vacation to andalusie-advice dec 2015

[monia]

Hi there,
I am a new comer to the forum, and I shall be grateful for some helpful advice. I would like to visit Andalusie in Dec 2015 around 13 dec to 21 or 22 dec.
it will be just my sister from Montreal and myself from Munich . I do not wish to hire a car, I wish to know if I just book my flight and hotel and do the sightseeing and the different cities with bus , for example the places I wish to visit are Granada , Sevilla, Gibraltar, Cordoba, Ronda, Tanger, Nerja and Jerez. I do not wish to be at the beach but real sightseeing, as well Flameno etc.The vacation intended will be 8 to 10days. I shall appreciate for some advices : mainly where to start . We shall be flying from Munich. The earlier we can start is around 13 Dec, as my sister is traveling from Montreal. Thank you, Monia

[Free at Last]

That's an awful lot to fit into 8-10 days and you may find a lot of your time taken up in travelling from place to place. However, if you really want to do it I would suggest the following itinerary:-

Fly into Malaga and travel by bus to Nerja for a 2 night stay.
Take the bus from Nerja to Granada for a 2 night stay which would give you time to visit the Alhambra.
Take the train from Granada to Ronda for an overnight stay.
Take the train from Ronda to Algeciras from where you can take the ferry to Tangier, timings would probably involve an overnight stay there.
Return to Algeciras by ferry and take the bus to Jerez for an overnight stay.
If you really want to visit Gibraltar you could take the bus from Algeciras to La Linea and cross the border to Gibraltar from there.
Take the train or bus from Jerez to Sevilla and stay 3 nights, during which you could take a bus to Cordoba for a day visit.
Take the train from Sevilla to Malaga for the return flight.

If that sound exhausting, that's because it most probably would be!

[WomBatt]

You may want to visit all these places but you leave yourselves little time to see, do and appreciate with ten days. Sorry, but this is too many places and would be foolishly paced. I suggest you recognize the amount of time spent travelling, from door to door in unfamiliar surroundings and the little time you have anywhere.
Why no mention of train? I suggest you do some maths with train and bus times.
www.renfe.com and www.alsa.es

[katy]

I would skip Nerja if you are not interested in a beach. Although you may be jet lagged if flying in from Canada, good place to crash out

There are some good coach tours around, be a bit easier with everything organised. If your budget runs to it.

[olive]

It would be a lot easier if you hire a car. Outside the cities, driving is very easy and well signed. For example the Alhamabra is signed from the motorway and has its own dedicated road to the car parking.

Book your ticket for the Alhambra in Granada in advance.

Trains from Granada to Cordoba and Granada to Antequera are currently affected by major engineering works preparing for high speed trains. I believe currently both are bus service only. I do not know when that will end.

[Free at Last]

You may want to visit all these places but you leave yourselves little time to see, do and appreciate with ten days. Sorry, but this is too many places and would be foolishly paced. I suggest you recognize the amount of time spent travelling, from door to door in unfamiliar surroundings and the little time you have anywhere.
Why no mention of train? I suggest you do some maths with train and bus times.
www.renfe.com and www.alsa.es

The Alsa bus company won't necessarily cover all the journeys the OP wants to make - the one from Algeciras to Jerez is a different company, for example.

If the OP left out Tangier and Gibraltar then the trip would be a lot more do-able, as they would have no need to go to Algeciras at all (and it's not somewhere you'd really want to go to unless it was to get a connection to somewhere else).

[Wicksey]

I agree with Olive that car hire would be far easier. The motorways are often quite empty (away from the western Costa del Sol area) and are easy driving.

You can do a driving tour to see Jerez, Seville, Cordoba and Ronda and then onto Granada. Although I live near to Nerja and it's a pretty enough place it isn't worth seeing if you are then rushing to visit all the other places you named. Apart from the caves that everyone seems to visit, I wouldn't say it's worth a special trip which would be out of your way. Being mid-winter as well it may not be at its best if the weather is bad.

You need a couple of days in Seville I would say, and the same for Granada as the Alhambra takes some time to see plus there's the city itself to visit. Trying to do all this by public transport sounds a bit of a nightmare personally as you'll spend so much time travelling.

Not sure if you are aware that there are often long delays trying to get into and out of Gibraltar due to the Spanish border control's stop and search policy! May be quicker if you go over the border on foot from La Linea but it can be time consuming otherwise. There's quite a lot to see with the war tunnels, caves and museums, so you'd need to be there a whole day and therefore be staying in Gib itself or nearby in Spain.