Southern Spain - bus toilets & travel options

The ALSA busses that I have taken in southern Spain do have bathrooms, in the exit door down ramp. That makes no sense now but it will once your on the bus. I'm sure there is always a possibility of a broken bathroom, but I would not worry about that now. The bathrooms are not used that much so the odds of them being broken is small. J

I'm guessing the concern is that the bathroom door will be locked. I have a similar concern since I have a 3 hour bus ride from Seville to Granada. Regretting not buying a train ticket.

https://community.ricksteves.com/travel-forum/spain/quality-of-buses-in-spain

Yes, sometimes the doors are locked. In theory buses make a stop every 2 to 2.5 hours (smoke/comfort break for the driver as well as the passengers), but unfortunately I had a driver who felt no need to adhere to that and went all the way from Granada to Valencia with only one announced comfort stop not all that far north of Granada. It was an 8-hour trip. So I'm not going to promise anyone that there will be no issue. I handled the situation by getting off the bus as fast as I could at every stop (because I had no idea whether or when there would be another stop), saying "toilet" to the driver and literally running. He never left me behind. That was an ALSA bus.

Thanks Acraven, Gail & Joanne!

After reading your comments, we decided to just plan a long lunch break in Tarifa and then take a later bus to Cadiz the same day. Whew, glad I was looking at buses because most of them were sold out to Cadiz! That day is the beginning of Carnival, so now the quantity of sold out buses makes sense.

Good decision to break your trip into two separate trips. I’ve been caught out on these buses and even though some specify they have toilets, they don’t, and if they do it can sometimes be a weird pod in the middle of the bus that costs a Euro or so. It differs from bus to bus.

For some reason the bus drivers… yes some can be cantankerous… get great pleasure in telling us there are no toilets.

We'll be in Cadiz for two weeks just prior to you, and have yet to book our bus tickets on Comes buses from Seville to Cadiz.

Glad Tarifa is only a lunch break. There isn’t much to the town itself and a couple hours are more than sufficient to see anything worthwhile.

I don’t know about the bus from Cadiz but we just took an Alsa bus from Granada to Sevilla in December. There was definitely a bathroom on it.

Here’s the update: we took buses from Estepona to Cadiz. I woke up a couple of hours early to have my coffee. ; )

From Estepona to Tarifa, the bus stopped for 30 minutes at Algeciras. It looks like two bus tickets, but it’s the same bus. So, there’s plenty of time for a bathroom break at Algeciras while all of us were standing around the station.

We purchased tickets to stop at Tarifa for lunch, so we had a 3-hour time period in Tarifa. Plenty of time for lunch and to walk around the city and port area. Then we took the bus from Tarifa to Cadiz.