Travel Review: Tour of Spain, Madrid, Barcelona, Granada, Bilbao, Cordoba, Seville, Alhambra, Guggenheim Museum

Our trip to Spain was absolutely amazing, and it is hard to imagine a more attentive and knowledgeable travel company than this travel company.  We worked with its founder and president, and he organized a trip for us that exceeded our expectations.  We found our agent to be a careful listener, a wonderfully sensible and pragmatic organizer, and an inspired source of information about Spanish culture, history and institutions.  He put together a 17-day trip for us that covered almost all of Spain (except for Barcelona, where we had been previously), and his suggestions, including ones for off-the-beaten path places to visit and things to do, were all terrific.  Before planning the trip, our agent invested a lot of time trying to understand what we wanted to see and do in Spain and what was important (and not important) to us as travelers, and the itinerary that he produced was pitch perfect in its details.  One of the great strengths of this company is its network of local guides.  We had spectacular guides in all of the cities we visited.  In Bilbao our guide was an art historian with a Ph.D. in art history (who had studied at the University of Liverpool as a John Lennon and Yoko Ono fellow there) and was also a native of the Basque country, and she not only took us on a wonderful tour of the Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, but she provided us with a lively and fascinating account of Basque history and culture in the region.  When we drove from Sevilla to Ronda, our agent arranged for a guide who was a consummate foodie, who took us to an old olive mill once frequented by Ernest Hemingway and Orson Welles (the current owner showed us pictures of the two with his grandfather)  and where olive oil is still made with hand presses.  When we arrived in Ronda, our guide took us to a tapas restaurant that was fantastic and recommended a restaurant for dinner where we may have had our best meal in Spain.  Everything about our trip worked like clockwork, all because of our agent's meticulous planning and attention to even the smallest of details.