These instight guides are not the type you travel with in your pocket to refer to when on location, but are a great source of information for pre-trip planning or armchair traveling. The strong points of these guides are, the looks into the society, culture and a better understanding of the people and their lives that you will be amongst when there. A Chapter on Flamenco, one on bullfighting: the chapters that cover the locations give one a good feel for the area, to decide if it would be of interest to you to visit on your trip to southern Spain. Enjoyable books with good photographs.

Let's say you've decided to plunk down about $3000 to take a trip to Seville this summer. Your friends who have been to Spain tell you that you "must" see the Alhambra, or Gibraltar, or some other equally famous place, while you are there. Everyone has heard of Spain, of course, but you realize that you really don't know very much about the country or where the things are that you might want to see. If you're planning to do the trip on your own, finding out where to go and what to see is essential, but, even if you are on a guided tour, it really helps to know a little ahead of time about what you will be seeing, and makes the trip so much more enjoyable. Suppose I told you that for less than $25 you could have a team of experts, people who have spent a lot of time working or traveling in the area where you are going, who have even written guide books about it, come to your home at your convenience to show you beautiful pictures of the area and its inhabitants, tell you details not only about the places and the sights you should see, but also about the history of the region, the people, the food they eat and their customs. Would it be worth the cost? You bet! That's really what Insight Guides do for you.

When I recently found myself in that position, the first book I bought was the 1998 version of the Insight Guide to Southern Spain. This was not by accident. I've used the Insight Guides before and have enjoyed them very much. I'd always been a Lonely Planet kind of guy until I bought my first Insight Guide: Chile. My initial reaction to the book was that it was a lot of money to spend for a picture book kind of guide that didn't even have the detailed type of hotel and restaurant listings that I was used to in the Lonely Planet guides. But I bit the bullet and bought it anyway and, surprise, I really liked it and found it very useful. I've since followed it up with Boston, Mexico City, and now Southern Spain. What I like about the Insight Guides is that they are eminently readable and give you a fantastic overview of the area. They're short on the nuts and bolts (which hotel to choose, where to go for dinner, detailed maps of the cities) at which the Lonely Planet guides excel, but with both, you have it covered. This is the guide you read beforehand and when you are planning your day's activities, the Lonely Planet is the one you carry around to figure out where you are staying or eating, and how to get where you are going.

Southern Spain, as do all the Insight Guides, starts off with a history of the area, Andalucía, sometimes called "the Soul of Spain." If history's not your thing, you don't have to sleep in class, you can just skip that section, or return to it later to pick up a little perspective. That's followed by brief articles on subjects such as Bullfighting Heroes, Flamenco music and dance, Sherry makers, and "A Cook's Tour." The heart of the book is descriptions of the many places to visit and things to see. Included are 17 pages on Seville, 13 pages on Córdoba, 15 pages on Granada and the Alhambra, Gibraltar, Morocco, and even a narration of a walking tour through Andalucía. The descriptions are informative, without being drawn out, and very descriptive, evoking an excitement in experiencing the reality. I was enchanted by this description from the section on Granada:

"To enter the Albaicín, which one should first do without any formal list of places to see, is to leave civilisation as we know it behind. Or, rather to enter a civilised world where the smells of jasmin, of damp, of heat or of cooking take over from car fumes, where the dominant sound is burbling water and where mules are still used to carry bricks and bags of cement, not by courtesy of the tourist board but simply because they are the only means of transport suitable for the narrow, steep streets."

At the back of the book is Insight's rather brief attempt to give you "Travel Tips": 33 pages of information on addresses and hours of museums, restaurants, hotels, and the like. This may be of some help to you if you just have the one guidebook, but, frankly, you'd be much better off with another guidebook. Lonely Planet, one of the Insight Pocket Guides, or something like Michelin or Fodor's would suffice. This book is best used according to the proposition underlying all of the Insight Guides: that, with insight into a country's people and culture, visitors can both enhance their own experience and be accepted more easily by their hosts. In that, it does it's job admirably.

Buen viaje!