Barcelona Video Guide

Barcelona
The enchanting city of Barcelona is a visual delight, and has an atmosphere that combines elegance and sophistication with provincial charm. In exploring its streets you’ll discover medieval romance in its Gothic quarter and the awe-inspiring delights of the fantastic and sometimes outrageous Art Nouveau architecture of Gaudi and his contemporaries.The funicular up to Tibidabo, or the cable car up Montjuic both offer breathtaking views over this city. Its skyline is perhaps most famous for Antoni Gaudi’s masterwork, the still incomplete church of the Sagrada Familia, as well as the city’s huge Gothic cathedral. The artistic legacy of Barcelona is one of the city’s most appealing offerings, with museums containing extensive collections of the works of Miro and Picasso.Barcelona is also a shopping Mecca, with the city’s flair for style reflected in its numerous boutiques and markets, open late into the afternoons. As the sun sets, and the city’s many bars and restaurants open, the night comes alive. Dinner is served at any time between nine o’clock and midnight, and the festivities around the bars and nightclubs carry on well into the early hours of the morning.
Barcelona is the commercial centre of the popular holiday region known as the Costa Brava, the northernmost Mediterranean seafront in Spain, as well as the Costa Dorada to the south. The coast is dotted with popular resort towns, many retaining their age-old charm, which can be easily reached from the city.

Valencia Video Guide

Valencia
If you are visiting Valencia for the first time or you’ve heard about this great city, the first thing that will catch your attention is the incredible light that reaches every corner, the great weather that lasts all year long, or perhaps the friendly nature of its people. All this is true, as is the fact that together with Barcelona, these two cities are the most important on the Spanish Mediterranean coast, and, within the last few years, Valencia has grown tremendously.But perhaps what might surprise you even more is its incredible diversity. Moving from one area of the city to another means being surrounded by completely different urban landscapes; so much so that you might even think you’re in a different city altogether.

Marbella Video Guide

Marbella
MARBELLA stands in considerable contrast, after another sequence of apartment-villa urbanizaciones, to most of what’s come before. It is undisputedly the “quality resort” of the Costa del Sol, where restaurants and bars are more stylish and everything costs considerably more. It has the highest per capita income in Europe and more Rolls Royces than any European city apart from London (although many of the classy cars here are rumoured to have been stolen elsewhere and re-registered in Spain). Recently the Spanish government and local police have been exercised by the arrival in Marbella of Russian and Italian mafia bosses who have been buying up property and using Marbella as a base to control their criminal empires, while in an ironic twist of history, there’s been a massive return of Arabs to the area, especially since King Fahd of Saudi Arabia built a White House lookalike, complete with adjacent mosque, on the town’s outskirts.

Sevilla Video Guide

Sevilla
“Seville,” wrote Byron, “is a pleasant city, famous for oranges and women.” And for its heat, he might perhaps have added, since SEVILLA’s summers are intense and start early, in May. But the spirit, for all its nineteenth-century chauvinism, is about right. Sevilla has three important monuments and an illustrious history, but what it’s essentially famous for is its own living self – the greatest city of the Spanish south, of Carmen, Don Juan and Figaro, and the archetype of Andalucian promise. This reputation for gaiety and brilliance, for theatricality and intensity of life, does seem deserved. It’s expressed on a phenomenally grand scale at the city’s two great festivals – Semana Santa (in the week before Easter) and the Feria de Abril (which starts two weeks after Easter Sunday and lasts a week). Either is worth considerable effort to get to. Sevilla is also Spain’s second most important centre for bullfighting, after Madrid.

Malaga Video Guide

Malaga
MALAGA seems at first an uninviting place. It’s the second city of the south (after Sevilla), with a population of half a million, and is also one of the poorest: official unemployment figures for the area estimate the jobless at one in four of the workforce. Yet though many people get no further than the train or bus stations, and though the clusters of high-rises look pretty grim as you approach, it has its attractions. The elegant central zone has a number of interesting churches and museums, not to mention the birthplace of Picasso and the new Picasso Museum, housing an important collection of works by M?laga’s most famous son. Around the old fishing villages of El Palo and Pedregalejo, now absorbed into the suburbs, are a series of small beaches and a paseo lined with some of the best fish and seafood caf?s in the province. And overlooking the town and port are the formidable Moorish citadels of the Alcazaba and Gibralfaro – excellent introductions to the architecture before pressing on to the main sites at Cordoba and Granada.