Spain

Spain is not one country, and that is the whole point

Ninety-six point eight million people came to Spain in 2025. That is more foreign visitors than Spain has citizens, arriving in a single year, and it is a record — up 3.2 per cent on 2024, with spending rising faster still, to €134.7 billion, according to the national statistics institute INE. Tourism is now 12.6 per cent of Spanish GDP.

Here is what that number should actually change about your trip. Three regions absorbed most of it: Catalonia first, then the Balearics, then the Canaries. Which means the version of Spain most people book — Barcelona in August, a Mallorca resort, the Costa del Sol — is the most heavily used part of the country, and in 2026 it is also the part being deliberately made more expensive. The rest of Spain, the four-fifths of it that nobody queues for, is having a completely different year.

This guide is built around that gap. It covers the famous Spain properly, because the Alhambra and the Prado deserve their reputations. But it spends as much time on the Spain that rewards a second visit more than a first: the Basque coast, Rioja Alavesa, Asturias, Extremadura, Galicia. Seventeen autonomous communities, four official languages, and differences between them larger than most travellers expect — the food changes, the working day changes, and in the north it rains.

The 2026 question: where the crowds are, and where they are not

Barcelona has stopped competing for visitors and started pricing them. The city raised its general tourist tax in April 2026 to among the highest in Europe, and the council has approved cutting cruise terminals at the Adossat wharf from seven to five by 2030, taking simultaneous passenger capacity from roughly 37,000 to about 31,000. A further proposal — not yet law — would raise the levy on cruise passengers who stop for less than twelve hours from €11 to €30 a head.

Read that as a signal rather than an insult. Barcelona is not closing; it is selecting. The traveller who stays four nights, eats in the city and books a guide is exactly who the policy is designed to keep. The one who arrives at nine, photographs the Sagrada Família from outside and re-boards at five is the one being priced out. If you were ever going to do Barcelona properly, 2026 is the year it starts paying off.

And if you are not fixed on Barcelona at all, the arithmetic is even simpler. Catalonia, the Balearics and the Canaries take the bulk of the 96.8 million. Asturias, Extremadura, Aragón, La Rioja, Navarre and inland Galicia take almost none of it. These are not consolation prizes. Extremadura holds three UNESCO-listed towns and the best jamón ibérico de bellota in the world. Asturias has a coastline of green cliffs, a mountain range you can be standing in an hour after landing, and, in 2026, a three-Michelin-star kitchen. You will hear Spanish spoken by Spaniards, which in high summer on the Costa del Sol you often will not.

The cities, and what each one actually gives you

Madrid is the one people underrate and then move to. It has no beach and no cathedral worth the detour, and it is the best city in Spain for eating, walking and looking at paintings. The Prado is the argument: Velázquez’s Las Meninas, Goya’s black paintings, and a Bosch room that stops conversation. Give it a full morning, then walk to La Latina and eat standing up. Madrid also has the country’s only real late-night culture — the city genuinely does not stop, which is charming at 28 and a logistical problem at 58. Plan around it either way.

Barcelona is having its defining year. Gaudí died in 1926; a century on, the Sagrada Família’s central Tower of Jesus Christ was structurally completed in February 2026 at just over 172 metres, and blessed in June. It has been the tallest church in the world since October 2025, when it passed Ulm Minster in Germany. The detail worth carrying with you: Gaudí set the height deliberately below Montjuïc, the hill behind the city at 177.7 metres, on the principle that nothing made by a person should stand higher than something made by God. Interior work runs to 2027–28, so you are visiting a building site — a 144-year-old one, finally in sight of finished.

Seville is the one to visit in March and avoid in July, when 40°C is normal and the city empties into the shade. The Alcázar is the better palace to book if the Alhambra is full, the cathedral holds Columbus, and the Plaza de España is the rare grand civic space that photographs exactly as it looks. Granada is smaller and stranger, and the Alhambra is the single most heavily booked monument in Spain. The Nasrid Palaces require a timed slot, they sell out weeks ahead, and no amount of money buys you in on the day. Book that first and build the trip around it — this is the one place in Spain where the order of operations matters.

Bilbao and San Sebastián are ninety minutes apart and belong on the same trip. Bilbao spent thirty years converting itself from a dying steel port into a city people fly to, and Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim is only the visible half of it. San Sebastián is the eating capital: three Michelin three-star restaurants sit within a short drive, and the old town serves the best bar food in Europe on a counter, one plate at a time. Valencia gives you paella where it was invented, a dry riverbed turned into nine kilometres of park, and a beach inside the city. Santiago de Compostela is the end of a walk rather than a destination in itself — but standing in the Praza do Obradoiro at midday as people arrive on foot is one of the genuinely moving things Europe still does.

Traveltalk picks three

Three places to sleep. Marqués de Riscal at Elciego, in Rioja Alavesa — Frank Gehry wrapped a 19th-century winery in ribbons of titanium the colour of red wine and foil, and you sleep inside it, surrounded by Tempranillo. The Parador de Granada, a converted 15th-century convent standing inside the Alhambra’s own walls; it is small, it books out months ahead, and it is the only way to be in the complex after the gates shut. Hotel María Cristina in San Sebastián, belle époque, 1912, on the river a short walk from the pintxo bars — the kind of hotel that makes the walk home part of the evening.

Three tables. Etxebarri in the village of Axpe, an hour inland from Bilbao, where Bittor Arginzoniz cooks almost everything over wood he burns himself — one Michelin star and a reputation many times larger. Disfrutar in Barcelona, three stars, and the most inventive cooking in Spain. Casa Marcial in Arriondas, Asturias — three stars in a green valley almost nobody flies to, which is exactly why we are naming it.

Three things to do. Walk the Nasrid Palaces on the first slot of the morning, before the light hardens. Spend a night crossing San Sebastián’s Parte Vieja one plate and one glass of txakoli per bar — never two in the same place. And drive the Picos de Europa from Cangas de Onís to the Lagos de Covadonga: forty minutes of switchbacks that end above the cloud line, in a country most people think of as flat and hot.

How Spain eats, and how to eat it properly

The Michelin Guide Spain & Andorra 2026 lists 307 starred restaurants: 16 with three stars, 37 with two, 254 with one. It is a record, and it is also not the interesting number. The interesting number is €14–20 — the price of a menú del día, three courses and wine, served at lunchtime in more or less every town in the country. Spain’s real culinary achievement is not the top of the pyramid. It is that the base is this good.

Eat regionally and the country makes sense fast. In the Basque Country you eat standing at a bar, choosing pintxos one at a time and paying at the end. In Andalusia the tapa arrives free with the drink and the fish is fried in the morning’s oil. Valencia does paella at lunch and never at dinner, with rabbit and beans rather than the seafood most visitors expect. Galicia gives you octopus on a wooden plate with paprika and coarse salt, and albariño cold enough to hurt. Asturias pours cider from above the head, holds back all but one mouthful, and throws the rest away — that is not showmanship but aeration, and the cider genuinely is flat without it.

Two things worth planning for. Jamón ibérico de bellota comes from black pigs finished on acorns in the oak pasture of Extremadura and western Andalusia, and there is no substitute for eating it where it is cured. And Sunday lunch is the immovable Spanish institution — book it, and expect to be at the table for three hours. If food is the reason you travel, our food and wine section is where the rest of this lives.

The wine: two regions above all the others, and four you should know

Spain has hundreds of protected wine denominations and exactly two at the top tier. Rioja was raised to DOCa in 1991; Priorat, in Catalonia, followed as DOQ in 2003. Nothing else has been promoted since. If you remember one fact about Spanish wine, make it that one — it tells you where the country itself thinks the ceiling is.

Rioja is the one to visit, not just drink: roughly 65,000 hectares of Tempranillo along the Ebro, and a concentration of architect-designed wineries — Frank Gehry at Marqués de Riscal, Santiago Calatrava at Ysios, Zaha Hadid’s decanter-shaped pavilion at López de Heredia — that makes a three-day drive worth the fuel on its own. Priorat is the opposite experience: black slate terraces so steep they are worked by hand, tiny yields, and wines priced accordingly. Two hours west of Barcelona, and a different planet.

Then the four to know. Ribera del Duero makes the most concentrated reds in Spain from the same grape as Rioja, grown at altitude through winters cold enough to shape the wine. Rías Baixas in Galicia trains albariño on granite pergolas above head height, because the Atlantic keeps everything damp. Jerez produces sherry, the most misunderstood wine in the world and the only one that genuinely improves a plate of fried fish; a bodega visit in Jerez de la Frontera is the best-value wine tour in Europe. And Cava, made by the same method as champagne in the Penedès outside Barcelona, is where the value hides. A region guide is coming for each of these.

The slow Spain: walking, mountains and the coast that is not the Costa

In 2025 the Pilgrim’s Office in Santiago issued 530,987 Compostelas — the first time more than half a million people finished a Camino route in one calendar year, up six per cent on 2024 and the third record in a row. The Camino Francés took 242,179 of them, and 162,076 people started at Sarria, the last town from which the final 100 km still earns the certificate. That last figure is the useful one: it tells you exactly where the crowds are, and that starting anywhere further back buys you a quieter road.

The mountains surprise people. The Picos de Europa rise to 2,600 m within about 20 km of the Atlantic, the Pyrenees hold serious ski terrain at Baqueira-Beret and Formigal, and the Sierra Nevada above Granada runs lifts to 3,300 m, from which you can be on a Mediterranean beach in roughly ninety minutes. Ski in the morning and swim in the afternoon is a claim made in a dozen countries and true in this one.

And the coast is not one thing. The Mediterranean side is what the beach holiday brochures sell. The Costa da Morte and the Galician rías are cold, green and dramatic; the Basque coast between San Sebastián and Bilbao has surf, cliffs and villages built into ravines; and Cabo de Gata in Almería is a volcanic desert park where the beaches have nothing built behind them at all, because building there is prohibited. If sun is the whole point, take the Canaries in February over the mainland in August — the trade almost nobody makes and almost everybody should.

When to go

• March–May. The best window for Andalusia and for cities generally. Seville’s Semana Santa and Feria fill the city and double the prices — either commit to them or avoid those two weeks outright.
• June. Long days, warm sea, schools still in. The best single compromise month on the mainland.
• July–August. Inland Andalusia and Madrid are genuinely too hot, and the coasts are full. Go north instead: Galicia, Asturias, Cantabria and the Basque Country sit at 22–26°C and stay green.
• September–October. Our pick. Warm sea, harvest in the wine regions, and the cities back in working order.
• November–February. Cities at their cheapest and emptiest, skiing in the Pyrenees and the Sierra Nevada, and the Canaries at around 21°C — the only dependable winter sun in Europe.

Getting around, and the one booking rule that matters

Take the train. Spain’s high-speed network runs to roughly 3,973 km, the longest in Europe, and it has been going since the first Madrid–Córdoba–Seville line opened in 1992. Madrid–Barcelona takes about two and a half hours. Madrid–Seville covers 471 km in much the same. Add airport transfers, security and the taxi at the far end and the plane loses on almost every domestic route in the country. Fares are cheapest the day they are released, months ahead, and climb steeply from there — so if your dates are fixed, book the train before the hotel.

Hire a car for the countryside and not for the cities. Rioja, the Picos, Extremadura and inland Andalusia are car country. Madrid, Barcelona, Seville and Valencia all operate low-emission zones that fine foreign plates automatically, and charge more for parking than the car costs to rent. And if you want the memorable stay rather than the efficient one, the state-run Paradores chain — founded in 1928 and now around 98 properties, many of them castles, convents and monasteries — is the most reliable way to sleep inside Spanish history at the price of a good business hotel.

Where we take Spain from here

This page is the spine. The regional guides hang off it, and they are being written in this order: Andalusia — Seville, Granada, Córdoba and the white towns — then the Basque Country and San Sebastián, Madrid, Barcelona and Catalonia, Rioja and Spanish wine country, Asturias and the Picos de Europa, Mallorca and the Balearics, and the Canaries. Each gets the same treatment as this page: named places, current numbers, and an honest answer to what is worth a week of your life.

In the meantime, Spain sits inside a wider set of guides. Europe is the parent page, with Italy and Germany alongside this one. If you travel by interest rather than by map, start with city breaks, art and culture, luxury travel or golf — Spain is a serious golf country, and the Costa del Sol alone carries more courses than any comparable stretch of continental Europe. And if you would rather watch than read, TravelTalk Lens holds our film library, Spain included.