Guidebooks to Andalucia
Michelin Green Guide Andalucia $21.95
Perhaps the most comprehensive guidebook to the region with amazing details about sights and towns. The maps allow visitors to plan their touring and not miss the top sights and natural areas. This guidebook provides good overall history and background about the region, but is basic when discussing the individual sights and villages. The hotel and restaurant recommendations are very limited.
Michelin Red Guide 2008 Espana & Portugal $26.00
This is my bread-and-butter guidebook when I travel. No other guide provides the indepth hotel and restaurant content. There is no tourist information regarding sights or history – this is strictly hotels and restaurants. The book is priceless. Its research is almost always right on accurate. They do their homework. I love eating while traveling. The Michelin Red Guides have been my bible when searching for a wonderful place to dine and good accommodations. The listings come with accurate phone numbers, locater maps for larger cities and a brief description of the establishment.
Rick Steves’ Spain $21.95
The cities included in Rick Steves’ Spain are limited to the most touristy, but that is where most Americans travel. What Rick covers, he covers well with humor and good surprising detail. His Andalucian coverage is excellent with in-depth information about Seville, Granada, Arcos, Ronda, Jerez, Gibraltar and Nerja. His hotel and restaurant recommendations are quite good. The only problem is that at breakfast in a Rick Steves recommended hotel it seems that every other tourist at the hotel is reading their Rich Steves’ guidebook planning their day.
The Rough Guide to Andalucia $19.99
If you can only take one guidebook, this would be the one. The coverage of Andalucia is extensive with lots of history and interesting insights. I always learn something new when I use this guide. The authors of this guide, Geoff Garvey and Mark Ellingham really did their research. The guidebook even includes a reading list of books about Andalucia.
Seville & Andalusia (Eyewitness Travel Guides) $20.00
These are fabulously illustrated guidebooks that are exceptional to use while planning a trip and dreaming about where to aim your travels. However, they are heavy and without real useful details when it comes to lugging them around while on the road. I often enjoyed looking at the illustrations more after I returned from Spain than while I was there. Every so often, there is an insight that other guidebooks mention, but I wouldn’t carry it with me. The short historic descriptions play second fiddle to the photos and drawings. No hotel or restaurant suggestions. In looking through Amazon.com it seems that this book is out of print, however there are plenty of used and remainder copies available.
Moon Handbooks Spain $24.95
A dramatic effort for such a general country guidebook! However, Spain is far too varied with too much to see to pack it into a single book without focusing on only a few cities and short-changing the peninsula. Candy Le LaBalle bites off a bit too much and the destination coverage is uneven. Pamplona coverage is as good as any I have seen in a guidebook but Granada and Seville coverage seems thin.
Fodor’s Spain 2008 $22.95
Once again, this is a country-wide book without enough detail to really do justice to Spain. The Pamplona coverage is so sketchy, it is just about useless — the sights are minimal; the hotel recommended has seen better days; and of the restaurants, Josetxo is the most expensive in town and overly affected, Erburu is under new ownership for several years and avoided by locals, and the last, Casa Otano, is still a good place to dine. The coverage of Cordoba and Seville is factual, but without passion. This book will point you in the right direction, but any real tourist will want far more history, sights and inside information.
Fodor’s See It™ Spain $24.95
This appears to be the Fodor’s version of the colorful Eyewitness Guides — lots of pretty color photos and maps. The guidebook’s organization is a giant pain to navigate. Rather than grouping all of the information for cities in one place, Fodor’s editors decided to split the book into four sections – sights, what to do, walks and tours, and eating and staying. Each section is presented by region and by city. A reader has to flip to four different areas of the guidebook to gather information about a single city. The best section of the book is “walks and tours” that presents a collection of interesting and unusual Spanish itineraries by foot and by car. These pages could be a mini-guide. “Sights” is well done but fairly limited. “What to do” is almost indecipherable. “Eating and staying” is a collection of randomly selected hotels and restaurants seemingly without any rhyme or reason. More often than not, only one restaurant or hotel is mentioned — some upscale, some moderate with no consistency that I could see.
I will be adding to this list as soon as I receive and go through several additional guides.
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