Great places to visit in Spain

Spain's most recognisable building is still a building site, and that is half of the appeal. Work began in 1882 under a different architect, Antoni Gaudí took charge the following year, and what he left behind is less a church than a quarry turned inside out, with columns that branch overhead like trees and stained glass that drags bands of colour across the floor as the afternoon moves. The central Tower of Jesus Christ reached its full height of 172.5 metres in February 2026, which made this the tallest church in the world, and Pope Leo XIV blessed it that June on the centenary of Gaudí's death.

Architect: Antoni Gaudí · Style: Catalan Modernisme · Begun: 1882

Location: Eixample district, Barcelona

Tickets and tours

Access: Ticketed, timed entry

No other monument carries the Islamic centuries of the peninsula so completely. What started as a hilltop fortress became the palace city of the Nasrid emirs, the last Muslim dynasty in Iberia, and their halls still carry carved stucco, honeycomb vaulting and Arabic inscriptions worked into nearly every surface. Water is the other constant, running from the Court of the Lions up to the terraced gardens of the Generalife. Dropped into the middle is the Renaissance palace of Charles V, a perfect circular courtyard inside a square block, marking the moment the conquerors moved in.

Style: Nasrid and Renaissance · Heritage: UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1984

Location: Sabika hill, Granada

Tickets and tours

Access: Ticketed, with a separate timed slot for the Nasrid Palaces

Nowhere in the country reads its own history quite as plainly. Abd al-Rahman I began the great mosque in 785, his successors kept extending it until the late tenth century, and the prayer hall now holds roughly 850 columns of jasper, marble and granite carrying tier upon tier of red and white striped arches that seem to run on without end. Castile took the city in 1236 and the mosque became the cathedral; in the sixteenth century a Renaissance nave was cut straight through the middle of it. Both buildings now share one roof, and Mass is still said here daily.

Style: Umayyad and Renaissance · Begun: 785 · Heritage: UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1984

Location: Córdoba, Andalusia

Access: Ticketed

Anyone travelling to the country for its painters ends up in these rooms. The Prado opened in 1819 around the pictures the crown had been buying since the sixteenth century, which is why the Spanish school is stronger here than anywhere on earth: Velázquez and Las Meninas, the Goya rooms that end in the Black Paintings, El Greco, Ribera, Zurbarán, and the Flemish and Venetian canvases the Habsburgs collected alongside them. The holdings run to some 7,600 paintings and only a fraction hangs at any one time, so two hours covers the famous names and a full day still leaves rooms unseen.

Architect: Juan de Villanueva · Style: Neoclassical · Opened: 1819

Location: Paseo del Prado, Madrid

Tickets and tours

Access: Ticketed

A palace that was never finished so much as rebuilt, again and again, by whoever held the city. Muslim rulers raised the first citadel here in the tenth century, and after the Castilian conquest of 1248 the kings kept adding rather than clearing, most famously when Pedro I brought in Muslim craftsmen in the 1360s for the Mudéjar palace at the heart of the complex. The Patio de las Doncellas and the domed Hall of the Ambassadors are the set pieces, with sunken bathing vaults below the gardens. The upper floors still serve the royal family on visits to the city.

Style: Mudéjar, Gothic and Renaissance · Heritage: UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1987

Location: Seville, Andalusia

Access: Ticketed, timed entry

This began as a property venture that failed. Eusebi Güell wanted an English-style garden suburb on a bare hillside above the city, almost nobody bought a plot, and the estate opened as a public park in 1926 instead. What survives is Gaudí reading a landscape rather than designing a building: viaducts of undressed stone that look grown rather than built, a hall of leaning columns holding up the terrace above, and a bench curving around that terrace under a skin of broken tile. The pine woods around the centre are the part most visitors miss.

Architect: Antoni Gaudí · Style: Catalan Modernisme · Heritage: UNESCO World Heritage Site

Location: Carmel hill, Barcelona

Tickets and tours

Access: Free in the wider park; the Monumental Zone needs a timed ticket

The largest palace in western Europe belongs to a family that does not live in it. More than 135,000 square metres of floor space and 3,418 rooms went up between 1738 and 1755, ordered by the Bourbons after fire destroyed the old Alcázar on Christmas Eve 1734 and built in stone rather than timber so that it could not burn again. Visitors get the state rooms, the porcelain room, ceilings by Tiepolo, the Royal Armoury and its collection of arms, and the only complete string quintet of Stradivarius instruments anywhere. State ceremonies still happen here.

Architect: Filippo Juvarra and Giovanni Battista Sacchetti · Style: Baroque · Completed: 1755

Location: Calle de Bailén, Madrid

Tickets and tours

Access: Ticketed

When the builders finished in the early sixteenth century they had taken the title of largest church in the world off Hagia Sophia, which had held it for a thousand years, and it remains the largest Gothic cathedral anywhere. It stands on the footprint of the Almohad mosque it replaced, and the mosque's minaret survives as the Giralda, 104.5 metres to the weather vane and still the marker every view of the city is framed around. Christopher Columbus is buried inside, his tomb carried on the shoulders of four heralds.

Style: Gothic · Heritage: UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1987

Location: Seville, Andalusia

Access: Ticketed

Roman engineering rarely survives in the middle of a working town, which is what makes this one worth the detour. The aqueduct carried water some 17 kilometres from the Frío river into Segovia, and its elevated stretch crosses the Plaza del Azoguejo on a complete arcade of 167 arches, granite blocks stacked without mortar and held in place by weight and geometry alone. It stayed in service until 1973. Emperor Domitian is generally credited with ordering it, although evidence published in 2016 points to a slightly later date under Trajan or Hadrian.

Style: Roman · Heritage: UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1985

Location: Segovia, Castilla y León

Access: Free, standing in the open street

Few buildings have changed the fortunes of a city the way this one did. Frank Gehry set it on a stretch of derelict dock along the Nervión, and the titanium panels fold and curve so that the shape shifts with every step along the riverbank, pulling visitors to an industrial port that had never appeared on an itinerary. It opened in October 1997. The galleries inside run to modern and contemporary art, the largest of them holding Richard Serra's steel maze The Matter of Time, a permanent installation visitors walk through rather than look at.

Architect: Frank Gehry · Style: Deconstructivist · Opened: 1997

Location: Bilbao, Basque Country

Access: Ticketed

Rivalry between the industrial families of the city produced this one. Josep Batlló bought a plain block of 1877 on Passeig de Gràcia and in 1904 asked Gaudí to outdo the neighbours, which is how the row came to be called the Block of Discord. Almost no straight line survived: the lower storeys carry bone-like pillars and irregular oval windows, the front is skinned in broken tile running from gold to blue, and the arched roof reads as a dragon's back. Inside, a lightwell tiled in deepening blues drops daylight through it.

Architect: Antoni Gaudí · Style: Catalan Modernisme · Heritage: UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2005

Location: Passeig de Gràcia, Eixample district, Barcelona

Access: Ticketed, open every day

Every branch of the Camino ends here, at a church held to stand over the tomb of Saint James the Great, one of the few raised above an apostle's grave. Work began in 1075, the last stone went in around 1122 and consecration came in 1211. Master Mateo carved the Pórtico da Gloria by 1188; the Baroque front on the Praza do Obradoiro came much later, finished by Fernando de Casas Novoa in 1740. The Botafumeiro, an 80 kilogram censer of 1851, swings across the transept on feast days.

Style: Romanesque, Gothic and Baroque · Begun: 1075 · Heritage: UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1985

Location: Santiago de Compostela, Galicia

Access: Basilica open daily for worship; museum, Pórtico da Gloria and roofs ticketed

Photos: "Santiago Compostela Cathedral, view from Alameda Park" and "Santiago cathedral" by Fernando Pascullo, "Catedral de Santiago de Compostela, nave lateral" by D.Rovchak and "Interior catedral Santiago" by Miguel Hermoso Cuesta (CC BY-SA 4.0).