Rick Steves Spain (Seventeenth Edition)

Lot's of walking tours and information

Love the detailed information on how to travel safe and best places to visit. How to get around very helpful.

With the title "Spain", one expects coverage of the main regions, cities and attractions of the country. Unfortunately that is not the case. I plan to travel to Barcelona this summer, rent a car, and visit the southeastern portion of the country, including cities like Zaragoza, Valencia, Alicante and Murcia, all top 12 biggest cities in Spain. I bought the book with the expectation of using it to plan my trip. Well, none of these cities, or the main regions where they are located, are even mentioned in the book, so I just wasted my money.This travel book is very selective in what it covers, not regionally comprehensive at all, and in some cases whimsical. For instance, it spends 20 pages on Gibraltar and 40 pages on Tangier in Marocco, but does not even mention Andorra.If the book does not cover 4 (at least) of the top 12 Spanish cities, or major regions like Aragon, Valencia and others, how can it be called simply "Spain", without qualifiers? It certainly misled me.To be fair, what it covers is detailed and quite useful. For sure, I will use the information provided regarding Barcelona to plan that portion of my trip. But unless you limit your Spain trip to the places that Rick Steves chooses to cover, you will be left on your own to plan it (or buy a different travel guide that is more complete)

I buy Rick Steves to find the out of the way stuff based on his original philosophy of “through the back door”. I was looking for small beach town finds near Barcelona. Small hotels, little local places and where to meet the locals. Only one fishing town was covered. I know there are incredible and less touristy beach towns on Spain’s southern coast but not much to go on With this book. Much more like all the standard books than Rick Steve’s used to be.

I was disappointed in this edition of Rick Steve's SPAIN because there are so many smaller, but relevant towns and cities that aren't mentioned so I felt it there was a lot of missing information for my upcoming trip to Spain.