europe

I can honestly say that no other brand of travel guide will give you the feel of a country more than DK's Eyewitness series. Eyewitness Spain is a beautiful book that uses excellent pictures, maps, and illustrations more than words to bring across the FEEL of Spain.

When planning a trip to Spain, I would reccomend this book along with the Rough Guide to Spain as an unbeatable duo. Whereas Rough Guide provides you with the nitty-gritty and exhaustive traveling advice, Eyewitness Spain will ensure that you will be anticipating your trip like none other.

The most aesthetically pleasing of all the Spanish Travel Guides, Eyewitness Spain is a beautiful book to read, whether it's employed on the plane there or on the coffee table at home.

I think the title of my review wraps it all up: the eyewitness guide to Spain is a work of graphic art. Its highlight is probably the great work on the maps, both small and large scale, which are of great help as you navigate around the citise and towns looking for the hot spots. As a tool for reaching all of the sights you want to see, I would say that the Eyewitness Guide is among the best, with its close-up street maps, neighborhood maps and public transportation guides. In addition to this, as another positive comment I would say that it is a great guide to take on a trip if you don't have much time and you need information presented in an easy-to-read, simple manner. The drawings and photos, and the way they are laid out, is very appealing.

The advantages stop there, however. If you really want to get to know a city, town or region, you simply need more in-depth historical and cultural information on the sights you are seeing. Most of the descriptions of places in the Eyewitness Guide for Spain do not stretch beyond a paragraph or two, which is quite superficial in my opinion. The country is simply to big to be covered in this sort of book with so many nice pictures and drawings, but so little of the written word that you will need as you travel around.

If you really want to know about the history behind the church, monument, museum or park you have traveled so far to see, you will definitely need another guidebook to give you any kind of detail, since the information here is utterly superficial. This flaw becomes far worse when you read the sections on sights that are off the beaten track (which are so many!). The descriptions become utterly superficial, with sometimes no more than a sentence dedicated to a whole town or village filled with things to see.

VERY harsh critique also for the hotel and restaurant information, which is limited to places designed for the rich and famous, or at least the very upper of the upper-middle class, especially in a country like Spain, which has so much to offer at a lower price but with high quality. The best guides give you a little information on all styles of lodging and food, from low budget to luxury, but these guides make little effort to do so, and even the information on the laps of luxury is limited to little symbols, instead of providing descriptions like other guides do. If you rely on this book for advice, you will think Spain is outrageously expensive, and this simply is not true.

With this combination of characteristics, I think Eyewitness is good to take along for a short trip in which you have little time to spend seeing the city and you don't really care about getting any deep information on what you're seeing. Otherwise, keep looking for another guidebook, ESPECIALLY if you are going anywhere outside of the big cities.

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