About Andalucía Bound

If you come to Andalucía by air, your first impression is of a mountainous landscape, and between the jagged mountains rolling hills and valleys covered in endless rows of more or less identical greyish-green trees. But for most visitors, once they land, those soaring mountains and olive groves are hidden behind the coastal hills. The world they glimpsed through the plane window slips out of sight and out of mind. Instead, they enter a land of golden beaches, tapas and happy hour, set against a backdrop of towering palm trees and the shimmering Mediterranean.

In recent years, the number of people venturing beyond the beach resorts has grown, and the great cities – Seville, Granada, Córdoba – have become popular for their historic monuments, elegant streets, delicious food and dramatic flamenco shows. Yet most visitors barely scratch the surface of those cities, let alone reach the myriad smaller towns and villages that make Andalucía so special.

That’s why we decided to create Andalucía Bound – to share our experience of that world away from the beach resorts, and to help other people to discover it. Although we have lived in Andalucía for 20 years, we continue to find amazing new places to visit. From Roman ruins to Michelin-starred restaurants, through hidden mountain villages and elegant medieval towns. Andalucía has an incredibly rich history and culture, and with this website, we hope to inspire you to explore more of it – its cities, its mountains and its coastline.

As well as providing you with inspiration, we’ll help you to plan your trip, so you can visit the places that most appeal to you and find the best route between them. However long you have – a few days, a week, a month, or half a lifetime!

About us: Ben and Rebecca

We’ve always loved travelling, and it has given us many wonderful experiences around the world – as well as a few not-so-good ones, like being held up at gunpoint and stepping on a sea urchin. In 2006, we decided to set out on a new adventure by moving from London to Granada. We planned to stay a couple of years – just long enough to properly learn the language and experience the Andalucian lifestyle. But like many others, we were entranced by the city’s culture and the backdrop of the Sierra Nevada mountains, so it quickly became our adopted home.

We run a small educational publishing business, and we’ve written and edited a range of history and geography textbooks for Spanish secondary schools. 15 years ago we started the website treksierranevada.com, which has been a very popular source of information for people planning a hiking trip to the Sierra Nevada mountains in Andalucía. Then, a few years ago, we were offered the opportunity to create a VoiceMap tour of Granada, and we really enjoyed the process: it combined our interests in local history, architecture, culture and gastronomy. The response we got was fantastic, so we went on to create two further tours of Granada, as well as tours of other destinations that we know well, including Córdoba, Seville and much smaller places like Capileira and Pampaneira in the Alpujarra.

Having lived here for so long, and done quite a bit of exploring, we thought we knew Andalucía like the backs of our hands, but as we’ve researched the tours, we’ve discovered so much more about the wonderful region where we live, including new places to visit and fascinating details about its history and culture.

What’s in it for us?

We love Andalucía and want more people to enjoy everything it has to offer, and particularly the places that most visitors never discover. Of course, we’d also love it if you bought one of the audio tours we’ve created using the brilliant VoiceMap app. Our tours cover some of Andalucía’s most interesting towns and neighbourhoods, and they give much richer detail about the local history, culture, people and architecture than we can do on this website. They’re like podcasts that move with you, to tell stories about what you’re seeing right now. The tours get fantastic reviews, so we think we must be doing something right.

Aside from that, though, we want you to be able to plan your trip without unnecessary distractions, so there is no external advertising on Andalucía Bound*. In particular, we don’t get any commission from the businesses we recommend, such as bars, restaurants and tourist attractions. As well as giving you a cleaner browsing experience, this means our itineraries can focus on what we think are the best experiences, rather than the ones that will make us most money from click-through advertising.
* Caveat: where we recommend somebody else’s VoiceMap tour, we receive a small commission on any sales.

Feedback

If you have any questions or comments, get in touch using our contact form. We’d love to hear what you think of this website and of our audio tours – what you like, and what you think we could do better.

And if you enjoyed one of our audio tours, please leave a review on TripAdvisor – it really helps with spreading the word.

Questions and answers