Spain Drive, Train, Fly or combo

Hi Stacy,
The list of places you have in mind is hard to arrange in a straight line. Valladolid is nothing special, by the way, and Albarracin is so remote that I would consider leaving it out altogether.

If I had 22 days for this, I would allocate them as follows:

Barcelona 4
Granada + Alpujarra (the region where Capileira is) 3
Seville 3
Extremadura including Guadalupe 3-4 (use Trujillo as a base)
Asturias + Cantabria 5-6
Madrid 2-3

This is also the order that I would follow. Barcelona to Granada is a flight or a long train ride, then you can rent a car for the rest - you do not need it in Seville but well, it seems hard to optimize things otherwise.
The route passes over some highlights (Cordoba, Salamanca, Leon, Burgos) without stopping, but you cannot do everything in 3 weeks. Burgos can be a lunch stop; Salamanca can be an overnight between Extremadura and Asturias with leon as a lunch stop the next day.

I’m not sure I could have picked a list of more disparate locations. Cantabria and Asturias are small, but beautiful. Not sure which towns you intend to visit in those provinces. I too don’t feel the need to visit Valladolid. There is plenty to see in the Guadalupe/Trujillo/Cáceres area. They are all close together. Albarracín is nice to visit and hard to reach by public transportation. We visited it while visiting Teruel. Capilieira Is an outlier from the other locations.

I’m a fan of having a rental car for the flexibility it affords and that’s my recommendation. Once you come up with a route, check the towns between your planned lodging stops. There are plenty of small towns and villages worth visiting that tourists never make it to. Once you conduct research on the things you like to see, you may find out that trying to cover such a large area isn’t practical.

Would this be your first visit to Spain? I ask because your list is certainly atypical, and misses more than a few of what most folks here would consider the highlights of Spain. You haven’t mentioned your interests (other than driving), that would help get better responses.

I enjoy a road trip as much as anyone. Having a car in Spain - at least in parts of Spain - can be great. That said, I would avoid driving in the centers of old cities and large cities, where having a car can be an expensive headache. Spain’s rail system is very convenient in many places (though not all).

First. I want to thank all of you for spending so much time in your replies. We will be renting a car. Yes. This is my first time in Spain although my husband has been to Alicante, Murcia, and Valencia. We like visiting charming off-the-beaten-track villages and towns. Having said that since this is my first time, I for sure would love to know the things I absolutely should not miss. The reason Vallidod is on the list is that I have friends that live there but if it is a huge detour, I don't need to stop there. I guess I just want to be sure that there is enough to see if I drive from Barcelona to Seville and finish in Madrid. It seems like you all agree that Albarracin is not worth the journey??? While I love to drive and I am a professional tour guide by trade in the San Francisco Bay Area, I don't love the idea of driving in big cities. That's why I wondered if it is better to split the trip by train or if you think a car is manageable. Is there enough to see on the drive or will it be large stretches of open road? I feel like a fish out of water. Thanks so much for all of your thoughtful replies.

Albarracin is an atmospheric village in a scenic area. The regional capital, Teruel, is an attractive city rarely visited by foreigners. You can get to Teruel by (non-express) train from Valencia or Zaragoza, but seeing Albarracin requires spending at least one night in the village, and that only gives you a few daylight hours because there's one bus a day arriving around mid-afternoon and then departing early the next morning. Really, you need to stay two days if you don't have a car. This is by way of saying that if you have a car, it would be a great opportunity to see that area. But I always like to consider how much sightseeing time I'll have at a destination compared to the travel time needed to get there. For just Albarracin, I'd tend to question the trip. Add Teruel and it begins to make more sense (at least to me).

You might also be able to loop in the interesting town of Cuenca (with hanging houses along a ravine, an old church and a couple of small modern-art museums). Cuenca's not too far away from Albarracin and Teruel as the crow flies, but I haven't gone to ViaMichelin.com to get an estimated driving time. Forcing Cuenca into the itinerary isn't something I'd do if it doesn't seem logistically sensible, because it is easily reached by express train, being on the line connecting Madrid and Valencia. The only minor wrinkle with visiting Cuenca by train is that the AVE train station for Cuenca is outside the town, requiring a bus or taxi into the center if you arrive by rail. Well, I guess there's a second potential issue. The express-train tickets can be very inexpensive if bought very early, but the cost can (and often does) escalate a lot if you aren't will to commit your money to a specific departure time on a specific date way in advance. You do need to take an express train to Cuenca, because the non-express trains take much, much longer.

You're trying to see places covering much of the length and breadth of a large country, which can lead to a highly rushed trip or a protracted period of one itinerary adjustment after another as you try to make the area covered fit the time available. I'd urge you to try to get the list of target cities down to a more manageable size sooner rather than later.

ou have 3 major cities on our list: Barcelona, Madrid and Seville. I'd start by digging into lists of sights in those cities plus nearby day trips you might want to take, to figure out how much time you'll need just for those three. Then you can subtract that total time from the 3 weeks you have available to see how many days you have left and begin to figure out what additional areas you can get to on this trip.

For me, Barcelona and Seville are both 4-night cities at a minimum, without any side trips. Madrid can vary a bit depending on how much time you anticipate spending in its art museums, but it has a lot of magnificent side trips--places fairly short train rides away but worth multiple nights if you had more time. In addition to the aforementioned Cuenca (much faster by train than by car), you have the even more important Toledo and Segovia. There are other day-trip options from Madrid, but I doubt you want to spend 8 of your nights in Madrid.

Barcelona has good side-trips, too (Girona's my favorite), and there's Zaragoza right between Barcelona and Madrid.

Cordoba can be a side trip from Seville if you must (it's on the way from Madrid to Seville by train), though it's worth an overnight or two or even three. It's both attractive and historically very important.

The other major omission from our itinerary is Granada (running from Barcelona through Zaragoza to Madrid, then Cordoba, then Seville.

I keep mentioning trains because along that Madrid-Seville line the trains are much, much faster than driving.

Since you obviously want to see some more off-the-beaten-path areas, you might consider covering only part of Spain's geography on this trip.

My wife and I thoroughly enjoyed Albarracín. There is a short walk around the base of the town that isn’t difficult. When coming into the village there is a pay parking lot by Monolito del Cid, before the tunnel. It’s by the beginning of the trail. Valladolid, to us, has no must see sights, so we’ve skipped visiting it. There’s nothing wrong with the city itself. On a side note, on two occasions we stayed in the small town of Tedula del Duero outside of Valladolid and both times it happened to be during its asparagus festival. Most everything in town was closed but we had an entire restaurant to ourselves.

When we plan trips to Spain now, I always look at the list of Spain’s prettiest towns to see if any are near where we’ll be. On our trip last year we stopped in Mogarraz and La Alberca.

There are places with stretches of open road. We try to stay off the interstate type roads and prefer the rural ones since they go through the small villages. Be aware that in the country’s interior many small towns are dying as people migrate towards the larger cities and coast. It isn’t uncommon to pass through almost completely deserted hamlets. Once you have a rough route I may be able to offer ideas for places to stop that we enjoyed since we’ve literally crisscrossed the country by car.

For lodging, we try to stay at Paradors if there’s one in the area we’ll be in. Many are in historic buildings and in small towns.