Customer Reviews

Northern Spain

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After much search for a book on Northern Spain. I believe this Cardogan guide to be one of the better ones. It does provide some essentials: overview and history of Spain's northern regions, culture, cuisine and travel highlights. Also good recommendations on where to stay and have a friendly drink with the locals.

A few drawbacks: lack of comprehensive maps of regions in relation to Spain as a country and more specific maps of towns that you may want to visit.

All in all this is the best guide I've found available to get you started and excited about your trip as well as help you focus your travels to a particular area in Northern Spain if time is a concern.

The collaborative effort of Dana Facaros and Michael Pauls, Northern Spain is a detailed, comprehensive, portable, and "user friendly" travel guide to medieval villages, churches, cathedrals, legends, coastline, art collections, museums and so much more to be found in beautiful northern reaches of Spain. Offering 400 hand-picked lodgings, 300 recommended restaurants, as well as numerous bars and cafes, thirty maps, Spanish language tips, solid travel advice, and more, Northern Spain is an excellent consultation resource for vacationers and business travelers alike. Also very highly recommended for travelers in Spain are the regionally specialized companion guidebooks by Dana Facaros and Michael Pauls: Andalucia and Bilbao & The Basque Lands.

Facaros and Pauls are erudite people, who unfortunately do not always understand the delicate balance between good depth of knowledge, and useless obscure references. Furthermore, they made a few mistakes, and a subtle anti-Catholocism was evident in their writing (i.e. by not mentioing that Covadonga is a pilgrammage destination where a virgin's apparition occurred, and that the Oviedo's cathedral hosts the suderio santo, the rag Jesus wore while on his way to the Crucifixion). We sometimes doubted that the authors had actually visited the places described within, or if so, they they did not understand the guides! While not the best for logistics, this guide does offer the best quantity of history per page.