask doing day trip via train to Évora tomorrow. It's also possible via bus, which has more departures, but the research I did said you needed to make a reservation for the bus because it gets so crowded. And I didn't want to nail down my plans until I got here and saw how much time I had. Hope this helps!!

You've already been given a lot of suggestions about the "classic" day trips from these cities. Rick's books not only have day trip ideas, but also precise logistics on how to get there and get around.

From Lisbon, two places not in his book are Santarem (one hour from Lisbon) and Tomar (one hour further from Santarem, on the same train line as Santarem). I used Rough Guide and Lonely Planet for these.

Santarém is an hour from Lisbon by train or bus. The bus goes to the center of town. If you take the train, you will most likely need a taxi to the center, as the local bus from the train station to the center is infrequent and the walk is quite uphill on a road with no separated pedestrian space. The town has a very nice vibe as well as some gorgeous churches. The Igreja da Graça with its rose window is more famous, but I thought the Igreja de Marvila with its stunning azulejos (painted tiles) was more beautiful. The views over a bend in the Tagus are lovely too.

Tomar was a center of the Knights Templar, and also has a fascinating museum of matchboxes (all sorts of social and political history in there - wait till you see the Nazi one!). Santarem and Tomar would make a nice one-day combo, if either one does not have enough for you. Both were, at least in 2002 when I went, very un-touristed.