What City to Base a 90 Day Stay

We are thinking of a 90 day stay in Spain (one year retirement visa). What is the best city or two to base our stay?

We are in our mid/late 60's. Will have just complete a 90 day travel through Italy and other countries. Will use Spain as rest stop (and to re-set our S. visa time in Europe) Spain/Gibraltar/Morraco. We will most likely select two and maybe three places to stay with one and two day trips to explore the surrounding area. We enjoy the outdoors, our birders, never miss an art museum or botanical garden and like to walk when exploring a city. Will have our own car to drive but when in big cities we park the car and use public transportation. The time of year we will are thinking of being in Spain is June - August +/_ a couple of weeks. Cost is always a factor but not always the over riding factor. Will use Airbnb or other site to rent for several weeks at a time.

Looking for suggestions and reasons to back up suggestions.

Thanks.

These folks went to Oveido:

Oviedo for 91 Days

Are you comfortable with speaking Spanish? If you are, then you have a number of excellent options, but it can be very warm (hot!) in June-August in the south and inland areas.

If you will already be spending time in Italy and other Schengen Area countries, you cannot use Spain to reset your Schengen visa requirment. You would have to spend the next 90 days in a non-Schengen country like Morocco.

We understand the Schengen visa requirements. We are in the process of securing a one year visa (residence) permit for Spain as noted above. And yes, we know it will be warm but this is the time period we have to work with.

90 days is quite a lot. Best would probably be to stay in 2-3 regions. One of them would probably be Andalucia, your best options are Seville, Granada and Cordoba (depend on how large you want the city of choice to be). These 3 give you easy access to a lot of sights around, which are the most famous in Spain (Alhambra, Mezquita, Real Alcazar, etc - do a google images search).

For the second region, you really need to expand on your interests / needs, because there are plenty of choices. Barcelona is definitely one, also Madrid and Valencia. If you want smaller cities and colder climate, you could pick Bilbao, San Sebastian, etc. But there are so many options for smaller cities, for example, Caceres and Salamanca

Spain is much larger than Italy (nearly twice the size), only the Madrid area is really conductive to day trips (Segovia, Toledo, Escorial, etc). Keep that in mind, because if you want to travel around you will be booking additional hotel rooms anyway, so factor that in when you book longer term accommodation.

For example, lets say you stay in Oviedo as suggested above, and you want to walk Ruta del Cares (the most popular walk in Picos de Europa, a must, its easy). On the map they look right next to each other, but driving from Oviedo to the start point takes 2 hours. Both ways that's 4 hours driving!

This topic has been automatically locked due to inactivity. Email community@lonelyplanet.com if you would like to add to this topic and we'll unlock it for you.