Customer Reviews

Lonely Planet Madrid (Lonely Planet Travel Guides)

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

 

 

I am an experienced traveler (30+ countries) who is nearing retirement and plan to travel extensively, who has recently become obsessed about finding "good" guidebooks. So this review is a comparison of the books I looked at for Madrid.

I started with the Insight Guide. I was seeking to get background, history, etc. The Insight Guides seem to vary enormously from one to the next in both quality and orientation. I think they are good for an entire country if you are trying to decide where in the country or what parts you want to see. I thought the guide for Madrid was useless. It provided very little information about the city or the culture. It seemed to be best if you were planning on moving to Madrid and wanted to find out the differences between the various suburban areas. I suggest you forget this one.

I looked at the Mini-Rough Guide. I didn't like the format and it was too terse for my taste. In my opinion, Rough Guide still needs to produce a guide for Madrid that is a regular, not a mini Rough Guide. The LP Guide to Madrid seemed pretty mediocre. The stiff covers also made it awkward to use or hold open to a particular page. The information and descriptions were inadequate compared to some other guides. The Eyewitness Guide to Madrid is, I think, the best overall guide to Madrid. (Generally I prefer Eyewitness guides for City's much more than as a guide for an entire country.) The maps are good, the pictures of the food and other items are very helpful. The hotels and restaurant sections were pretty good, but not great. If you are looking for hostels, you will need the LP guide. Eyewitness does not give great historical depth, but it gives you some, probably enough for most tourists. Guide Books are not the best source for detailed historical and cultural information anyway. The Time Out guide was almost like a tourist's yellow pages, primarily a listing of hotels, restaurants, sites, services, etc. It had the best listing of restaurants and hotels and covered all price ranges. It wasn't as good as Eyewitness is describing the things to see and do.

I ended up getting the Eyewitness Guide to use while sightseeing, supplemented by the Time Out guide for picking hotels, restaurants and being able to look up things. Another reviewer recommended this same combination in order to visit Tapas bars. I'm not that much into Tapas, but I still think these two are the best combo.

Incidentally, the Spain Rough and LP guides Madrid sections do not cover Madrid as well as the Madrid-only guides. You are looking at a 60-page section, compared to the Madrid-only guides of around 300 pages length.

Looking at the dates, it seems like the reader reviews for this book are all for the old guide. The new version just came out, and I think it looks and reads a lot better, so maybe it's time to put up some new reader reviews.

I bought this book recently (the new edition). I have read through it in planning my upcoming trip. Although I have yet to test the accuracy of the information in person, the book strikes me as practical. First, the book is paperback and fairly slender-- so not too bulky or heavy to actually carry around while you're traveling. The second thing that struck me is that it provides maps, including a metro line map. Although the maps may not be the most user friendly with their small print, they'll do fine for the trip planning stage of the trip (I usually get a good city map for navigation once I arrive to my destination city). The sections seem thorough, with an entire chapter on the history of the city. I was pleased with the day trip chapter as well, which lists many options for day trips, how you can get there, what you can do there, and how long it takes to travel there.
As far as the accuracy issue, I have yet to find a guidebook that is completely accurate. That being the case, I view them as one source of information among many and do not rely exclusively on a single guidebook.

This is a decent book, but as others have mentioned, LP just doesn't do as good a job on their European guides as they do for those on the developing world. The maps are what convinced me to buy this guide over the Rough Guide/Frommers/Rick Steves books on Madrid, though even those have gone backwards now that LP has traded the full color maps of yesteryear for black and white (with a bit of blue) versions. Who thought that was a good idea?

Now about the book: I personally feel that Anthony Ham spent a bit too much time covering high-end boutique shopping and five star dining at the expense of the nitty-gritty practical knowledge and advice which can only be gleaned through experience and is therefore invaluable for newbies in any given city. Are 100 euro meals and 1000 euro suits and dresses really what most Lonely Planeteers are after? I'd venture otherwise. How about telling vegetarians (and other felafel) fans about the wonderful branch of Maoz (the only one in Madrid) just off the Puerta del Sol where a hungry budget traveler can get an enormous felafel pita with about fifteen toppings for around 4 euros? In a city where you'll be hard pressed to find a decent meal for under 10 euros, this is exactly the kind of information that most travelers need, IMHO.

Anyway, this book got me around Madrid and Mr. Ham was pretty spot-on regarding the character/vibrations of the individual neighborhoods. That said, I definitely think there's room for improvement. I just don't get why the LP guides for Europe are almost always lackluster in comparison to the ones they publish for the parts of the world where gathering information would presumably be a lot harder to do. It's just another one of life's little mysteries, I guess...

Over the summer, my family and I spent two weeks in Madrid and this guide was totally helpful. We were staying with a Spanish family, but they weren't always around to help us out with finding places to go and transportation. The Metro is so convenient and this guide was a total help in using the Metro because it had maps and at each location description is the stop you need for the Metro. There were also some day trips inside the book so you could venture out of Madrid. As we walked around the city and get hungry, we were able to look up restaurants in the book in the area we were. There also were cultural information such as tipping and local holidays, festivals, and markets. We found it easy to navigate through the city and visit all the places we wanted. This book was easy to use and full of information on cultural and touristic topics.

First and foremost, this book states that the Madrid Metro is "safe". This is not true for foreign males! The central part of the Metro (near the art museums and the city center) is rife with pick-pockets. We caught 1 attempt each day, or first 3 days there. The perpetrators were not, as some claim, "South Americans".

Many restaurants listed are gone. All prices in the book are quoted in pisitas, which is annoying now that everything is in Euros.

The maps are barely useful, being rather too small to read street names easily.

I have enjoyed other Lonley Planet Guides very much, but this one is a real stinker.

I spent 5 days in Madrid last August and found this book to be a useful guide. it will lead you to a good time in madrid, which consists of going to the museums, a bull fight and eating a lot. also, i recommend going to one of the sherry bars mentioned in the book.

Even though I had the most recent edition of this book, I still encountered some major problems with it. Most notably, all of the medical information was sorely out of date and difficult to find. (That's one of those things that you hope you never have to use, but when you need it... you want it to be there, and accurate.) Thank heavens my travel companion spoke Spanish, as the guidebook was a complete loss in directing us to a hospital or helping us to navigate the emergency room.

Aside from that obvious problem, the organization of this book is highly unusual and difficult to follow. There's an emphasis on eating establishments and bars in particular. We couldn't find one restaurant the guidebook advised (despite consulting many Spaniards), and another that the guidebook raved about was over-run with tourists. I realize the irony in stating that, in that I myself was a tourist, but there was not a single local Spaniard in the restaurant.

Honestly, with tripadvisor to help you find the best hotels and restaurants in a more adequately vetted and up-to-date fashion, I'm having trouble understanding what the point of this book was. I bought it because I wasn't traveling around Spain, but just flying into and out of Madrid, but it doesn't help with practical information.

I have been reading the last 3 editions of Lonely Planet Madrid and it contains tons of innaccurate information over and over.
As in Spain one can not fine a lot of Australian wines, they draw the conclusion that "Spaniards do not take leaps into the unknown"
It is like everytime they make a new edition the stay 2 days in Madrid and take everything of the last edition, fading Madrid's feeling, culture, way of life and thinking.

Photography is also awful but this is just my opinion.

Not a bad book. I bought it because of its size but much of it was history on Madrid. I think it'd be better to buy the Spain book instead.