Blessed with a few days off and a good friend working as a tour guide in the south of Spain, we packed our bags for a few days of fun in the sun. As you might guess from the map, Spain (the yellow part) is a little too big to see everything in nine days. For some sense of scale: the distance between Santander and Malaga is about 1000km. Because we were based near Malaga, we decided to travel a bit of Andalucía (the blue part). Keep reading and maybe you will feel like you were also there! Our travel route took us from the coast into Malaga, Ronda, Sevilla & Granada and back to the coast. 

Of course all the impressions on this website are purely personal. Don't let it keep you from finding out yourself. After all, that is the main goal of visiting other countries.

People - When reading one of the tour books, we found a very apt description of the natives - they are "economical with etiquette". Customer service does not seem to be very important here as we never got so much as a direct look or a smile when shopping. The few Spainards that did smile when talking to us, talked non-stop, regardless if we understood them or not. There is surprisingly little English spoken by the natives, especially considering we were in some highly touristy places.

As in most southern Europe countries, family life is still important. Seeing (and hearing) large groups of people of all ages at the beach is a very common sight.

Land - The landscape is beautiful, and quite varied. We expected to see beaches and old buildings, so were pleasantly surprised when we found we were just a short drive from the Sierra Nevada mountain range. We started our trip in Torremolinos (courtesy of a travel guide: "Torremolinos is a concrete continuum designed to squeeze as many paying customers as possible into the smallest conceivable area"). A kind of European Miami Beach. Not the ideal place to get away from the crowds, but a very central place on the Mediterranean Sea to make trips around the South of Spain. We could even see Gibraltar and Africa from there!

General Impressions - The beach was a bit surprising. Whenever thinking of the Mediterranean Sea, we thought of warm blue waters. Perhaps living on the Pacific Ocean has spoiled us, but it did not live up to our expectations. The sand was very hot - much too hot to walk on without shoes, and the water, in contrast seemed extremely cold. However, the pool at our friend's apartment was just the right temperature to cool off in every evening! Away from the beach, Andalucía is beautiful. We only could spend 9 days looking around, but there is enough there to spent a few more weeks. Just try to visit in the spring or autumn, when the temperatures are a bit more fit to walk around and visit sites.

The currency is the Peseta (abbreviations: Pts). At the moment 100 Pesetas are equal to 1 Can$. As Spain is a member of the part of the European Union that is going to introduce the Euro in 2002, the exchange rate to a lot of European countries (not England!) is fixed.

Voltage is 220V AC. It seems that a pretty common European kind of plug is used, but this could be different in smaller places.

The weather is hot for a long period in the summer. July and August are the driest months with almost no rain. Temperatures reach up to 30-35 Celsius (F = C*9/5 + 32). In winter you can call the area cold....if you're a Spaniard. When you're from Holland or Nova Scotia (considering the comparative size of these two parts of the world, it seems right to talk about a country and a province), a whopping 10 to 15 Celsius is a heat wave. Not if you're living in Andalucia.

Costa del Sol (Torremolinos, Malaga, Mijas)

The Costa del Sol was one of the first areas in Spain to be swamped by tourism from northern Europe (English, Germans, Dutch). High rise buildings, expensive mediocre food (the ever-popular English style breakfast), people in bathing suites who shouldn't be etc. Torremolinos is the best example of how it shouldn't be done. The one advantage was that our friend is living there as a tour guide, which meant free accommodation, loads of tips for trips and cheap deals on hotels and car.

The second day of our trip we went to see nearby Malaga, one of the many cities in Andalucía that thrived during the occupation by the Moors from the 8th until the 15th century. Compared to the plump Roman building styles in Western Europe at that time, the Moors were sophisticated architects who have left a lot of beauty in the region.

We found out that it is not necessarily only the 7th day you can rest, so we spent the third day on the beach. Doing nothing. This was to prepare for our four days with a car, of which the first day took us to Granada, home of the Alhambra. During this trip we also briefly visited the Sierra Nevada, the highest mountain range in Spain.

The second car day took us up into the mountains behind Malaga. As in many countries where the beach, disco's and getting drunk seem to be the main attractions, this proved to be a beautiful experience. Mountains, lakes, old cities; it's all there when you go touring around to the El Chorro/Ronda area.