Seven days in Andalusia without turning it into a road-race

What to take away

• Two hotel changes, not four. Moving is the thing that makes a week feel like work.
• Alhambra Nasrid Palaces sell out weeks ahead. That booking sets your whole calendar.
• Cordoba is one night, not a day trip. The Mezquita at 08:30 is a different building.
• Trains beat a hire car for this route. Parking in all three cities is a punishment.
• Build the afternoons around shade, not around a checklist. May already hits 34 degrees.

The route everyone plans first, and why it fails

The first draft of this trip had six stops in seven days: Malaga, Ronda, Seville, Cordoba, Granada and a night back in Malaga for the flight. It is a route you see on a hundred blogs and it is basically a moving day with sightseeing attached.

Count the packing. Six hotels means six checkouts, six check-ins, six luggage handovers and roughly five hours of the week spent standing next to a suitcase. Add three of those days having a train in the middle and you get a holiday where the longest continuous block of free time is about four hours.

The version we ran instead moves twice. Three nights in Seville, one in Cordoba, three in Granada. Same three headline cities, one third of the logistics, and enough time in each place to have a second favourite bar.

• Seville: 3 nights. Big enough to reward an empty morning.
• Cordoba: 1 night. Enough for the Mezquita before the crowds.
• Granada: 3 nights. The Alhambra plus the parts people skip.

The Alhambra booking sets your entire week

The Alhambra sells timed entries for the Nasrid Palaces and they routinely sell out weeks in advance in spring and autumn. If you take nothing else from this, take this: fix that ticket first, then build the rest of the trip around it. Not the flights. Not the hotels. The ticket.

Buy from the official site. There is a wall of resellers who bundle the same ticket with a guide at three times the price, and some of them oversell. Tickets are name-bound and they check ID at the entrance, so book with the names on the passports.

Also check which entrance you need. The complex is large and the main ticket gate is not next to the Nasrid Palaces entrance. A taxi to the wrong gate is a twenty minute uphill walk with a timed slot ticking. We took the C30 minibus from Plaza Isabel la Catolica, which takes about fifteen minutes and drops you at the right end.

• Nasrid Palaces entry is a hard time window. Late means no entry.
• Book on the official Alhambra site with passport names.
• Allow 3.5 hours inside. Generalife, Alcazaba and the palaces.

Seville: three nights, one deliberately empty morning

Seville is compact and the useful hours are not the ones your calendar expects. Mornings are for anything with a queue or a roof. Between roughly 14:00 and 18:00 in May, the city is too hot to enjoy on foot and most of the interesting small places are shut anyway. Evenings start late and go long.

Book the Real Alcazar for the first slot of the day, around 09:30. By 11:00 the gardens are a slow-moving line of tour groups, and the same rooms that felt like a palace at 09:40 feel like an airport at 11:20. The cathedral and Giralda are the other queue worth an early ticket.

Then leave one morning completely empty. We did nothing on the Thursday until 13:00 and it was the best part of the week: coffee in Alameda, a wander through Macarena, a market lunch. Seville pays back aimless walking more than it pays back a schedule.

Cordoba is a night, not a day trip

The standard advice is to do Cordoba as a day trip from Seville, because the train takes about 45 minutes and it feels efficient. It is efficient. It also means you arrive at 10:30, which is exactly when the Mezquita fills up, and you leave at 18:00, which is exactly when the old town becomes pleasant.

Stay one night instead. The Mezquita opens for a free early window on weekday mornings, usually around 08:30 to 09:20, and walking into that forest of arches with maybe thirty other people in the building is a completely different experience to the 11:00 version.

The rest of Cordoba is small. The Jewish quarter, the Roman bridge at sunset, Palacio de Viana if you like courtyards, and dinner somewhere off Calle Cardenal Herrero. One night covers it comfortably and the second train leg to Granada takes under two hours.

Granada: the Alhambra is one morning of three days

People plan Granada as an Alhambra trip with two spare days attached. That is backwards. The Alhambra takes about three and a half hours and is best in the morning. The rest of Granada is where the trip actually happens.

Stay somewhere you can walk home from. The Albaicin is beautiful and the lanes are steep in a way that is charming at 11:00 and less charming at 01:00 after four glasses of wine. We stayed just below it, near Plaza Nueva, which meant every walk home was flat and every walk out was a choice.

And the tapas here are still free with a drink, which is genuinely unusual in Spain now. Order a beer, get a plate. Order four beers across four bars and you have had dinner for about twelve euros. Two of our group tried to book restaurants before the trip and cancelled all of them by Tuesday.

Trains, heat and the things that go wrong

Seville to Cordoba is around 45 minutes, Cordoba to Granada about an hour and forty. Book the Seville leg ahead if you need a specific departure for five people; the others have more flexibility. Renfe releases cheap fares roughly two months out and they climb steadily after that.

A hire car is a bad idea for this route. All three old towns are restricted traffic zones with camera enforcement, and the fines arrive at your home address four months later. If you want the white villages or Ronda, rent a car for one day from Seville and give it back the same evening.

The heat is the real constraint. In May we lost one afternoon to it entirely, which is fine if the plan expects it and miserable if the plan has you crossing town at 15:30. When we replanned the Wednesday around a 36 degree forecast, the afternoon stops moved indoors and the walking moved to 19:00. That took about a minute and saved the day.

Questions travellers ask

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