1. Lunch in a hanging house in Cuenca
The clifftop city of Cuenca, an easy day trip from Madrid, is famous for its casas colgadas, the wood-beamed houses that have clung to the rock for more than 500 years. Two contain the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español, a world-class collection established by a group of avant-garde artists in the 1960s. Next door, a third is home to Casas Colgadas, a fine dining restaurant run by the local Michelin-starred chef Jesús Segura. Book at lunchtime for vertiginous views across the Huécar gorge and Segura’s multi-course take on the cuisine of La Mancha.
Restaurante Casas Colgadas
restaurantecasascolgadas.com
Museo de Arte Abstracto Español
march.es/es/cuenca/visit0
Photographs: Getty Images; Festival Merida; Bodegas Hidalgo La Gitana; Celler de Can Roca
2. Stay in a monastery in Guadalupe
When a farmer discovered a wooden statue of the Virgin near this remote Extremaduran village in 1326, he sparked a pilgrimage craze that continues today. Devotees flock from across the Hispanic world to revere the 2ft-tall sculpture that stands in its finery within the Royal Monastery of Santa María, a Unesco World Heritage site. Visit outside religious festivals and it’s easy and inexpensive to bag a room at the Hospedería del Real Monasterio. Your room key will clank in the lock and echo around the red-tiled corridor. Monks whisper in the cloister, and at dinner, a printed name card indicates your table.
Real Monasterio de Guadalupe
Hospedería del Real Monasterio
3. Watch drama in Mérida’s Roman theatre
Once known as Emerita Augusta, Mérida has some of the best-preserved Roman ruins beyond Italy. The highlight is the city’s Roman theatre, which hosts a classical theatre festival on warm summer nights. From your amphitheatre seat, the open-air performance plays against a floodlit backdrop of columns and statues. Tickets are in high demand, but because the festival runs throughout the summer months, with a little planning it’s not difficult to book. While performances are in Spanish, the spectacle is the thing, and the programme also includes operatic productions. Stay in fitting style at the nearby Ilunion Mérida Palace hotel or the city’s parador.
Mérida festival
festivaldemerida.es/en/the-festival/
Ilunion Mérida Palace Hotel
ilunionhotels.com/hoteles/ilunion-merida-palace
Parador de Mérida
paradores.es/en/parador-de-merida
4. Make a hospital visit in Barcelona
This year, Barcelona is celebrating the centenary of the death of its greatest architect, Antoni Gaudí, so his masterpieces – especially the nearly finished Sagrada Familia – will be busier than ever. You’ll want to visit, for sure, but make time, too, for one of Barcelona’s lesser-known masters of Modernisme català: Lluís Domènech i Montaner. His most jaw-dropping project is the Recinte Modernista Sant Pau, a vast hospital complex built in the early 20th century not far from La Sagrada Familia. Conceived around the philosophy that light and beauty can aid the healing process, its garden-set pavilions are gloriously decorated with ceramic tiles and stained glass, and linked by underground tunnels. Patients were treated here until 2009.
Basílica de la Sagrada Familia
Recinte Modernista Sant Pau
5. Scoff egg and chips in Madrid
Madrid has some of the world’s most sophisticated, and expensive, restaurants, but if you’re looking for the most enjoyable, it’s hard to beat the sister restaurants Casa Lucio and El Landó. The signature dish at both is the simple yet sensational huevos rotos sobre patatas, in effect egg and chips. Almost every diner in the traditional, wood-panelled rooms orders it to start, perhaps with a few slivers of Ibérico ham hand-carved on top. If you’ve dined at some of the capital’s more precious establishments, it may surprise you how pleasurable simple Castilian cooking, courteously served, can be. While you’ll need to book at either restaurant, Casa Lucio often has walk-in spots at the bar.
Casa Lucio
El Landó
instagram.com/landorestaurante
6. Taste olive oil in style near Ronda
A huge red concrete cube stands incongruously amid the olive groves. A single bull’s horn in weathered steel juts from its side. It is the work of the superstar designer Philippe Starck, who was commissioned to create this paean to olive oil and to Ronda. A multifaceted oleotourism experience lets you visit local producer LA Organic’s olive oil mill and museum, learn about the architecture of the extraordinary building, and sample a selection of extra-virgin oils with artisanal bread. You can lodge among the olive groves in a 19th-century farmhouse and even take a helicopter tour of the tree-dotted mountains.
LA Almazara
7. Sip manzanilla by the river in Sanlúcar
Manzanilla is the pale, dry sherry made in the seaside city of Sanlúcar de Barrameda. Aged in vast bodegas wafted by the Atlantic breeze, it has a distinctive salty tang that makes it even more popular in Spain than the fino from Jerez up the road. Several bodegas offer tasting tours (a nighttime visit to La Gitana is especially atmospheric), but the best way to enjoy the wine in its natural setting is to lunch at one of the riverside restaurants that line Bajo de Guía. The locals’ favourite is Casa Bigote, where platefuls of salt-scattered estuary prawns are accompanied by cold manzanilla straight from the barrel. Afterwards, hop on the ferry across to the Doñana nature reserve, for a head-clearing stroll along the deserted beach.
Bodegas Hidalgo La Gitana
Casa Bigote
Suggested Reading
Visiting Spain – but in France
8. Tilt at windmills in Castilla-La Mancha
Cervantes famously declined to name the hometown of his great fictional character Don Quixote, but many of the places and sights that appear in his epic tale are real and still exist. A road trip across the empty plains of La Mancha lets you relive the knight errant’s adventures, from the inn he took for a castle to the supposed home of his fair lady. The otherwise unassuming villages of Consuegra and Campo de Criptana vie for the honour of having inspired the book’s most famous episode. Each has a wonderfully preserved array of traditional 16th-century windmills, which Don Quixote mistook for giants and attacked with his lance. Visit at golden hour for epic, Instagrammable results.
Consuegra
spain.info/en/places-of-interest/cerro-calderico-doce-molinos
Campo de Criptana
9. Sample the Roca brothers’ hospitality
Twice named the world’s best restaurant, Girona’s three-Michelin-starred El Celler de Can Roca has a waiting list that stretches up to a year. But the Roca brothers now offer a range of dining and accommodation options across this elegant medieval city that are accessible and surprisingly affordable. The most indulgent are Esperit Roca, a contemporary hotel and restaurant complex within the ruins of a fortress on a hill just outside the city, and Casa Cacao, a boutique hotel in a working chocolate factory whose breakfast hot chocolate is unmissable. Those on a budget can join in, too. Vii is a casual wine bar that simply does tapas really well (including the ragú-filled cannelloni that’s on the menu at Celler de Can Roca), while Rocambolesc is a wickedly witty ice-cream parlour. There’s even a mid-range restaurant called Normal.
Roca brothers’ universe
cellercanroca.com/en/universo-roca
10. Tour Córdoba’s Mezquita at dawn
Every guidebook to Spain recommends Córdoba’s Mosque-Cathedral. It is one of the world’s great architectural achievements. The problem is that, along with the neighbouring medieval district of the Judería, it gets very busy with tour groups. Avoid them by rising at dawn to wander the ancient streets before the shutters come up, towards the cathedral bell tower that glows in the sunrise. For an hour from 8.30am every morning except Sunday, entry to the Mezquita is free, and tour groups are not allowed. You can contemplate the mesmeric forest of red and white columns with just a few other souls.
Mezquita-catedral de Córdoba
mezquita-catedraldecordoba.es/en/
Frommer’s Spain 2026 was published on February 24
