Getting Around

There are a lot of opinions online of whether to rent a car while doing our (fairly standard) loop. We chose not to, because they are impractical in all of Seville, Malaga, Granada, and Cordoba, although of course they would have been helpful elsewhere.

Trains work great for some routes. We took the fast trains from Madrid to Cordoba, from Cordoba to Granada, and from Seville to Madrid. One tip we got is to use raileurope to book RENFE (the Spanish national train) lines, because the RENFE website is difficult to navigate. We also used a new company Iryo for one of these 3 trains — not because it’s necessarily better (we didn’t see a big difference between the “business class” of RENFE and Iryo) but because the schedule worked just a bit better for us. Spanish trains in general seemed a great experience, and in a way we wish we’d used them more. (Editors note: I wrote this just before a January 2026 partial derailment of an Iryo that then collided with an oncoming RENFE train … on a track that we almost certainly passed through just 8 weeks before. Gulp).

The fast trains don’t service some of our routes well. We wanted to do “quick” visits to some of the Pueblos Blancos (white villages) of Andalucia. These are often hill towns, and often small with parking lots a mile outside of the main square, but also off the main train routes. We had chosen to visit Ronda for a night (more in the Pueblos Blancos section), which is off the train route. That got us looking for a company that does car services from one town to another, and we found daytrip.com, which has existed for years and serves 120 countries but for some reason we had not previously discovered. We used daytrip 3 times — from Granada to Malaga (serviced by train, but with a connection), from Malaga to Ronda, and from Ronda to Seville. It’s not exactly a budget option, but in each case we got door to door service. More importantly for us, having a car allowed us to see a lot that we would not have seen otherwise. If (for example) you book the 1.5 hour daytrip from Granada to Malaga, the daytrip website gives the option of one of 6 stops along the way, each from 1–3 hours, and each for an additional $100 or so. In that case, we chose Antequera — but for each of the 3 “daytrips” we saw some small towns along the way that made our trip far richer.

Time of Year

We did this trip October 21 through November 6 and thoroughly were happy with it. Southern Spain can get hot; Seville has the reputation of being one of the, if not the, hottest major city in Europe. We back-loaded Seville and it was lovely, we were told it had been high 80s just 2 weeks before we arrived. Generally we had 70s highs in the afternoon, except for Madrid which is far cooler as it’s north of a mountain range and at elevation — totally different weather profile than Andalucia.

While the crowds at the major “spots” (Mezquita, Alhambra, etc) were certainly not “thin”, we’re told it’s far worse closer to summer. Like pretty much any European destination, shoulder seasons are the way to go, it just happens that the fall shoulder season in Andalucia is weeks later than most of Europe.

Food

As we said elsewhere, as much as we love Jamon Iberico, we did find that, at least in restaurants near tourist areas, that most restaurants had very similar menus to the point of some monotony. We found mixing it up with some Italian food (great everywhere in Europe) or even some Asian fusion spots (lots of excellent sushi so near the sea) made for some great respites.

Tinto e Verano

Reading List

Kevin highly recommends “Ghosts of Spain” (Goodreads). It’s written by a British journalist who spent much of the 1990s and 2000s living in Seville, visiting Spain soon after Franco’s death. It’s good to be reminded of how important 40 years of fascist dictatorship was/is to what modern Spain is like. Very readable and enjoyable, if now feeling a bit dated (written circa 2005).