Customer Reviews

Northern Spain, 6th (Cadogan Guide Northern Spain)

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I really appreciate the Cadogan Guides, including this one, for the in-depth information about sights and history, along with some information on hotels and restaurants. This guide provides far more detail and is more regionally specific than any other guide I discovered. What isn't clear, however, unless one "looks inside" is that the book includes only Galicia, Asturias, Cantabria, Castille y Leon, and as far east as the Basque area. It does NOT cover Catalunya. For great detail and sights that other guidebooks may not point out, as well as very interesting descriptions, I highly recommend this Cadogan Guide of Northern Spain.

We just completed a two week trip across (mostly) northern Spain and used this as one of our guides. It was very helpful in planning, with pretty decent recommendations for both hotels and restaurants. It provided very interesting background information on many of the sights and areas covered within. It is very well written, with some incisive analysis.

The book does have some downsides. The biggest is that some fairly large cities that are covered in the guide book (Oviedo and A Coruna, for example) do no have maps included with the coverage. So you'll need a map from another source to find the hotel the guide recommended you. Additionally, even for the cities that have maps, they don't always align with the recommendations. So, for example, just finding an exciting-sounding seafood place on the provided map can become a real exercise in frustration.

Also, while this has been updated since it was published in 2008, though, some of the information is getting dated. For example, it underestimated by about 30 euros (per person) the price of a restaurant in Santiago de Compostela. The accuracy of hotel websites listed is also somewhat hit-or-miss.

Hopefully another version will come out soon to deal with the datedness. As for the maps...find another source before you go. Don't do what we did and arrive in a town believing you can find a bus station because it is "near" the train station, only to wander aimlessly for 20 minutes before finding help.