Eyewitness Travel Guide to Spain by Jane Ewart and Tom Prentice

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Eyewitness Travel Guide to Spain by Europe Travel Books

Eyewitness Travel Guide to Spain by Jane Ewart and Tom Prentice
Price: $0.41

Features

Paperback: 672 pages

Publisher: DK Travel 1996

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0789410680

ISBN-13: 978-0789410689

Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.2 x 1.3 inches

Shipping Weight: 2 pounds

Product Review
You'd be hard-pressed to find a more comprehensive, engrossing and just plain fun-to-read guidebook than the Eyewitness Travel Guide: Spain. Spilling over with all sorts of useful information for the traveler, you'll find three-dimensional drawings, floor plans, and detailed neighborhood maps, as well as timelines and charts, and even a map of the Metro. Broken into sections including "Introducing Spain," "Region by Region" (covering major cities and areas like Madrid, Barcelona, Basque Country, Andalusia, and the Balearic and Canary islands), "Traveler's Needs," and "Survival Guide," the guide paints a complete picture of the country. Readers will especially love the hundreds of color photos of everything from famous plazas to pitchers of sangria. You'll also find street-by-street illustrated city walks (Old Madrid, which takes in the Puerta del Sol and Plaza Mayer, looks especially enchanting), the best paradors, and, of course, tapas bars. --Jill Fergus

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Reader Reviews
Just got back from Spain where I put this guide to the test in several cities. I decided to try this instead of the usual guides I used in the past (Let's Go, Rick Steve's, Lonely Planet, Fodor's, etc.). My overall verdict is that this book is good for a certain type of traveler on a certain type of trip, but can't be leaned on too heavily as a reference guide. It handles a few things better than other guides, but doesn't have enough information for the budget travelers dependent on their guidebooks to make it from place to place. What it does better than other guides is provide beautiful color photographs and cutaway diagrams of major sights, like cathedrals and museums and select neighborhood in major cities. Unlike other guidebooks, the photos are presented on thick glossy paper, providing extremely vivid coloring. I leaned heavily on the city-map of Madrid to find my way to the right metro stations for all the sites. Each chapter on a town had a fairly good list of sites to see along with operating hours, and each one was keyed to a map so I could easily navigate to the site. The subway map of Madrid inside the back cover was super useful. It has a list of restaurants and hotels for various cities all in two color-coded appendixes at the back of the book, and the price ranges listed are wider than other guidebooks like Let's Go or Rick Steve's, which focus on hostels and budget hotels. You'll find five star hotels and "jacket and tie required" restaurants in the Eyewitness Guide. But many travelers will find the book problematic. First, it has very little information on how to get from one destination to another. Rick Steve's and Let's Go, which my travel companions brought, were much better on this front. Those two books saved me countless trips to tourist offices and train/bus stations and were worth buying for that reason alone. The Eyewitness guide just have had general travel info as an appendix in the back of the book, but very little on travel from one particular town to another. Not a problem if your travel plans were made out all in advance, but a fatal flaw if you're figuring it out as you go. A few other problems: the high quality paper means the books is much heavier than other guidebooks. Walking around in the heat, I didn't appreciate having to lug it in my backpack. Also, the restaurant and hotel listings are pretty skimpy--just two pages of restaurants and hotels for Madrid?! Other guidebooks are more complete--Eyewitness tends to focus on a few restaurants and hotels across a broad price range, though I have no idea how those particular ones were selected. In summary, I think this guidebook works great if you have all your travel between towns and lodging in each destination set ahead of time. This guidebook will help you pick out a few sites to visit in each area and provide great photos for each. For the budget traveler/backpacker who needs to figure out how to get from one town to the next on the fly, Let's Go or Rick Steve's or a book like that is essential. Next time I travel, I'm buying Let's Go before the trip, and if I'm in a particular town for a while, I might pick up an Eyewitness Guide once I'm in town and then toss it out once I leave. Or perhaps buy one at home and tear out the relevant pages to bring along. They make Eyewitness Guides for particular destinations, like Madrid only, which might be a better value than the entire Spain guide if you're only hitting a few spots. Comment | Permalink | (Report this)

Eyewitness Travel Guide to Spain
Available from Amazon
Price: $0.41
Updated on 8-25-2008.