Rough Guides - The Rough Guide to Spain

This Rough Guide is one of a new generation of informative and easy-to-use travel-guide ebooks that guarantees you make the most of your trip. An essential tool for pre-trip planning, it also makes a great travel companion when youre on the road.

From the section.

Detailed area maps feature in the guide chapters and are also listed in the , accessible from the table of contents. Depending on your hardware, you can double-tap on the maps to see larger-scale versions, or select different scales. The screen-lock function on your device is recommended when viewing enlarged maps. Make sure you have the latest software updates, too.

Throughout the guide, weve flagged up our favourite places a perfectly sited hotel, an atmospheric caf, a special restaurant with the author pick icon . You can select your own favourites and create a personalized itinerary by bookmarking the sights, venues and activities that are of interest, giving you the quickest possible access to everything youll need for your time away.

City walls, vila

First-time visitors be warned: Spain is addictive. You might book a city break, villa holiday or hiking trip, but soon youll find yourself distracted by something quite different swept up in the excitement of a fiesta, hooked on the local cuisine, or stunned by Barcelonas otherworldly architecture. Even in the best-known destinations from Madrid to the costas , from the high Pyrenees to the Moorish cities of the south there are genuinely surprising attractions at every turn, whether that be cool restaurants in the Basque country, the wild landscapes of the central plains, or cutting-edge galleries in the industrial north. Soon, youll notice that there is not just one Spain but many and indeed, Spaniards themselves often speak of Las Espaas (the Spains).

This diversity is partly down to an almost obsessive regionalism, stemming from the creation in the late 1970s of seventeen comunidades autonomas (autonomous regions) with their own governments, budgets and cultural ministries, even police forces. You might think you are on holiday in Spain but your hosts are more likely to be adamant that youre actually visiting Catalunya, and will point to a whole range of differences in language, culture and artistic traditions, not to mention social attitudes and politics. Indeed, the old days of a unified nation, governed with a firm hand from Madrid, seem to have gone forever, as the separate kingdoms that made up the original Spanish state reassert themselves in an essentially federal structure.

Does any of this matter for visitors? As a rule not really, since few tourists have the time or inclination to immerse themselves in contemporary Spanish political discourse. Far more important is to look beyond the clichs of paella, matadors, sangra and siesta if youre to get the best out of a visit to this amazingly diverse country.

Even in the most over-touristed resorts of the Costa del Sol, youll be able to find an authentic bar or restaurant where the locals eat, and a village not far away where an age-old bullfighting tradition owes nothing to tourism. The large cities of the north, from Barcelona to Bilbao, have reinvented themselves as essential cultural destinations (and they dont all close down for hours for a kip every afternoon). And now that the world looks to Spain for culinary inspiration the country has some of the most acclaimed chefs and innovative restaurants in the world its clear that things have changed. Spain, despite some lingering economic uncertainty, sees itself very differently from a generation ago. So should you prepare to be surprised.

Right Parque Nacional de Ordesa y Monte Perdido, Aragn