501 Places

Zaragoza has a tough time getting itself noticed. Almost halfway between Madrid and Barcelona, thousands of people on the high speed AVE trains pass through Zaragoza every day as they make their way between the two Spanish giants. Yet this city of 700,000 people registers on only a few tourists’ radars as they that pass [...]

Merida was intended as little more than an overnight stop. We were travelling eastwards from Lisbon; it was Easter Sunday and the transport connections, poor at the best of times between Portugal and Spain, could not be trusted to take us beyond Merida in a single day. Being such a major holiday we also decided [...]

It was entirely my fault. I had looked for a place to stop a few hours east of the Portuguese border. Ciudad Real immediately jumped out of the map at me. “Royal City”: it sounded promising. I further compounded my mistake with a quick search on Google images: a grand looking plaza, a few fine [...]

Oviedo had barely registered on my radar before my recent visit to the city. As a football anorak I did recall it being a venue during the 1982 World Cup in Spain. Beyond that I knew little about it. So when I was invited on a recent trip to Oviedo to attend the Turismo.as conference [...]

This week’s guest post is written by Juan Otero Rionda. I spent several days with Juan on my recent blog trip to Valencia, and during that time he described how he owns and manages a couple of rural guest houses in the beautiful countryside of Asturias in northern Spain. His passion for his home region [...]

If you asked most British people what they knew of Valencia, few would be able to shed much light on Spain’s third biggest city. Football supporters may have heard of its illustrious team for their occasional victories over English opponents, but beyond that? Even I, a person obsessed with maps and travel guides would have [...]