Customer Reviews

Madrid (Eyewitness Top 10 Travel Guides)

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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. Eyewitness is not perfect, but it's the best one that I saw.

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.

This is the book you put in your coat pocket and take with you when you leave the hotel. It has the best maps, the top sights listed and detailed, the right amount of history, the best book. It is also beautifuly done, and is fun to look at for the pictures and maps. If you are visiting Madrid, you are probably also visiting Toledo and Segovia, and this book covers them as well in excellent fashion. I visited that area for 10 days, and this is the book I had on me every day. The book improves the experience of being there.

I spent the first week of my vacation on my own in Madrid. Since every street in the Old Town looks the same as every other, good maps are essential. I highly recommend this guidebook for its accurate maps, ease of use, convenient size and beautiful photography.

Accurate Maps: Every street was just as pictured, right down to the drawings of suggested sights. Local Madrileños nodded in approval as they shared my guidebook with their friends.

Ease of Use: Unlike other bulky travel guides, this slim guidebook is easy to slip into a medium size purse or backpack. The included page-keepers made it easy to go back to the same map again and again. I enjoyed my afternoon as other tourists stood on streetcorners trying to find their way using ordinary maps. Another American tourist preferred my Madrid guidebook to her husband's text-saturated guides.

Beautiful photography: It's helpful to see pictures of foods with English descriptions since many restaurants don't have menus in English.

The pictures of buildings are placed right with the featured area maps, making a professional guide rather unnecessary. I enjoyed my unhurried stroll the the old town, something I would have been unable to do without such a fantastic guidebook. This guidebook is also a great supplement to guided tours, providing a lasting memory of my travels...all the details we so quickly forget.

I must mention the restaurant lists in the back. The restaurant Casa Labra was easy to find, close to my hotel, and within the price range specified. Although the croquetes bacalao were very good, I didn't find the atmosphere of the tapas room to be at all inviting.

Overall rating of 5 stars is well-deserved.

This is the most entertaining of all guide books on Madrid I have ever read. The accuracy is incredible, it really gave me the feel of the city before i visited. It provided me with the knowledge to explore the sights before I had even reached them. Excellent!!!

This map was worth over its weight in gold in Madrid. The idea is excellent. The streets are large enough and the laminated paper makes it usable even in the rain and it also can fold in any direction so that you can slip it into your inside pocket while the section your interested in is just a peek away at all times (saves the tourist look)...GENIUS...my friends swept all the bookstores in madrid looking for one just like it . only problem is you get spoiled and wish there was a map like that for every city.

I spent two days in Madrid in November 2002 with this guidebook. I found it to be well-organized and readable, with photos accompanying the text. With this guide, it didn't take long to gain a basic understanding of the history of the city and the different neighborhoods. The restaurant listings were particularly helpful.

There were two downsides, in my opinion. One is that there is no pull-out map. The map pages are integrated with the rest of the book. Second, the prices in the book are given in pesetas, not in Euros. I found that hotels, restaurants, etc. were all quoting prices in Euros, making the guidebook slightly less user-friendly. Still, the printed prices seemed to give a good idea of relative cost.

Overall, a good guidebook, but be sure to pick up a map when you arrive in Madrid.

This guidebook is invaluable in terms of detail but is also beautifully organized. The photos and maps are wonderful. Top notch guide.

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Summary:
Every Dorling Kindersley Guide has been a great and interesting book... and delightful to have and use, even if you are not traveling to that location, but are only interested in learning more!

The Guides are well organized in a logical and easy to follow manner. They are beautifully illustrated, well developed with accurate information (it is unusual for hotel and restaurant information to be that accurate), have enough history to help the reader understand the people and cultural background, and have a lot of useful travel information and useable maps in the appendixes.

The really great attraction to this book is several fold; it is:
............Very complete
............Easy to read
............Beautifully and artistically completed
............Good shopping, safety and other tips
............Gorgeous photographs too numerous to list.

Specifics:
The guides are organized as follows:

How to use this guide
Introduction to Historical and Geographical information
Geographical Regions
Introduction to Madrid
............Putting Madrid on the Map
............History of Madrid
............Madrid at a Glance
............Madrid Through the Year

............Madrid Area by Area, each section includes:
........................Introduction to street by street area
........................Detailed pictorials of area buildings
........................Architectural drawings, pictures, cut-aways of buildings

........................Specific stops, historical monuments, churches, buildings, etc.

Madrid Sections Reviewed:
........................Old Madrid
........................Bourbon Madrid
........................Around La Castellana
........................Further Afield
........................Beyond Madrid

Travelers Needs - includes full list with rankings and notes
............Hotels
............Restaurants, cafes, bars
............Shopping
............Entertainment

............Outdoor activities

Survival Information
............Practical
........................Tourist info., Etiquete, Personal Security and Health
........................Currencies, Telephones, misc info.
............Travel Information (Getting to Madrid )
............Street Maps (Getting Around Madrid )

............General Index
............Phrase Book

Discussion:
The book begins with "Introducing Madrid", including a complete map, a review, the city's history, and Madrid thought the Year - including events, etc.

Areas with an "At a glance" overview, then has subsections of specific blocks, or forums, then specific locations, churches, historical monuments, bridges, galleries, etc.

Architectural reviews include various views, and cutaways; given greater understanding and better perspective. They are all attractive, if not works of art - honestly.

The travelers' Info. offers good and valid info. on prices, currencies, customs, important words, etc. I have used the reviews on hotel's restaurants and nightclubs, in most European cities, and Dorling has yet to disappoint me. I have found they were useful and accurate, and helpful with my touring and site decisions.

The books are so well thought-out that it has multiple maps, with various lookup tables, and the book's flaps are designed to be used as bookmarks for map pages.

Negative:
The only negative with this book is that it is substantial with good quality paper, and is therefore heavier than other travel books.

Conclusion:
Each book in this series is a great help, and beautiful collectible resource. As the President, CEO of an International Meeting Planning Corporation we have many resources and techniques to learn about places we have meetings / groups at as well as the cities and sights. But, as a traveler, this book really is top notch and I would recommend it to anyone going on a personal trip, or wanting to learn about a city, or location. We have used some of these books to augment our research to investigate cities for our groups.

This was a nice guide for a 2 day trip to madrid -- the monument descriptions & photos were enjoyable & the walking tours were fun. It was very nice to have pictures of each key sight next to it's description so we could be sure were were looking at the right place.
However, we also used this book to navigate to our hotel. Big, big mistake. In this guide, hotels are not marked on the map, they are located by quadrant (e.g. Map5 D-3). But our hotel was very far from where the book said it was; it was 3-4 map-quadrants away, which we found only by using the address & after a 30 minute walk with our luggage. FYI: unlike in the US, addresses do not go up by 100 per block. Going from 85 Gran Via in the old quarter to 15 Gran Via is about a 2 mile walk.

We recently traveled to Spain spending most of our time in Madrid and Andalusia. We really liked the Eyewitness Travel book on Madrid. Our hotel had already been booked and we generally like to "find" restaurants after a day of wandering, so we cannot comment on the hotel/restaurant section. The book was very useful for providing information on sites, routes, history etc. A minor issue is that one of the walking routes was very hard to follow, the map in the book showed us taking the "next" right, while there were actually several streets until we should have turned right. A real strength of the book was the "day trip" section. We relied heavily on this book while visiting Toledo and Segovia. This book worked very well for our stay in Madrid.