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Portugal and Spain: How we are spending our time

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The Westin Palace hotel, Madrid, Spain

The Westin Palace, Madrid – our hotel for two nights.

For our upcoming trip to Portugal and Spain, we will be gone for a total of 13 nights.  While I originally wanted to stick to three or four cities, it was so hard to limit the options.  I want to share the itinerary for our two week vacation, since we’ve been sharing bits and pieces of the travel-planning process:

Lisbon, Portugal – 3 nights

  • Arriving: around 8:30am at the Lisbon Airport
  • What to Do: explore the neighboorhoods, enjoy the food and wine (and hopefully experience Fado!), visit Belém, visit Sintra (as a day trip)
  • Leaving: around 9:30 from the Lisbon Airport

Barcelona, Spain – 3 nights

  • Arriving: around 12:30 at the Barcelona airport
  • What to Do: nothing is set in stone, but we plan on visiting some of the popular sights like Sagrada Familia and Parc Guell, hanging out at the beach, exploring La Rambla, enjoying tapas
  • Leaving: around 9:30am – this ticket is already booked! Check out Ryan’s post here on direct online booking to potentially save a lot of money on train tickets. 

Sevilla, Spain – 2 nights

  • Arriving: around 2:00pm at the Sevilla train station
  • What to Do: Alcazar, Flamenco, food!
  • Leaving: We aren’t sure yet.  There are a few train options we’re looking at – one leaving around 7am, one that would leave around 9:30am and one that would leave around 12pm.

Granada, Spain – 3 nights

  • Arriving: Depends on the train we decide to take from Sevilla, but we would get in around 10:30am, 1:30pm, or 3pm at the Granada train station.
  • What to Do: the Alhambra, a possible day trip to Nerja
  • Leaving: around 9:00am from the Granada train station.  This ticket has also already been booked. 

Madrid, Spain – 2 nights

  • Arriving: around 1:30pm at the Madrid train station
  • What to Do: tapas, tapas, tapas! Ok, and the Royal Palace, Prado, and 
  • Staying: At The Westin Palace, Madrid.  This is the only hotel we haven’t written a post on, so I wanted to share the information now.  Long story short:  Starwood had a “points and cash” option for the nights we will be staying (pay partially with starpoints, partially with “cash” in USD – this is usually an awesome deal) and we couldn’t pass it up.  The location is great, so honestly, we didn’t even look at other options. 
  • Leaving: around 11:30am from the Madrid airport.

We’ll continue to do research on activities, places to eat, and things to see, but we look forward to changing our plans according to what we want to do while we’re there!

Hotel Casa 1800: Sevilla and Granada

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Right after we booked our plane tickets to Portugal and Spain, Ryan and I went crazy looking for hotels. Ryan found the Hotel Casa 1800 – one in Sevilla and one in Granada. Both have great location (we think) and Ryan was especially in love with the De Luxe room at the Sevilla location. And I don’t know if I can blame him. Here are a few pictures of the Superior Room, from the hotel wesbite: 

The best part is the terrace with the jacuzzi tub. But, this isn’t our honeymoon and, while that doesn’t mean we can’t stay in nice hotels, we are trying not to go over-the-top and spend too much money on hotel rooms. Especially since we won’t be spending much time there anyway! This room was over 200 euros a night, which isn’t horrible, but we’re trying to keep costs lower than that. As of now, we have not made a decision on Sevilla, but we’re hoping to do so in the near future.

So now to Granada. I’m not sure which hotel Ryan found first, but the hotel website provides links to both, so it was natural for us to be curious about the hotel in each city. Here are a few pictures from the hotel site:

It does look amazing. But there are so many places to stay in both Sevilla and Granada, and it seems silly to stay in the same hotel in two different cities. Especially since we don’t know what they are really like. We’ve looked at more hotels, especially in Granada, so I’ll spend some time comparing the options.