Spain Holidays

Ships in Malaga Harbour, Sept 2004

Photos of Barcelona

Hotels in Barcelona  - Great value and easy to use hotel bookings for Barcelona in Spain.

Barcelona travel information - excellent travel guide to Barcelona from In-Spain.info.

The Works of Antoni Gaudi in Spain
Antoni Gaudi is my favourite architect. His organic, fluid forms that characterize his work are both easy on the eye and require thorough attention. The majority of his works in Spain are in Barcelona, and are all thoroughly worth a visit.

Car hire in Spain - for cheap car hire in locations all over spain, try Buzz Car Hire.

Hotel Accommodation in Spain

Spain Hotels

Spain is the third most popular tourist country in the world, and its not hard to see why. Every region is Spain has it's own flavour and you can find hotels all over Spain here!

• Barcelona Hotels
• Madrid Hotels
• Marbella Hotels
• San Sebastian Hotels
• Seville Hotels

Andorra Hotels
Gibraltar Hotels

About Buzz Hotels

Buzz Hotels is opertaed by Tourizm - a UK based company specialising   in travel and tourism services. All hotel bookings are carried out with our   partner - Active Hotels.

Active Hotels is one of Europe’s leading online reservation providers   to the hotel industry. The company has over 5,000 hotels, which it promotes   across 1,500 websites, including many of the market leaders in online travel.   We currently sell over 1.7 million hotel room nights per year.

Active Hotels offers the best choice of hotels and room prices available across Europe. Our coverage ranges from B&Bs and guesthouses to 5-star quality leisure and corporate hotels in the major European capitals as well as other popular regions throughout Europe. By promoting these hotels through our distribution network, we give each of our hotels visibility to over 2 million Internet users each month.

You can contact Tourizm at [email protected]

 

Dining in Spain

Spanish are very passionate about their food and wine and Spanish cuisine is home of the world famous Paella. Spanish food can be described as quiet light with a lot of vegetable and huge variety of meat and fish. The Spanish cuisine does not use many spices relies only on the use of high quality ingredients to give a good taste.

Bars and fast food in Spain

The entry level to Spanish food is found in bars. Often you find a variety of different tapas and bars often specialize on some tapas. A Spanish custom is to have one tapa and one small drink and then go to the next bar and do the same. Tourists are easily spotted when they load their plates full of tapas. Fast food has not yet established a strong grip on the Spaniards and you will find McDonalds and BB only in bigger towns in the usual places. Pizza is increasingly popular and you will find some outlets in bigger towns as well.

Restaurants in Spain

Restaurants deliver a wide range of food and in coastal areas seafood deserves some attention, especially in the north Atlantic coast. Spanish are very concerned about the freshness of seafood and it can happen that you place a order and the waiter tells you that he can not serve this dish, because they did not receive this particular seafood freshly on the day. It is very unlikely to find dishes that had been prepared from frozen fish in real Spanish restaurant. Obviously so much freshness has its toll and seafood is quite pricy. Meat products are usually of very good quality, because Spain had maintained a quiet high percentage of free range animal. A speciality is "jamon iberico" from free range pigs.

Service in Spain

Despite the good food the service in Spain is often lousy and waiters seem to be not very skilled in their profession or least they are not bothered about anything. Double that for touristy place, when you are a foreigner, and / or you are not fluent in Spanish.

Tipping in Spain

A little tip is common and you are free to increase that if you are very pleased, but obviously you don’t have to tip a lousy waiter. Large tips are uncommon and are not expected. You would typically leave the small change after paying with a note.

Special offers

Many restaurants offer a lunch time menu for a fixed price and this often works out as a bargain. It is quiet common that water and wines are included in the fixed deal.

Lunch and dinner times in Spain

Spaniards have a slightly different timetable than most people are used to: the main lunch time starts at around 2 pm and is then followed by the traditional siesta time. Dinnertime starts at around 10 pm so don’t surprised that a restaurant looks completely deserted at 8 pm. 

Touristy places in Spain

Typical Spanish food can be found all over the country, however top tourist destinations such as Costa Brava and Costa del Sol have turned all existing traditions upside down. Meaning that drinks are generally more expensive (about double) and it is difficult to find proper Spanish food in the tourist centres. However you will get Schnitzel, original English breakfast, Pizza, Doner, frozen fish and all the good things that modern society has invented to supersize you.

However, if you are prepared to look a little harder then even in the busiest tourist towns, you can find some exeptional traditional Spanish restaurants. If you are on the coast then think fish and seafood and you wont be dissappointed.

Spanish dishes

Typical dishes are:

• “Calamares en su tinta”:
• “Chorizo”: Spains most popular sausage is made from pig meat, ham, salt, garlic and pepper and is produced in multitude of varieties, in different sizes, shapes, short and long, spicy, in all different shades of red, soft, air dried and hard or smoked.
• “Fabada asturiana”: bean stew from Asturias
• “Gambas pil pil”: little prawn with garlic and chilli
• “Gazpacho Andaluz”: cold vegetable soup
• “ Merluza a la Vizcaina” : Spanish are not very of sauces, one of the few exception is merluza a la Vasca in this case the fish is prepared with white asparagus and green peas.
• “Morcilla” - sausages made from pig blood flavoured with anise, it comes as a fresh, smoked or air dried variety.   
• “Aceitunas, Olivas”: often served for nibbling, is the fruit of olive tree.
• “Paella”: famous rice dish originally from Valencia and now eaten all over Spain.   
• “Pimientos rellenos”: filled peppers stuffed with minced meat or seafood, whatever version you on a Menu the peppers in Spain taste different from all other peppers in Europe.
• “Potaje de espinacas y garbanzos”: chick pea stew with spinach
• “Tortilla de patatas”: probably the most popular dish in Spain. You can easily assess how good a restaurant is by having a small peace of “Tortilla de patatas”.
• “Rabo de toro”: Oxtail is very famous dish in Spain, obviously there is loads of them available after a bull fight.

Originally published on wikitravel.org

Photos of Salamanca

If you want to see these beautiful buildings in Salamanca yourself, please try this website for hotels in salamanca .

You can find more photos of spain here.

Welcome to Spain!

Spain is more than bullfights, flamenco dancers and crowded beaches. It's a spectacular and diverse country, the north resembling the rolling, green hills of Ireland and the south giving you a taste of Moroccan landscapes and architecture. Its tremendous history is reflected in its prehistoric cave paintings, Moorish palaces, crumbling castles, Roman ruins, Gothic and Renaissance cathedrals as well as some very unique modern architecture. The uniqueness of Spain lies in the separate kingdoms which made up the original Spanish nation. These regions remain diverse in their language, culture, cuisine and art. These regions include: Andalucía, Aragon, Asturias, Basque Country, the Balearic Islands, the Canary Islands, Cantabria, Castilla La Mancha, Castilla León, Catalonia, Extremadura, Galicia, La Rioja, Madrid, Murcia, Navarra and Valencia. Areas of interest are not limited to each region, here are some highlights:

The Moorish influence (the Moors from Morocco were the dominating civilization for 800 years) in Andalucía can be seen in the sumptuous Alhambra palace in Granada, the mezquita , a former mosque in Córdoba and the Alcázar and Giralda tower in Sevilla. The White villages are hidden joys, as the small villages surrounded by natural beauty can not fail to impress.

Remarkable Christian monuments, from Romanesque to contemporary, can be found throughout Spain. A possible tour to the most fantastic cathedrals will take you through Toledo, León,    Salamanca, Burgos and Segovia. The pilgrim route to Santiago is lined by gorgeous Romanesque churches.      

Excellent and quiet beaches can be found near Cádiz and Almería in the south as well as near the coasts of Galicia, Asturias, Cantabria and Euskadi. If you enjoy extremely developed resort towns, there are plenty of crowded beaches on the Costa de la Luz and the Costa del sol.

Fantastically preserved medieval towns are places not to miss and Toledo should be at the top of the list.    Toledo is the capital of medieval Spain, at its best, with synagogues, an incredible cathedral and former mosques. Other interesting medieval towns include: Baeza and Úbeda (Andalucía), Ciudad Rodrigo (Salamanca), Trujillo and Cáceres (Extremadura), Albarracín, Sos del Rey Católico and Teruel Mudejar's Unesco's World Heritage (Aragon), and Santillana del Mar (Cantabria).      

The most spectacular Roman sites are based in Mérida, where you can also find an interesting museum on Roman era. There is also a remarkable aqueduct in Segovia and other fascinating Roman ruins in Carmona, Tarragona, Empuries, Italica and Caesaraugusta ( Zaragoza,    Aragon).      

Very unique modern art and architecture can be found in Barcelona and Madrid. The visionary architecture of Antoni Gaudí and the Picasso museum are in Barcelona while Madrid is home to Spain’s top three art museums.

If you would rather get some fresh air, Spain is filled with opportunities to visit wildlife parks as well as trekking. The Pyrenees, especially around the Aragón area, are the best areas for trekking. Andalucía has smaller mountain chains, though still spectacular. The Picos de Europa in Cantabria and Asturias are also worth a trek. Beautiful parks include Monfrague in Extremadura and Ordesa in the Aragonese Pyrenees.

Information gratefully provided by World 66