Athens
Madeleine
Spain is one of hers. She’s the one to call for group travel — reunions, milestones, friends going together — and she’s backpacked Europe herself.
Spain isn’t one country so much as several that happen to share a passport.
Andalusia and the Basque Country have different food, different landscape, and — locals will tell you — different temperaments entirely. Catalonia is different again. Which is good news: it means a second trip to Spain feels nothing like the first, and a third still has somewhere to go.
For a first visit we usually pair one great city with one region you can slow down in. Barcelona and the Costa Brava. Madrid and Andalusia. Bilbao and the Rioja vineyards an hour south. The trick is not trying to link all three by train in ten days.
Where to go
Three places worth building a trip around
Great cities, inland towns, and coastline — Spain has more of each than most countries twice its size.
Barcelona
Cosmopolitan and coastal
The old town and the avant-garde neighborhoods sit side by side, with the Mediterranean at the end of the street. One of the world’s most visited cities, and one of the few that survives the crowds intact.
Andalusia
The Spain people picture
The Alhambra at Granada, flamenco in Seville, and white villages strung across the hills. Málaga makes a good base, and the climate means it works nearly year-round.
Basque Country & La Rioja
For the eating
San Sebastián has more Michelin stars per resident than almost anywhere on earth, and the pintxos bars are better than the restaurants. La Rioja’s vineyards are an hour away.
Endless ways to experience it
What kind of Spain are you after?
Food and wine
Pintxos crawls in San Sebastián, paella where it was invented, Rioja and Ribera del Duero. Tell us how you like to eat and we’ll route around it.
Art and architecture
The Prado, the Guggenheim Bilbao, Gaudí across Barcelona, and the Alhambra — which people routinely call the best thing they’ve seen in Europe.
Beaches and islands
The Costa Brava, the Balearics, and the Canaries — volcanic, subtropical, and warm in February.
Active and outdoors
The Camino de Santiago, the Pyrenees, surfing on the north coast, and golf courses along the south.
Fiestas and festivals
Las Fallas in Valencia, San Fermín in Pamplona, Semana Santa in Seville. Worth planning a trip around — or deliberately avoiding.
Sunshine
Close to 3,000 hours of it a year. If the goal is to leave the coat at home, Spain is the reliable answer.
Who you’ll work with
Pick the office nearest you.
All four of our advisors plan Spain. Which one you work with is usually just a question of which office you’d rather walk into.
Dunwoody
Leslie
Planning trips since 1990 and deepest in Italy, Greece, France, and Ireland. Ask her about the history nobody told you to look for.
Dunwoody
Steve
Left a career as a chiropractor for a year-long trip around the world, and came back to help other people take theirs.
Tuscaloosa
Stella
Spain is one of her soft spots. She builds trips around local life — markets, long meals, the streets past the checklist.
Go deeper
More on Spain
Region guides, hotels, and current offers — kept up to date through our relationships with colleagues around the world.
Ready when you are.
Tell us roughly what you have in mind and we’ll take it from there.
