Category: Spain

Jerez de la Frontera

Jerez de la Frontera Walk through the old centre of Jerez de la Frontera on a warm afternoon and the air itself can smell faintly of wine, drifting from long whitewashed bodegas where sherry has been ageing in oak for generations. This Andalusian town gave its name to the drink, and the English word “sherry” […]

El Escorial, Spain

El Escorial, Spain About 45 kilometres northwest of Madrid, where the plain gives way to the pine-covered slopes of the Sierra de Guadarrama, a single grey granite building houses a monastery, a royal palace, a basilica, a library and the tombs of the Spanish kings. El Escorial was Philip II’s answer to a battle, a […]

Reina Sofía Museum, Madrid

Reina Sofía Museum, Madrid At the southern end of Madrid’s grand museum boulevard, a long eighteenth-century hospital begun under Charles III now holds what may be the most famous painting of the twentieth century. The Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, Spain’s national museum of modern and contemporary art, is where Picasso’s Guernica hangs, surrounded by […]

Royal Palace, Madrid

Royal Palace, Madrid On Christmas Eve 1734 a fire broke out in the old Alcázar of Madrid, the fortress-palace where Spain’s Habsburg kings had ruled an empire, and by the time it burned out three days later more than five hundred paintings from the royal collection had been lost. What rose on the same ridge […]

Park Guell in Barcelona: Gaudi’s Hilltop Garden, and How to Visit It Comfortably

From the long, curving mosaic bench at the heart of Park Güell, Barcelona spreads out below you all the way to the sea, and it is easy to forget that this playful place was meant to be a housing estate for the city’s rich. Antoni Gaudí’s hilltop garden is one of the most enjoyable sights […]

The Prado Museum in Madrid: Masterpieces Worth Slowing Down For

The Prado Museum in Madrid: Masterpieces Worth Slowing Down For The Prado Museum in Madrid holds one of the great collections of European painting, gathered over three centuries by the kings of Spain, and it is easy to come away from it exhausted, having seen everything and remembered little. The answer is to see less, […]

The Alcazar of Seville: Gardens, Palaces and Practical Tips

The Alcazar of Seville: Gardens, Palaces and Practical Tips Step through the Lion Gate off the Plaza del Triunfo and a thousand years of Seville open up behind one wall: a Moorish courtyard, a Gothic hall, a Christian king’s palace built by craftsmen trained in Muslim Granada, and gardens of orange trees and pools that […]

The Alhambra in Granada: Visiting the Nasrid Palaces and Generalife Gardens

The Alhambra in Granada: Visiting the Nasrid Palaces and Generalife Gardens Seen from the Albayzín at dusk, the Alhambra looks less like a building than a ridge that has turned to stone, its red walls glowing above the cypresses with the snow of the Sierra Nevada behind. Up close, it is something else again: a […]

Avila, Spain: Walking the Medieval City Walls

Avila, Spain: Walking the Medieval City Walls Few towns announce themselves as plainly as Ávila, Spain. Approach across the high plain of Castile and the first thing you see is the wall: a granite ring more than two and a half kilometres around, studded with rounded towers and almost entirely intact, enclosing the old city […]

Tapas, Port and Sherry: Food and Wine Across an Iberian Journey

Tapas, Port and Sherry: Food and Wine Across an Iberian Journey Porto and the Douro at golden hour — one of three distinct food and wine traditions on a route through Spain and Portugal. Travel far enough across the Iberian Peninsula and the food changes as often as the architecture does. In Madrid, the evening […]

Seville, Jerez and Cádiz: An Andalucía Itinerary

Seville, Jerez de la Frontera and Cádiz sit within roughly ninety minutes’ drive of one another, yet each pulls at a different thread of the same Andalusian story. Seville carries the formal weight of Golden Age wealth; Jerez holds the sherry houses and stable yards that turned agriculture into international trade; Cádiz, the oldest of […]

Córdoba to Granada: Tracing Al-Andalus in Southern Spain

Córdoba to Granada: Tracing Al-Andalus in Southern Spain The Alhambra seen from the Albaicín at dusk — the old Nasrid capital’s final and most enduring vantage point. Two cities, roughly three hours apart by road, hold most of what remains visible of eight centuries of Islamic rule in Spain. Córdoba was once the seat of […]

Moorish Architecture in Spain: Reading Córdoba, Seville and Granada

The Alhambra above Granada — the final chapter in a story that begins in Córdoba. Three buildings, three cities, one continuous story. The Mezquita in Córdoba, the Alcázar in Seville and the Alhambra in Granada were not built as a matched set — they span more than five centuries and several different rulers, some Muslim […]

Spain and Portugal Travel: A 24-Day Preparation Guide

The approach to the Alhambra involves sustained walking on gravel and uneven stone — a fair test of the tour’s Level 2 activity rating. Twenty-four days across two countries sounds ambitious on paper — a route that runs from Gaudí’s Barcelona to the Alhambra’s honeyed stone, with Lisbon’s river light somewhere in the middle. In […]

Mérida, Spain’s Roman Ruins: Inside Ancient Emerita Augusta

The two-tiered marble stage backdrop of the Roman Theatre, built between 16 and 15 BC, still hosts performances each summer. Long before Madrid existed as anything more than a fortified outpost, Emerita Augusta stood as the capital of an entire Roman province, its theatre seating six thousand spectators and its aqueducts still striding across the […]

Toledo Day Trip from Madrid: Spain’s City of Three Cultures

Toledo’s old town, wrapped almost entirely by a bend in the Tagus River, with the Cathedral and Alcázar anchoring the skyline. Forty-five minutes from Madrid by high-speed train, the medieval streets of Toledo climb a granite outcrop wrapped almost entirely by a bend in the Tagus River — a defensive position so complete that the […]

Salamanca, Spain: University City and Gateway to Portugal

Salamanca, Spain: University City and Gateway to Portugal Salamanca’s Roman Bridge spans the Tormes River, with the city’s cathedral skyline rising behind it. Salamanca announces itself in colour. Its sandstone buildings turn amber and gold as the afternoon light lengthens across the Plaza Mayor, a hue so distinctive that Spaniards call the city la Dorada […]

Salamanca to Lisbon: Crossing the Spain–Portugal Border

Salamanca’s Roman Bridge and cathedral skyline on the Tormes River, the starting point of this crossing into Portugal. A Salamanca to Lisbon itinerary is one of the more overlooked stretches of Iberian travel, mostly because guidebooks tend to treat Spain and Portugal as two separate trips joined by a border crossing to get through quickly. […]

Spain and Portugal Itinerary: Barcelona to Granada in 24 Days

Spain and Portugal Itinerary: Barcelona to Granada in 24 Days Spain and Portugal are usually sold as two separate holidays, yet neither country’s history makes complete sense without the other. Their royal houses intermarried, warred and signed treaties with one another for six centuries. Their empires raced each other across the same oceans and drew […]

Spain and Portugal Tours: A Guide to the Journey

Spain and Portugal Tours: A Guide to the Journey The Alhambra and Generalife above Granada, the final stop on the 24-day route from Barcelona. The word Iberia covers two countries that spent centuries defining themselves against each other, and a well-built itinerary treats that tension as the point rather than a logistical inconvenience. A tour […]

The Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao: A Modern Landmark on a Spain Journey

The Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao: A Modern Landmark on a Spain Journey Most of the buildings on a Spain and Portugal itinerary are older than the nations that now claim them — Roman theatres, Gothic cathedrals, Moorish palaces built and rebuilt across a thousand years. The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is barely three decades old, and that […]