2 comments about Lodging in Spain's Monasteries.

1. The information in this reference book is very good. The text and photos are informative. The one missing link is a map or series of maps that would help the reader orient him/herself.
   
   I recommend it for adventurous travellers.



2. This is an exceptionally well presented resource on Spain's monastic lodging opportunities. I have been studying and trying to stay in monasteries in Spain for at least 10 years. This is the first resource that I believe will really help me find these preferred accommodations in Spain. I haven't used the book yet but I shall this summer. I am very optimistic.
   
   In addition the travel information about the area around the monastery is unusually good. It often gives more particular and much more interesting information than other regular guidebooks. I know several of the areas discussed well and I find that the information given is much of what I want to know. It has a different perspective that will enrich any journey.

5 comments about Knopf MapGuide: Barcelona (Knopf Mapguides).

1. We've just returned from Barcelona, having brought several pocket guides with us -- this one was the lightest to carry and had the best maps. The city is divided into six sections, each with short descriptions of several attractions and restaurants, and each with a fol-out map to that section. These maps were included metro stops, street names and the places listed, and were augmented by small color photographs. Attraction and restaurant listings include hours, prices and telephone numbers/ The front and back covers fold-out also and give general and metro information and some hotel listings. We found this little guide to be fairly useful, but particularly liked the maps.



2. I brought 5 Barcelona books with me for the trip. This was the only one I carried around throughout my stay there. Great fold out maps and color coded to easily find your destination. It's small and compact, easily fit into a coat jacket or a purse.



3. If you've never tried Knopf MapGuides, you are missing out.
   I've used them in several countries, from Russia to Italy, and I'm never disapppointed. They mark every single street so you never get lost walking between toursits stops.
   
   They are easy to use, thanks to the sections that fold out - no more struggling with big clumsy maps, or straining to read tiny maps in guide books that only label the big streets. They always include a metro map and show metro stops.
   
   The best part is, they have recommendations on everything for each area in the city: entertainment, arts, food, cafes, hotels, etc. Just leave a museum and want to grab a pastry & latte? No problem, there are 4 good choices within the area listed. Want to know a good spot for food within walking distance of your hotel? There are a dozen spots listed.
   
   In Barcelona, I found two amazing spots to eat that wouldn't have been written up anywhere else (in the second eatery they locals looked stunned when we walked in - obviously not a usual place for tourists). Other guidebooks limit the total number of write ups - with the design of the fold out map, Knopf has space for many more. Haven't eaten at a Knopf recommend place that was subpar yet, and I can't say that for my other guidebooks.
   
   The only draw back is Knopf only covers so many cities, but hopefully they'll continue to expand.



4. These are great guides. Very small on size, huge on information! These guides contain all the information that you need.



5. Best travel guide bar none. Fits your pocket or small purse.. Visually great looking.There are actual pictures .... All high recommended hotels different prices..Great maps.. hard to get lost even in Barcelona .. Great recommends for food I am a shopper.. Absolutely great & unusual shops ..None of the bad tourist gear only the styling gear.. .I had four guides to Barcelona this is the one we used every day...We do not go anywhere without this guide if there is one available for the destination I will be traveling to....

5 comments about Walking in Spain (Walking).

1. I am walking the Camino de Santiago now and can only comment on the Lonely Planet in this context. Day after day I become more convinced that Lonely Planet's researchers have never been on the Camino. They make much of the albergues or refugios but all this information is printed on the back of pilgrims' credencial (price one euro not 25 cents as LP claim). All of the other places where one might stay are hardly mentioned if at all. Punte Reina is described as a one street village, absolutely wrong! The trail leaving the same town is totally mis-described and all the trail mythology plagiarised from other sources takes up space that might be given over to hard facts. Distances are frequently misleading because of sloppy language. A typical example, is something like ¨"start from the crossroads, you'll pass x, y and z and continue for 5 kms to reach a crossroads¨." So where does the 5 kms start, at the crossroads or is it x,y and z? Whichever you choose you'll be wrong, there's no consistency. It happens time after time. An iron bridge near Estella is described as wooden. All small errors you may say but it just piles up day after day. Do not waste money on this useless book. What you need to know is what awaits you at the end of each day when you struugle into the next place after 20 or 30 kms only to read more vague errors from this.



2. I walked the Camino in 2001, using the 36 pages of the 2nd edition guide, in conjuction with the Confraternity of St. James Camino Frances. I found a large amount of excellent info in the 36 pages, and have been recommending it on our Camino web page ever since. The refugios change so rapidly that you shouldn't rely just on one guide. When I saw the recent negative review from a 2003 pilgrim, I went out and bought the 3rd edition, to see if there were drastic changes. The changes were few, and were all improvements - a list of refugios at the beginning, bolder print on the maps, so they are easier to read, slight rewording of some of the text. The authors of the Camino segment are still Nancy Frey and Jose Placer. Nancy has a PhD from University of California, Berkeley, and has written a well respected book on the Camino: Pilgrim Stories. The two of them own the On Foot In Spain adventure company and personally lead walks on the Camino and other treks in Spain. The history in the Lonely Planet segment is authentic, though necessarily condensed. I stand by my original recommendation. In addition to these 37 pages, get the Confraternity Camino Frances guide, and get either Davies and Cole's guide or John Brierley's guide.

   You will find some errors or changes needed in all of these guides, due to conditions changing on the trail, overlooked typos, etc. When you do, help future pilgrims by sending an email to the publication's website so that they can revise the next edition.




3. I think some of the reviewers' comments below are probably correct but none of them are serious drawbacks. True, the maps in this guide are not EXTREMELY detailed, but if you want a really detailed topographical map, you can always get one. The actual trail descriptions in this book are painstakingly detailed -- it even gets tedious. So if you can't find every tree along your route marked on the maps here, just use your imagination a little and wing it.

   "Walking in Spain" describes thirty or so of the best trails in Spain, highlighting trails in Mallorca, the Alpujarras Mountains of Andalusia, the area around Valencia, Castile's Sierra de Gredos and Sierra de Guadarrama, the Spanish Pyrenees, Galicia, and the Cordillera Cantábrica. Hikes vary from longer hauls like the 23-day Pyrenean traverse and the month-long Camino de Santiago to shorter 5- and 6-day hikes and walks you can do in less than a day.

   I've used the guide to get some great ideas for an upcoming hiking trip to the Alpujarras Mountains and the Sierra Nevada and have found it extremely useful. It lists numerous places to stay, ranging from 30- and 40-euro "pensiones" to dirt-cheap hikers' "albergues". You're not going to find a list of every single cheap place to crash your head here (if you did, you would have a book twice as big as this one), but you won't find yourself stranded. There's also a bunch of affordable eating places listed in this book.

   A plus for hikers who want to tackle all or part of the famous St. James pilgrimage route is that the guide's recommended day-to-day itinerary drops you off at the end of each day in towns where you can get food and water. A chart also shows the distance between each official "albergue" and the next.

   This book comes up a little short on cultural information, but you can always take a look at Lonely Planet's general guide to Spain. Recommended. Five stars.




4. This Guide lives up to "Lonely Planets" reputation as a publisher of well researched Travel guides. It's the only guide you really need to "Walk Spain Flat"!
   
   All the basic info is provided, Maps, discriptions,and language in easy to read format {although now that I'm in my 60's the print/font seems smaller??}. For walking Spain the guide is a "must have" piece of equipment.



5. I used this book to plan a loop-hike in Sierra de Grazalema in Andalucia. Luckily, the inn keeper informed us that the book had published the hike in reverse of the intended route, due to some sort of copyright issue.
   
   If we would have followed the book's instructions, we would have had a more difficult hike, and might have gotten lost. The inn keeper said that many hikers have complained of getting lost after following this book, since all the arrows are pointing in the opposite direction, and the cairns aren't necessarily even visible from the route, if you follow the book. Once on the hike, we could see that he was correct. I found Lonely Planet's inclusion of this "backwards route" to be extremely unethical.
   
   But the book is the reason I even ended up on this beautiful hike, and it has a lot of good information. I don't know if there is a better guide available. But I DO recommend verifying/checking your route with someone local and NOT relying solely on the book for planning your route.

1 comments about The Rough Guide to Mallorca and Menorca 4 (Rough Guide Travel Guides).

1. I find some lack of practical information (like transportation schedules, costs of restaurants and places to sleep) and of extra-urban sights (like beachs). I believe the "lonely planet" model is best suited to this subjects which i think are not enough described. unfortunately this editor dont have this destination and since that this one is probably (from my research) the best.

No comments about Mallorca (Regional Guide).

4 comments about The Alhambra.

1. I don't always like to read classics, but when a friend of mine suggested that I read this book, I decided to try it, and I am very glad that I did. Irving's words, though written so many years before now, still paint eloquent pictures of the Spain of his time. I could almost see what he was seeing. The stories and legends are also wonderful and fascinating. An antique copy of this book is one of my most treasured gifts.



2. Irving's book on the Alhambra and the surrounding territory of Granada remains one of the best guidebooks to the region--and one of the most entertaining travelogues ever written. Anyone who has visited (or plans to visit) southern Spain will be thrilled by the account of Irving's trip, but I'll go further: you need not ever go there to enjoy this classic work of history and humor.
   
   Irving stayed at the Alhambra for three months in 1829 and jotted down notes concerning its history and legends. Early in his visit, Irving was accosted by Mateo Ximenes, a credulous and indigent "son of the Alhambra" who soon proves a worthy and endearing companion, a guide to secret chambers, and a conveyor of whimsical traditions. A couple of years later, while in London, Irving wrote "The Alhambra," describing his idiosyncratic hosts, recounting the millennium-old history of the Moorish occupation, and transcribing fresh versions of the palace's medieval legends and myths, many of which resemble stories from the "Arabian Nights." The first edition appeared in 1832, a second American edition was published four years later, but Irving extensively revised and enlarged the book in 1851, incorporating material unavailable or unknown to him in the 1830s. This last edition is the one most commonly available today.
   
   The result is easily Irving's most accessible book, filled with wit and anecdote. Alongside the history of the Moorish kingdom of Granada, Irving intersperses tales (both historical and mythical) of enchanted caves, imprisoned princesses, and buried treasure. His admiration for Islamic heritage is obvious throughout: "The Arab invasion and conquest brought a higher civilization and a nobler style of thinking, into Gothic Spain." And he regularly denounces the prejudices (both medieval and contemporary) "so strongly characteristic of the bigot zeal, which sometimes inflamed the Christian enterprises" and which have prevented his fellow Europeans from studying a rich and justifiably proud tradition.
   
   As Irving accurately summarizes, Moslem Spain was "a region of light amid Christian, yet benighted Europe; externally a warrior power fighting for existence; internally a realm devoted to literature, science, and the arts; where philosophy was cultivated with a passion . . . and where the luxuries of sense were transcended by those of thought and imagination." Plus, the Islamic "occupiers" and Christian warriors certainly knew how to tell a good story. This book will delight both history and literature buffs.



3. Many Americans know Washington Irving as the author of "the Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip Van Winkle". Few realize that he was also a world traveler, scholarly fluent in Arabic and Spanish and something of an Hispanophile, to the say least.
   Irving's book is largely responsible for the widespread romantic image of Spain. It is a collection of observation, history, fairy tale, written in Irving's unique blend of romanticism and healthy skepticism. It is roughly framed by his journey to the Alhambra and his departure from it, an in between we are given a tour of the grounds and hear a few tales (including tales of Moorish ghosts on headless horses) which are roughly intertwined as in the Arabian Nights. Indeed, this little book is the 'Arabian Nights' of the west.
   Before visit the Alhambra read this book. If you are not planning on going, read it and you'll probably change your mind.



4. I ordered this as a gift for my Ma.
   
   When I visited her a few weeks later I saw something that looked like
   
   a high schooler had copied at kinkos.
   
   The type is blurry and smudged.
   
   Some paragraphs are unreadable.
   
   Will Amazon take it back?
   
   No, it been more than 30 days....40 days to be exact.
   
   I will not purchase gift books from Amazon again...better off going to Borders....get a
   
   clean copy and ship it yourself.

5 comments about On Bullfighting.

1. The author does not pretend to be an expert on bullfighting. She undertook this book because it was offered to her. The result is not so much an explication of the sport but a meditation on it. She considers, among other things, why do matadors risk death when most professional sportsmen risk only defeat? The author roughly compares her own encounter with suicide with the risk that professional bullfighters take in the ring.
   This is an informed meditation on bullfighting. The author has done her homework. For a good introduction to the art, I would recommend Death in the Afternoon by Hemingway. It as an informed, literary intoduction to bullfighting with diversions into war, death and art. But this book is a good supplement. Unlike Hemingway, A.L. Kennedy describes the course of actual bullfights she has seen. Her meditations are engaging. On Bullfighting doesn't take long to read, but the curious would-be afficionado will value it.



2. A.L.Kennedy's extraordinary book leads us from her own near-suicide in Scotland to the gaiety of the Fiesta Brava in Spain. Her work is here somewhat shaped by her own ill-health, and much of the book is a meditation on death. Do not be put off by this idea, for the whole thing is exquisitely written and makes use of unusually moving images: the result is positivley inspirational. Kennedy has studied toreo in great detail, and has a good grasp of her subject; she neither condones nor condemns. My only criticism is that the book runs out of steam towards the end when the author relies less on her stunning abstract and philosophical ideas, and gives a semi-journalistic account of the corrida. There has been a lot of very bad literature about bullfighting (including some by Hemingway!) but Ms. Kennedy's book is of the highest quality, well researched and written, and deserves a very wide audience.



3. This book is written in language that some might mistake for fluid, inventive prose - but it's labored and overwrought. It doesn't help that the subject matter continually returns to the author's health and ill-spirit, or that every problem in her life can be conveniently and neatly tied to bullfighting. A typical passage will open with her problems, then segue with something like "...but I won't think about my aching back, instead I'll distract myself with the story of xyz bullfighter who I just saw some film of..." and will then return to her issues with life. The suicide thing is, frankly, a cliche. Ending with the positive - she does a good job of delineating the history and the terminology as it would naturally become accessible to the first-timer.



4. There is very little taurine literature worth reading, specially in English. There is the dysfunctional American hotdog of the Hemingway type, busting with alcoholised mysticism, or else the false aficionado of the Barnaby Conrad sort, trading in stale myth-making and half-digested pseudosociology. Books of this kind proliferated in the 50s.
   
   A L Kennedy writes instead an extended essay, full of real insights, in which she relates bullfighting to mankind's [sometimes unconscious, often not] preocupation with death. She does this without grandiosity or bombastic sententiousness, or even that tiresome female one-upmanship. The fact that she is very obviously an Anglo-saxon woman may grate on some readers; then again, the freshness of her point of view would not be the same if she were a classically-educated, conservative Spaniard speaking of a long-cherished, unquestioned value. It is this freshness that makes her contribution interesting.
   
   The volume is perhaps poorly edited, but make no mistake: it is one of the few books on bullfighting worth reading. A minor classic.



5. I was in the process of researching bullfighting when I came across this book. I read it from cover to cover. This is an amazing and intimate account of a woman from outside of the Spanish bullfighting world coming to terms with its mystique, barbarism, and ceremony in highly readable and compelling terms.
   
   Her journey through Spain, and especially her trip by rail to Granada and the home of Lorca, was insightful and haunting in its detail of a society's need to cling to its traditions. The history of the bullfight and the author's personal story of physical and mental anguish were well matched, and the experience of this book has stayed with me long after finishing its pages.

5 comments about Roads to Santiago.

1. Very interesting view of selected Spanish history and culture. Superbly written. I have been reading lots of books from Spain and about Spain in the last 10 years, but this is certainly one of the best.



2. Spain becomes grist for the cracked mill wheel of Cees Nooteboom's mind. The book isn't really about Spain, it's about the author and his obsessive fixation with certain Spanish topics. He does this with painfully long rambling descriptions of various Spanish cultural icons that have caught his attention, drilling down to the time when they first caught his attention and the many times since then that he has pondered them. The topics themselves are interesting but almost irrelevant to the self indulgent dredging of the author's own mind. You would learn more hard facts about these topics from a museum brochure. The twin pillars of this tortuously slow moving narrative are the painter Zurban and Romanesque architecture. He drops and picks up these topics at random, throughout the book, and prattles on about them as if he is possessed with a reoccurring fever. He also slathers his book with an impressive amount of trite clichés about Spain, Spain the land of contrasts, Castille La Mancha the land of desolate panoramas, etc. He goes on ad nauseum. He also plays a little fast and loose with the few historical facts he deigns to use. He states that the aqueduct in Segovia was used until 1974; according to Segovia's municipal web site it is still in use. He states that Pizzaro left from Extremadura with an invasion force for Peru; Pizzaro left from Central America where he had been established for some years. Obviously no fact checker touched this book before publication. There are many wonderful books about Spain. This isn't one of them.



3. Am still trying to finish this book! Compared to some of the others on the subject, it's a hard read. I'll probably sell it.



4. first of all, cees nooteboom is a shining oasis in the arid intellectual desert of contemporary travel writing, and secondly, you should let go of everything that makes you unhappy, and set sail tomorrow.

   the sheer profundity and wit of nooteboom's observations left me, for one, in like total dumbstruck awe, and his seemingly divine ability to translate the most visceral of emotions into words (a medium of communication i had always, up till now, considered inferior) made me feel a little bit the same way i felt the first time i went skydiving. folks, this here is a man who knows how to travel, as well as being a freakin miracle of a writer--and anyone who is capable of firing a sincere philosophic-type synapse will LOVE HIM. also read "the following story," all you existential types out there--he's like a dreamy, colorful Camus, and his prose will make your eyes feel clean for the first time in years.




5. This is a spectacular book, written by the best kind of travel writer. Mr. Nooteboom's passion for Spain, Spanish art, and Spanish architecture is infectious. I did the pilgrimage to Santiago in September of 2003, and understanding the Camino in the larger context of Spanish history (which Mr. Nooteboom limns so admirably) was invaluable. I don't believe I would have looked for, much less appreciated the Romanesque architecture I saw along the way. Coincidentally, his love of the great Spanish painters Zurbaran and Velazquez inspired me to visit New York for the Velazquez to Manet exhibit. I consider this one of the essential books to read before you set out for Santiago de Compostela. Guide books will get you from A to B. This book will help you understand the importance of A, B, and all the points in between.

1 comments about Michelin Spain & Portugal/Espagne Portugal (Michelin).

1. OK for an overall view, but not detailed enough to drive in an unknown country. Buy local maps when you get there.

1 comments about Camino de Santiago Map.

1. this super light weight book showing the path to Santiago is an excellent alternative to taking a guide book with you if you are planning to walk the Camino Frances. It lists the albergues and hotels in all the villages along the way, along with other services offered - cash points, supermarkets, churches, etc. Spiral bound, well layed out, good town maps of the 5 biggest towns along the way. Highly recommended.