Andalucia in March

Hi Kristen, Your best bet would be to go to the following website, where they have a "Trip Planner" section and you can put in a location, the approximate dates you will be there (up to 14 days, I think), and it'll come back to you with an average of what the weather has been like the past 12 years or so. http://www.wunderground.com/tripplanner/index.asp Anecdotally, I was in Andalucia in March 2009 and the weather was gorgeous (then again, we were coming out of winter in Chicago!). I seem to recall the temps being in the 70s during the day, but it cooled off at night. Even though the weather was great, the even better part was that several flowers/shrubs/trees were starting to flower throughout the entire region - everywhere smelled similar to lilacs!

Angela, Thank you so much for the tip on weather underground! It's a great resource. Your experience in Andalucia sounded excellent. I was concerned about the flora at that time of year, so it's nice to hear that there were lots coming into bloom. I hope I can pick your brain a bit as we do our planning. I'm hoping to be able to fly into Madrid, hop onto one of those fast trains down to the region and then use public transportation to get around. Can you tell me how you traveled and what cities/sights you would consider "must sees" in a 9-10 day trip? Thanks.

Before I steer you too wrong regarding the flowery smells, I just looked at the dates we were in Andalucia and it was later in March (roughly the 22-28). I hope they are blooming in early March, too... For that trip, we had flown from Barcelona to Granada, stayed a few days, then rented a car and took a couple days to drive through the white hill towns (with a pit stop in Gibraltar). We ended the car portion in Sevilla, where we resumed train travel for the rest of the trip (to Cordoba, Toledo, and Madrid). We really liked having the car for the interior of Andalucia (the white hill town area). The roads are narrow, windy, and hilly, with beautiful vistas where we'd pull over often and just admire the view of the vast green landscape dotted with stark white hill towns. As for my personal must-see list for the region, well, we really liked Sevilla (the orange trees were in bloom, again giving off a fantastic scent), I loved the Mezquita in Cordoba, and, as mentioned above, we both loved stopping in random white hill towns for a look around (we both wish we'd spent a lot more time in the area). We had overnighted in Ronda, which is one of the larger (or largest?) white hill towns, and the town is set on top of a large gorge that is pretty cool. I also got quite a kick out of the monkeys at Gibraltar, although my husband was less enchanted by them. There is a lot more I wish we had seen, and with 9-10 days you could cover a lot of ground, from the sea to the interior. And hope those flowers are in bloom!