Northern Spain touring questions

I cant't imagine having a problem parking in the smaller cities of the North Central and North West - I certainly never have. With that said I do look for hotels with parking options or ask hotel staff for parking recommendations. When taking a day trip, Burgos for example, I often look for the public parking facilities, often an underground parking lot/car park, rather than deal with street parking. But, even when street parking is the only option keep a pocket full of euros and you'll be set.

We rented a car from Bilbao airport, drove to St. Sebastian, and parked our rental car at what was essentially a "park and ride" bus stop for a few days, before picking it up and proceeding west, staying in smaller towns, where parking was never an issue, before heading south and dropping off the car at the train station in Leon.

We found driving the major routes quite easy with pretty normal driving conditions. The backroads particularly in Asturias were a little more hairy, often not wide enough for two cars to pass at normal driving speeds, and plenty of potholes. One of the backroads we took wove between Asturias and Cantabria and we noted that the latter seemed to have better road maintenance! (or was it the former? There was a difference, regardless.)

Anyway I do recommend renting a car for this area because getting around by public transit especially to the smaller places would have been a huge hassle and time sink, even though I generally prefer public transit when it's well-serviced. It's definitely cheaper to hire cars and outside of the bigger cities you're not going to find something like Uber (not even sure if it exists in the bigger cities - we didn't need a taxi to walk around St. Sebastian and Bilabo).

While we enjoyed the scenery and culture of this area, also be aware that outside of the bigger, more touristed spots, English is not particularly widely spoken. My husband had to make good use of his very rusty Spanish. Learn some basic phrases before you go, even at big rest areas on the major roads we had some difficulty with language and we both have some decent Spanish vocab.

You can read my trip report here!

As others have mentioned, the best way to see the north is with a car. In the north, parking is usually available in the big cities and sites and most medium-large hotels will have their own subterranean parking garage. However, I should mention that those parking garages are quite compact and tight, they were built for smaller cars and it is easy to scratch the rental car especially with a longer sedan.

We had a car when we went visited the northern part of Spain in 2017. On that trip we stayed at Paradors where possible since we like them and parking was free at many of them. In Burgos and Pamplona we chose hotels with paid parking. In the cities, expect most parking will be paid (€12-€15 per day) while in smaller towns it tended to be free or with only a nominal charge. Parking was generally easy to find around the sites we visited, but we were there in May, before the main tourist season. I also used Google street view to look for street parking before going over for places I thought might be an issue. Save yourself a lot of time and get a rental/hire car.

If you stay at a hotel that is older and has an underground parking garage, check it out prior to entering it with your car. Many older garages were made for the old Spanish Seat cars of 1970s Spain and not for today’s larger vehicles. I was in Ourense a number of years ago and literally had only a couple inches between the sides of the car and the walls. Had the car not had a sun roof, there is no way we could have gotten out of the car had we gotten stuck.

Thank you for your responses. I see the price of car rentals, but do most people put the daily extra insurance on it? And I don't think I'll have acess to the internet in a car, but is a simple map suficient? Any places to avoid?

In Spain I don’t get the extra insurance. I get CDW through Allianz and my credit card. I will get the windshield protection if offered, but that’s it. I have a GPS as well as Google maps downloaded for offline use (no internet or phone plan needed). We also have a paper map. The roads in Spain, I feel, are well marked so if you know the towns you’ll be passing through or by, you should have little trouble. GPS comes in handy when trying to get out of town heading in the right direction and finding your hotel. I can’t think of any places one should avoid.

We've stuck to Google maps that has areas downloaded at home for the last three trips and we find it better (marginally) than a dedicated GPS. We use it on a tablet so it does double duty for email, etc. but it also comes in handy in the center of a large city just to know exactly where you are. The downside is that it takes a few moments to find your location when you first turn it on.

I've never had parking issues but I prefer to rent the cheapest and smallest available.