Lonely Planet Walking in Spain 3rd Ed.: 3rd Edition: Amazon.ca: Miles Roddis: Books

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...Lonely Planet for honesty, history, irreverence and budget.' --Esquire

Book Description

This guide features: detailed descriptions of 57 great walks; precise two-colour maps for every walk; complete coverage of the pilgrims route, Camino de Santiago; illustrated guide to Spain's wildlife plus complete information on accommodation and transport options.

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Front Cover | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index

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Customer Reviews

8 Reviews

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(4)
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3.6 out of 5 stars (8 customer reviews)

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5.0 out of 5 stars Great and lightweight, Oct 26 2003

By

Stephen Taylor (Chapel Hill, North Carolina) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lonely Planet Walking in Spain 3rd Ed.: 3rd Edition (Paperback)

I think some of the reviewers' comments below are probably correct but none of them are serious drawbacks. True, the maps in this guide are not EXTREMELY detailed, but if you want a really detailed topographical map, you can always get one. The actual trail descriptions in this book are painstakingly detailed -- it even gets tedious. So if you can't find every tree along your route marked on the maps here, just use your imagination a little and wing it.

"Walking in Spain" describes thirty or so of the best trails in Spain, highlighting trails in Mallorca, the Alpujarras Mountains of Andalusia, the area around Valencia, Castile's Sierra de Gredos and Sierra de Guadarrama, the Spanish Pyrenees, Galicia, and the Cordillera Cantábrica. Hikes vary from longer hauls like the 23-day Pyrenean traverse and the month-long Camino de Santiago to shorter 5- and 6-day hikes and walks you can do in less than a day.

I've used the guide to get some great ideas for an upcoming hiking trip to the Alpujarras Mountains and the Sierra Nevada and have found it extremely useful. It lists numerous places to stay, ranging from 30- and 40-euro "pensiones" to dirt-cheap hikers' "albergues". You're not going to find a list of every single cheap place to crash your head here (if you did, you would have a book twice as big as this one), but you won't find yourself stranded. There's also a bunch of affordable eating places listed in this book.

A plus for hikers who want to tackle all or part of the famous St. James pilgrimage route is that the guide's recommended day-to-day itinerary drops you off at the end of each day in towns where you can get food and water. A chart also shows the distance between each official "albergue" and the next.

This book comes up a little short on cultural information, but you can always take a look at Lonely Planet's general guide to Spain. Recommended. Five stars.

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4.0 out of 5 stars For Camino de Santiago, still excellent info in 37 pages, Oct 21 2003

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Timecheck "backpack45.com - Camino Chronicle... (Oakland, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lonely Planet Walking in Spain 3rd Ed.: 3rd Edition (Paperback)

I walked the Camino in 2001, using the 36 pages of the 2nd edition guide, in conjuction with the Confraternity of St. James Camino Frances. I found a large amount of excellent info in the 36 pages, and have been recommending it on our Camino web page ever since. The refugios change so rapidly that you shouldn't rely just on one guide. When I saw the recent negative review from a 2003 pilgrim, I went out and bought the 3rd edition, to see if there were drastic changes. The changes were few, and were all improvements - a list of refugios at the beginning, bolder print on the maps, so they are easier to read, slight rewording of some of the text. The authors of the Camino segment are still Nancy Frey and Jose Placer. Nancy has a PhD from University of California, Berkeley, and has written a well respected book on the Camino: Pilgrim Stories. The two of them own the On Foot In Spain adventure company and personally lead walks on the Camino and other treks in Spain. The history in the Lonely Planet segment is authentic, though necessarily condensed. I stand by my original recommendation. In addition to these 37 pages, get the Confraternity Camino Frances guide, and get either Davies and Cole's guide or John Brierley's guide.

You will find some errors or changes needed in all of these guides, due to conditions changing on the trail, overlooked typos, etc. When you do, help future pilgrims by sending an email to the publication's website so that they can revise the next edition.

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1.0 out of 5 stars Lonely Planet's Worst Offering, Aug 14 2003

By

Kate (Paris, France) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lonely Planet Walking in Spain (Paperback)

I am walking the Camino de Santiago now and can only comment on the Lonely Planet in this context. Day after day I become more convinced that Lonely Planet's researchers have never been on the Camino. They make much of the albergues or refugios but all this information is printed on the back of pilgrims' credencial (price one euro not 25 cents as LP claim). All of the other places where one might stay are hardly mentioned if at all. Punte Reina is described as a one street village, absolutely wrong! The trail leaving the same town is totally mis-described and all the trail mythology plagiarised from other sources takes up space that might be given over to hard facts. Distances are frequently misleading because of sloppy language. A typical example, is something like "start from the crossroads, you'll pass x, y and z and continue for 5 kms to reach a crossroads." So where does the 5 kms start, at the crossroads or is it x,y and z? Whichever you choose you'll be wrong, there's no consistency. It happens time after time. An iron bridge near Estella is described as wooden. All small errors you may say but it just piles up day after day. Do not waste money on this useless book. What you need to know is what awaits you at the end of each day when you struugle into the next place after 20 or 30 kms only to read more vague errors from this.

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Most recent customer reviews

2.0 out of 5 stars Insufficient, out of date; a poor buy
We used this book and also the Lonely Planet Spain guide together for 2 walks in Galicia. In both cases (Spindrift 2 and Mt Pindo) the information was out of date. Read more

Published on Aug 11 2003 by George Klima

5.0 out of 5 stars Accurate, informative, great!
My first-ever lonely planet guide, but it made me an instant convert. I've since bought a few other Lonely Planets and haven't been disappointed. Read more

Published on Aug 4 2002 by JeSuisse