Things to do in Spain

Spain is less one country than half a dozen, and the first decision is which one you are going to. Barcelona anchors the northeast, with Montserrat an hour inland and the Costa Brava coves an hour up the coast. Madrid sits dead centre, close enough to Toledo, Segovia and Avila that any of them is an afternoon. Andalusia is the south: Seville, Cordoba and Granada form a triangle you can drive between breakfast and dinner, with Malaga, Nerja and the white villages of Ronda and Frigiliana below. Valencia and Alicante hold the east coast. Then the islands: Mallorca, with Palma, Valldemossa and Soller under the Tramuntana ridge; Ibiza and Formentera; and the Canaries — Tenerife, Gran Canaria, Lanzarote, Fuerteventura — closer to Africa than to Madrid, with a climate of their own.

Things to do in Spain sort themselves by appetite rather than by month. Monuments come first: the Alhambra, the Sagrada Familia, the Mezquita of Cordoba, the Alcazar of Seville — all better with someone who can explain them, and all busier than you expect. Food is the second reason and often overtakes the first: tapas routes that become dinner, cellars in Rioja and the Penedes, paella cooked where the rice grows, in the Albufera outside Valencia. The outdoors is coastal and volcanic rather than alpine: sailing out of Palma and Ibiza, the whale channel off southern Tenerife, Teide's crater under a sky dark enough for observatories. And what only works here: flamenco in a small Seville tablao, an evening that starts at ten.

Whatever you pick exists in two versions, and the difference is company rather than content: a place in a group — on the boat, on the coach to Montserrat — or the same day privately, with a guide who waits while you linger, at several times the price. Small groups of eight or ten sit between.

Practical. High-speed rail is what makes a two-city trip work: Madrid to Barcelona, or Madrid to Seville, is about two and a half hours centre to centre, while the islands are a flight rather than a day trip. Weather divides the country as sharply as geography — inland Andalusia passes 40C in July and August, so summer sightseeing happens early and late and the middle of the day is surrendered; the northern coast is green because it rains on it; the Canaries sit near 20C in January and run a winter high season. Money goes further here than in most of western Europe: a coffee at the bar is a euro or two, the set lunch menu runs twelve to fifteen with wine included, and a beer costs less than bottled water in a museum cafe. Tipping is not a system — round up, leave the coins, ten per cent only for something genuinely good. Fixed-fare taxis run from both Madrid and Barcelona airports into the centre for around thirty to forty euros; the metro does it quicker. Book the Alhambra and the Sagrada Familia before anything else. And reset your clock: lunch is at two, dinner rarely before nine, small-town shops still shut in the afternoon, and tours are built around all of it.