The Rough Guide to Spain Paperback – March 5, 2012

Rough Guides are written for readers more interested in content than photography. Quite simply, other mainstream guides offer more for the eyes, but none surpasses the Rough Guide's comprehensiveness, historical and cultural contexts, and vast selection of dining, sleeping, and sightseeing options. Think of this book as more of an encyclopedia than a picture book, but it still treats you to color maps and a few nice photographs sprinkled in.Because of the series commitment to comprehensive information, expect a big brick-book written in narrative format. Chapters are arranged geographically, then broken down further into cities and towns. Then each city and town is presented, sights first, followed by listings for hotels, restaurants, shopping, etc... and other practicalities. This main content is framed by essential information in the beginning of the book, and history and cultural contexts at the end.Travelers more interested in learning about the places they visit will like this guide. The traveler who enjoys the history of a site and its cultural contribution should consult this book. This is the perfect guide for travelers who like to plan their itineraries BEFORE they go. This is the perfect guide to read while enjoying your morning breakfast and planning the rest of your day. Those more interested in the visual beauty of a site will probably find more value in one of the other mainstream guides.

I really liked having this book for my travels through Madrid and Andalucia (southern spain). I didn't find the lodgings or restaurants that helpful. For lodging we stayed in mostly hostels and found tripadvisor and hostelworld.com much more helpful, but for what sites to see this book was fantastic. What my travel buddy and I liked the most about this book was the background for each site and city we went to. This book had such great historical and other explanations that we started carrying it around and reading it instead of the pamphlets they gave out at the palaces and cathedrals.

I was hoping for a Kindle book that would give me the same level of access as the paperback. This Kindle version is very difficult to navigate.1. There is NO INDEX!!!2. Difficult to retrace tour steps. When you go to a link on a page, you have to go back to the Table of Contents to return to the original page you were viewing. There is no simple "back" function.3. Bookmarking a page lists it by the words on the top of the page. You have to make notes to make the bookmarks comprehensible.4. I haven't figured out if you can organize your bookmarks according to subject, or if they remain randomly listed in the order you bookmarked them.5. One plus: At least the print is larger, so it's easier to read than the paperback.There's probably more to say on this. I will add comments as I keep trying to use this guide. I want it to work for me so I don't have to carry the heavy paperback guide with me on my trip!

I first purchased a Rough Guide book in 2011 for a 5 month venture to New Zealand. After that I always look for a Rough Guide before any other guidebook.I went on a month long trip with some friends to first walk El Camino de Santiago and then do some sightseeing after. The Rough Guide gives great recommendations for those looking to travel on a budget. This book also gives great short history lessons and maps for both major attractions and random pit stop villages. If you buy an up to date guide the pricing is also accurate.All in all a very good buy.

I used this for travel in Salamanca, Oviedo and other parts of Asturias, Segovia, and Madrid. It is a good guide for a lot things, but NOT for entry times/dates for many places. In many, many cases wrong information is printed, which seems incredible for a book published nine months ago (it simply boggles my mind that so many monuments/sites would change their opening hours so drastically within a year). Definitely double-check the opening times of places you plan to visit, especially in the off-season. One cave in Asturias mentioned in the book is said to be open year-round but it is not! It is closed from September to March!

Practical and helpful. we bought the kindle version and read it on our ipads and iphone - quite convenient. Some of the big sections like Barcelona could have done with more hyperlinking and x referencing to make navigation inside the section more convenient. But overall, a good experiment for us in dispensing with the paper copy.

This is my second version of Rough Guide to Spain. I love these books because they touch on so many places that are out of the way. Many travel guides focus on the most popular places, but Rough Guide touches on so much and give one many ideas about places ego visit. The indexing is very good. The font has been improved with the exception of some of the special boxes where the font is so light in color that reading for this old man is rather difficult. I suggest that very light grey color be changed to provide improved contrast.

I bought the Kindle edition of The Rough Guide to Spain so that I can carry it with the rest of my reading material on a device small enough to fit in a side pocket of my cargo pants. The book has an exhaustive list of must-sees in Spain's principal cities plus an overview of Spanish history. I am planning a three-month trip to Spain this summer, and the ebook version of the Rough Guide will be with me every time I venture out the door and onto the streets. -- Jack Quinn

I own the hard copy, and bought the kindle edition when traveling because I thought it would be easier, but it's a condensed version, and much less useful as a consequence. Also it's hard to navigate -- you have to keep jumping back to table of contents to find things. It's not easy to do a simple keyword search of teh whole text. In the hard copy you can always flip to the index to look things up. The maps are too small to be legible (and we found at least one that was inaccurate.) I was stupid enough to buy three rough guide kindle editions before trying them out, not realizing there would be these problems. They should be MORE detailed than the hard copy - not less - and the maps, with GPS technology, should be accurate, detailed and up to date. No one wants to carry a heavy guidebook around anymore, and I can get what information I need online on the go. I bought the guidebooks because I thought it would be convenient to have a reference on my iphone/ iPad on occasions I couldn't get online, but it was a waste of money. Also I got bedbugs at a highly recommended hotel.

We have visited Spain a number of times with our family over the years but always as a package deal that tended to limit our opportunities for travelling around. We purchased this book with the intention of using it to explore the "real Spain" and in this regard it did not disappoint. Good layout and filled with useful information making it ideal for those of us that intend to travel throughout Spain. Hopefully the detailed elements on places to eat or stay have not changed too much.

This book reminds me why, if there's a Rough Guide available for where I want to go, then I look no further. It's been criticised for getting some prices and times of admission incorrect, but how can any guide avoid this? Surely they're all at least a little 'out-of-date' even before they goes to the printers and such details should be treated as indications, not concrete fact. The range of information packed into a single volume is amazing.

I would recommend the Rough Guide books to anyone considering travelling abroad. We have used the previous editions on Spain, and this one is up to the usual standard, with lots of useful information. We wouldn't travel without one whichever country we visit!!

I prefer Rough Guides to Lonely Planet and this one for Spain has not disappointed me.I think they are more complete and authoritative than Lonely Planet. I also like the histories of the countries that they include.