Pre-departure
The travelers; Married couple in late fifties, early sixties. Our first time in Spain! Initially I had planned 5 nights in Seville, but during my research I discovered this hike called the Caminito del Rey and immediately thought, I have to do it!
EditedA shout out to CWSocial on this forum, who had been to Andalucia in November and was very helpful in planning this trip.
Our itinerary;
Arrive Malaga
El Chorro (1 night)
Seville (4 nights)
Cordoba (3 nights)
Granada (4 nights)
Ronda (2 nights)
Malaga (1 night)
Depart Malaga
I will cover the following in this trip report; Cities & Sites, Food, Accommodations, Transportation, Final Thoughts
Cities & Sites
El Caminito del Rey-We left Malaga upon arrival at the airport via private transfer with Daytrip.com It was about an 1 hour drive to El Chorro where we spent the night at La Garganta hotel. The next morning we had purchased advance tickets to hike the Caminito del Rey, a cliff walk along a steep gorge. We had to take a shuttle bus from our hotel to get to the start of the hike. There are several ticket options, we chose the unguided ticket and were glad with this choice. I actually don’t like heights, but since there was a railing, I knew I would be fine and I was. This was just amazing! It was a highlight of our trip to Spain and not a hard hike. Easy! There were people in their 80’s doing it. It took us about two hours and after we were done, we ended up right at our hotel. Highly, highly recommend.
Seville-We stayed at Hotel Amadeus, which is just a few blocks from the Seville Cathedral. We started off by going to Las Setas or ‘the Mushroom” as it is affectionately called by the locals. Largest wooden structure in the world. We bought tickets to tour the top and enjoyed seeing it all lit up at night and after there was a 15 min movie on Seville that we enjoyed.
Seville Cathedral-We had advance tickets for the english tour of the Cathedral roof tops. We got to learn a lot about the building of this cathedral, the largest one in Spain and go where other tourists don’t get to go. Afterwards we were able to tour the rest of the cathedral at our leisure and see Christopher Columbus’s tomb. I definitely recommend doing this.
Royal Alcazar-We had purchased timed advance tickets for the royal apartments and enjoyed doing this tour. They have an English audio guide and a guard shows you the way around. You must put all your gear in a locker. We thought it was very good and recommend. Then we toured the gardens on our own and loved this. Peacocks flying around, tons of great bird sounds, we spent at least two hours here.
We also did the Rick Steves audio guided walk today. We love his audio guides and always do them if there is one in the city we are visiting.
Our last day in Seville we had no plans! There was a marathon going through the city, so we watched the runners for a while and then walked along the river and crossed the bridge to the Triana area where we wandered some more. We decided to do one of the river cruises, it’s one hour. It was fine, but not a must do. We had so enjoyed our river cruise on the Thames in London, but this is NOT that! Lol!
That evening, we had tickets at the Flamenco museum for their Flamenco show. The museum is ok, we were not too impressed, but the show, holy cow, fantastic! Highly recommend.
Cordoba-We arrived in Cordoba in the late afternoon and took the bus to our hotel Balcon de Cordoba. We had time to tour some of the patios for which the town is known for. We went into about 5 of them that were free, there were others, but you had to buy tickets and we decided not to. We wandered around, crossed the very cool bridge and went into the Museum of Andalucia, which is a small museum on, you guessed it, the history of Andalucia.