Customer Reviews

Garmin City Navigator 2012 Spain/Portugal microSD Card

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The SD card works fine. One problem I had is this is a micro SD
card so it needs an adapter to fit in the SD card slot on my
Garmin GPS. The micro SD card came in a Garmin package but no
adapter. There was an empty space in the package where it looks like their should have been an adapter. I was leaving for Spain the day
after I rcvd the sd card so I had to go to radio shack to buy an
adapter. The company needs to specify whether the package contains
and adapter or if you need to purchase it separately.

In general, a great add on product to my Garmin Nuvi. We drove around southern Spain and I found it an invaluable tool, especially when trying to navigate through larger cities. At times there was some confusion as to the direction to take, but that might have been related to the signal quality at the time. Bottom line, if you are driving in Spain and you do not want to rent a GPS unit, buy the maps and take your Garmin Nuvi with you.

I have two more days on the road with these maps. It has been a bit frustrating. I am solo, so trying to read a map and drive isn't safe and I thought this would be the ticket. However, I have gotten more mixed up with this than I ever did with Michelin. Three big caveats: 1) It often doesn't match the turn number and the road number at roundabouts. So, if you don't know the road you want to take, don't believe it the first time. Drive all the way around the roundabout and make sure that you are taking the right road. In medieval town plans, there is no such thing as "go around the block" and at one point I spent one half hour getting back to where I needed to be to take the correct turn. 2) It often calls out a different name for the road than the one posted. 3) It will send you down pedestrian only streets, which you might not realize until you are indeed there. (They are not blocked completely for delivery trucks to get to businesses, and they might not have a "blocked entry" or one way sign for that reason.) It is a huge problem, so be very careful. I've not yet been arrested, but I have come close to crying!

If you do decide to take this, take good maps, too. Go through all the turns and routes before you start and compare them to the map. If it seems reasonable, let the Garmin clue you as to turns. However, you might need to negotiate on your own, too.

I did write to Garmin while on this trip, and the advice I was given was to reset my unit and to download an update. (Of course, I don't have that cable with me, but this should have been the current version, as I just purchased it.) Moreover, when I did make my hotel reservation today, I mentioned that I wanted directions because I had terrible luck with my....(and I couldn't remember the Spanish word), so the desk clerk said, "GPS?" Yes, it was not the first time he had heard that.

btw, I've used the US version of Garmin for a few years and have had none of these issues.

I purchased the download version of this direct from Garmin, which was explained as being the same thing. So here's a newsflash for Garmin: The Balearic Islands - Mallorca, Menorca, Ibiza, etc. - ARE PART OF SPAIN and have been since the Greeks and Romans were there. One of my destinations in Spain was to Mallorca, and guess what my Garmin GPS showed? I was in the middle of water. The Mediterranean surrounded me, no land anywhere. The Garmin was therefore completely useless. Not that the large island was difficult to manage, but it could have saved me a one hour detour and a few other navigational headaches.

On the mainland it worked more or less fine. Always a good idea to keep a detailed map with you, though, because the GPS directions can be off at times. Best points: Generally very helpful in big cities. E.g., I had a Sixt rental car, and I was instructed to return it to "Atocha" in Madrid. If someone just says "Atocha," it means (1) the large train station on the southeast side of the city or (2) Atocha street, a nearby large road running up the hill of the old part of the city. The car return location which the German company had designated as "Atocha" was a not well marked basement garage with a narrow, forbidding opening beneath a hotel off a very small plaza in an area of winding and twisting streets a long way from anything resembling "Atocha". I had to call the Sixt help line, get the actual address and plug it into the GPS to navigate my way there. (That's another hint for travelling in Spain: buy a $20 cell phone with pay by the minute card installed which you can add minutes to at just about every gas station, roadside restaurant or kiosks located all over the large cities.)

This GPS was also helpful while on the road, especially with a Michelin in hand: Look up out of the way restaurants, then cross check with the GPS's data base of restaurants, then hit "go". It got me to a way cool 18th century farmhouse cum Michelin recommended restaurant in a semi-rural area which no way would I have found otherwise.


I would have given four stars, but three since the product is misrepresented. It is NOT complete for all of Spain when it entirely leaves out the very popular and beautiful Balearics. I'm guessing that the Canary Islands are also not included. Garmin needs to disclose those deficiencies.

My wife and I always take our Garmin Nuvi with us whenever we have to rent a car on our vacations. We have been to Europe on two prior different occasions and on those two occasions we used regular paper maps. We just got back from vacationing in Spain and Portugal this month and before we left we purchased these Garmin Maps to try our Garmin Nuvi. We did take paper maps as a back up. I am happy to say, we didn't need our paper maps. The Spain and Portugal maps were not only a time saver and precise, but they were easy to use. They even made driving in small town roads really easy. We were able to find all of the towns we wanted to visit and were able to find major hotels, landmarks, and attractions that we were looking for, just remember that if you are looking for a list of similar items, such as "beaches". For example, in Portugal after realizing that you have to type in the word "Praia" all of the beaches we wanted to visit were listed. We made the mistake of typing in the name of the beach like Selama, but were taken to the actual town center and not the parking lot for the beach. Once we figured this out, getting directly to the beach was a breeze.

A second tip I would offer when renting a car in either country, is to use the your Garmin's "Where Am I" feature before driving off with your car from the rental car parking lot. This will give you a chance to "save" that actual location and make it easier to find when you return your rental car to the same location. We did this and I am glad we did because there were no signs directing you to the rental parking lot at the Seville train station were we returned our car.

I was really pleased with this purchase and highly recommend it for anyone planning to rent a car in either country.

Just got back from Southern Spain with my Garmin with spain 2009 micro chip. Once I was immediately out of Madrid, the Garmin tried taking me off the direct highways. This continued all week whenever we set out on an day excursion. To it's defense, is does say 2009. There is a ton of brand new highways that really speed up your trips. thank goodness we had contacts at the resort to get the right story for the highway.

IT was GREAT when we entered the cities of cordoba, grenada, malaga, ronde. It knew every important stop and turn which is very important in these ancient towns.

If there is a 2011 version, I really recommend a newer one if you are traveling across the country.

The product worked as expected and very well. I had used similar products in Australia as well as Ireland and the UK. Spain and Portugal have many motorways and well developed highways. The device took me along the best routes for city to city travel. Having a map and a mental template helps for dealing with ambiguities about routes and instructions.

One caveat relates to some of the cities in Spain and Portugal where there are complexities and changes due to street closures. Sometimes you have to try a map only approach, but if you find yourself in the same spot over and over and are not making progress, try a map or calling the destination and getting clarification about location.

Bought this map card for our Garmin 1350LMT for our 3-week trip last month. Along with it, we also used Michelin maps. We were in Madrid/Toledo (pedestrian mode only until the day we left Madrid via rental car from MAD to start our driving portion of our trip). We went to Segovia (stopping at all the usual touristy spots nearby like La Granja, El Escorial), Cordoba, Sevilla, Faro, Tavira, Jerez de la Frontera, Cadiz, Tarifa, Gibraltar, Marbella, Ronda, Granada, back to Madrid to pick up our kids from their Spanish Immersion program and to fly from there to Porto. Then we drove starting in Porto down to Nazare, Fatima, Alcobaca, Obidos, Cascais, Sintra, and Lisboa. The combination of the map card and the paper maps worked real well for us. There were only just 3 times that we can recall the map card had failed us: 1) between Tarifa and Gibraltar - it sent us to an exit that didn't existt (and we had to drive at least 5km or more to be able to turn around to locate the exit we need ourselves using our paper map) which we think was due to new construction of the freeway so the exits around there must have gotten moved around; 2) Tavira to Faro - it sent us driving to some small town near Faro instead of the Faro historic city center (but it could be that the address we have for this small museum we were looking for is incorrect); 3) Sevilla historic city center in automobile mode - it couldn't help guide us in our rental car well due to all the little alleys that we think have became pedestrain only alleys in early 2011 and so we ended up getting sent to an alley where we couldn't drive on as there were tables/chairs set up blocking our path (but it worked in pedestrian mode). Once arrived at most of these towns, we used our gps in pedestrian mode (sometimes along with various city maps from our hotel or in our travel guide book) and that probably have saved us many steps of walking in the wrong direction. To us, both this map card and the paper maps were money well spent as our vacation time never seems to be long enough to be wasting more time than needed figuring out how to get to where we want to visit.

This little microSD chip for our Garmin Nuvi 1350 GPS system was a lifesaver! We specifically bought the GPS for this trip since we would be driving from Madrid and heading north into the Basque country. We speak no Spanish and absolutely no Basque!! Our travel agent had outfitted us with TripTix thru Avis or some other service, so we thought we'd have an easy time of driving to our various destinations. We really didn't have a lot of experience with the Garmin ahead of time, so we were a little unsure of ourselves using it. It did have a hard time locating satellites initially, then seemed to get better. Once on the road, we quickly realized that our TripTix were worthless - the signs didn't match and we were totally confused, and it's not like you can backup on the highway to see just exactly what the last sign said!!! If it hadn't been for the Garmin map, we would have been totally lost and our trip would have been miserable. The hardest part was needing to have a specific address as a destination, when usually all we needed was the City Center so we could sightsee. We solved that problem by using the Garmin in conjunction with our Rick Steves guidebook: we found the address of anything in the general vicinity of our destination and just entered that as the address. In reading over other reviews, I now realize we could have used the Attractions setting and probably have found just exactly where we wanted to go. And, I agree that you should still also have a paper map to help with the navigation......you still have to use your brain!!! We're getting the Italy map next!!!

Invaluable but have some real gripes about it -- got it a month ago and it did not have the A29 (auatoroute) that goes North to Oporto -- my daughter's rented Garmin which returned messages that it had not been updated for more than a year had the A29. Also did not have the Holiday Inn Express near the airport and, because that hotel is on a street of the same name as another street in Lisbon, we spent a very unpleasant hour and a half searching for it after arriving at the wrong street.

The card is really easy to install but-- for the price --Garmin City Navigator 2010 Spain/Portugal microSD Card one expected the information to be current.