Chapter 1
Informaciones Prácticas
(Practical Information)
"Spanish courtesy decrees that a negative answer to your question 'When can you come?' is unacceptable. The electrician or plumber hates to disappoint you. Perhaps he really does mean to try and squeeze a visit to your house into his already overcrowded schedule, but experience will show that you really cannot rely on his mañana. If you are used to punctuality, this can be really frustrating. You sit at home waiting and no one appears; so you get fed up and venture out. When you come home, you find a note saying the equivalent of 'We came! Where were you?' Getting angry with the fellow in question is a waste of time. He will agree with everything you say, smile and tell you he'll come 'mañana- seguro' (tomorrow for sure) only to repeat the whole cycle. You simply have to learn to be extremely patient. Besides, giving way to anger or frustration will not endear you to the workman in question. If you want to make your stay in Spain a success, the first thing to get used to is mañana."
-Marie Louise Graff,
Culture Shock!: Spain
A-Z Informaciones Prácticas
A
Accommodations
If you arrive in any town in Northern Spain without having booked a room in advance, the local tourist office staff can assist you in finding accommodations. This assistance is more thorough and professional in the larger cities, but judging from my experience, the staff at even the smallest tourist office in the smallest comunidad autónoma in Spain will be happy to assist you in finding a place to stay. They may not place telephone calls for you or make reservations (especially if it's high season and they are busy), but they will tell you what choices are available, give directions, and generally help in any way they can. Unless you are traveling for an extended period of time throughout the region or throughout Spain, I don't recommend showing up without a room, especially during the summer months and especially in August, the month when all Europeans take their vacations. That said, Northern Spain is one of the few areas of the world where reservations are not essential in the off-season, and I have traveled there without making advance reservations for every night of my trip, with success. Still, keep in mind that many of the most wonderful lodgings are quite small, with only a few rooms, and can fill up fast during the so-named shoulder seasons, fall and spring. (During the winter months, don't be surprised if some places are closed entirely.) We all have a limited number of precious vacation days, and searching for a place to stay can be a most time-consuming and frustrating experience and certainly not what you came to Spain to do. Unless you're traveling around by train and a backpack and are going from youth hostel to youth hostel, you will probably want to carefully select the places you'll call home for a few days or longer.
Some might argue that the choice of a lodging isn't important, since we won't be spending much time in our room anyway; but I disagree. Meeting the owners of a family-run hotel or turismo rural property, getting to know the front desk clerk at a posh parador, or simply returning to a nicely kept room for an afternoon siesta are all parts of a memorable and enjoyable trip. I can find no reason not to devote some time to researching where you will stay-the only problem may be narrowing your choices in certain areas because of the many great available options. (Travelers seeking luxury, however, should note that this type of accommodation is not thick on the ground, so to speak, in the north, so you will have fewer choices, making your task much simpler.)
You should keep in mind that the Spanish government's star rating system for lodging establishments awards stars based on the number and range of amenities available and that it pays special attention to the availability of air conditioning, elevators, banquet rooms, hair dryers, and the like. But stars have nothing at all to do with charm or quality of hospitality. All of Spain's lodgings display a blue plaque near the entrance with a large white H (for hotel), P (for pensión), Hs (for hostal), F (fonda), or CH (casa de huéspedes) and the gold stars (from one to five) it has been awarded just beneath the letter. Generally speaking, a pensión, fonda, or casa de huéspedes is a budget accommodation. Some hotels too may be budget accommodations (if the letter R, for residencia, appears after an H, no meal service is offered), especially if they are one-star establishments. Again, speaking generally, most one-star establishments are equated with simple accommodations and usually offer shared bathroom facilities. Two- and three-star establishments can be bed-and-breakfast or regular hotel accommodations, usually with a private bath. Four- and five-star hotels represent the highest standards of service and can be quite luxurious or less so. You may, in your research and travels, discover places that are not classified and therefore have no rating; this is not because the tourist board has rejected them but rather because their owners have not requested to be reviewed. I have stayed in a number of places with no rating, in Spain and elsewhere around the Mediterranean, and they were all perfectly fine and clean, some even quite deserving of two or three stars. All of this is to say that you cannot depend on Spain's star rating system alone. The only amenity standing between a three-star place and one awarded four stars may be a swimming pool, or a bigger bathtub, or a ceiling fan. Penelope Casas, in her excellent book Discovering Spain, notes that "a small luxury hotel that lacks dining facilities may receive only four stars, and yet its prices may be super-deluxe . . . a five-star hotel that has not been renovated in twenty years and is drab, musty, and outdated may retain its original rating. You can, however, trust those hotels (there are very few of them) designated Gran Lujo. They take great care with every detail, and are often decorated with antiques or costly furnishings, and like to pamper their clients. Generally they are very expensive-but not all of them are." Far better is to ignore the stars and read a thorough description of a place so you know exactly what you're paying for. Following are the types of accommodations you'll find in this part of Spain:
Albergues juveniles (youth hostels) are one of the most popular choices for those seeking budget accommodations (and if it's been a while since your salad days, keep in mind that hostels are not just for the under-thirty crowd). I would take back in a minute my summer of vagabonding around Europe, meeting young people from all over the world, and feeling that my life was one endless possibility. I now prefer to share a room with my husband rather than five twentysomethings, but hosteling remains a fun and exciting experience. Younger budget travelers need no convincing that hosteling is the way to go, but older budget travelers should bear in mind that some hostels do offer individual rooms, reserved mostly for couples or small families. Do compare costs, as sometimes hostel rates are the same as those for a room in a real (albeit inexpensive) hotel, where you can reserve in advance and comfortably keep your luggage. (When hosteling, you must pack up your luggage every day, and you can't make a reservation.) Additionally, most hostels have an eleven p.m. curfew. Petty theft-of the T-shirts-stolen-off-the-clothesline variety-seems to be more prevalent than it once was, and it would be wise to sleep and shower with your money belt close at hand. There are no age limits or advance bookings, but many hostels require membership in Hostelling International, whose national headquarters are located at 733 Fifteenth Street NW, Suite 840, Washington, DC 20005; 202-783-6161; fax: -6171; www.hiayh.org. Hours are 8:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, with customer service staff available until 7:00 p.m. An HI membership card is free for anyone up to his or her eighteenth birthdate. Annual fees are $25 for anyone over eighteen and $15 for those fifty-five and over. HI also publishes several guidebooks, one of which is Europe and the Mediterranean. Its price is either $10.95 or $13.95, depending on whether you purchase it from the main office or from one of its council affiliates around the country. (HI staff can give you the addresses and phone numbers for the affiliates nearest you.) The organization that oversees hostels in Spain is the Red Española de Albergues Juveniles (Spanish Network of Youth Hostels), and there are a number of hostels in Northern Spain. Additionally, during the summer months, student dormitory accommodations are often available in towns and cities with colleges and universities. The best resource for learning about these rooms is the local tourist office, and the staff at the North American Spanish tourist offices should be able to put you in touch with any of the local offices in Northern Spain (see the entry for Tourist Offices).
Bed and breakfast accommodations in Spain may be either simple or fancy, and they are offered in casas rurales or in small inns and hotels. Note that bed and breakfast establishments and casas rurales are not interchangeable: While casas rurales properties may be classified as bed and breakfasts, bed and breakfast places are often not casas rurales properties. The best guide, in my opinion, for seeking out B&B accommodations is Alastair Sawday's Special Places to Stay: Spain (Alastair Sawday Publishing, Bristol, U.K.; distributed in North America by Globe Pequot Press, Guilford, CT). I'm a big fan of this series (I've used the Paris, France, and Italy editions with great success), and it seems to me that the majority of these places do not appear in other accommodation guides. Subtitled A Feast of Over 300 Wonderful Places All Over Mainland Spain and Its Islands, the book actually features small hotels and inns in addition to B&Bs, so it is a worthwhile resource in both categor...
