March 2026: Another month of full-time travel in Spain

March 2026: Another month of full-time travel in Spain.

It’s hard to believe that it’s been 2 months back on the road. We had spent February exploring Andalusia. March was different: a month of fast travel that took us from Tarifa on one extremity of Spain to Girona on the other. It’s our last stop in Spain: from here we’ll be crossing the border into France in the next few days.

Places visited in March: Tarifa, Vejer de la Frontera, Cadiz, Madrid, Tossa de Mar, Lloret de Mar, Tarragona, Sitges, Vilanova i la Gertru and Girona.

 

In this post I cover the highs and lows of the month, detail our costs (it was an expensive month!) and tell you about changes with our equipment. Travelling fast really emphasized what is necessary and what was superfluous. Finally, I tell you about our plans for April.

 

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Highs and Lows of the month of March

We started the month in Tarifa. As I mentioned in my February summary, it was a highlight: wild nature, good restaurants, a cool vibe.

Vejer de la Frontera is one of Spain’s white villages and a popular place among foreigners. We spent 2 nights there. As a place to visit, we weren’t impressed (cold, wet weather didn’t help). Then 2 nights in Cadiz, a city we had previously visited on day trips. We really wanted to give it a chance but in all honesty we were left underwhelmed by Cadiz.

From there we went on to Madrid, a city we had visited back in 2022. I had been lukewarm about Madrid previously but I have to admit I really liked it this time around: the beautiful architecture, the art museums (we saw the “Big 3”: the Prado, Thyssen-Bornemisza and the Reina Sofía) and the restaurants and cafés. It was nice being in a big, cosmopolitan city and we took advantage of that to dispose of Lissette’s old camera and to buy some new North Face pants.

 

 

 

Tossa de Mar, our next stop, didn’t start so well. We were having dinner in front of the tv when it happened. Lissette: “a piece of my tooth just broke off!”. Of course it was a Friday night. I wrote our Airbnb host and asked her if she had a dentist that she could recommend. Long story short, we saw a Colombian dentist the next day and he fixed Lissette up. He and his wife (who works as his assistant) were super nice people and we spoke to them at length. They gave us tips on where to go for coffee and where to eat. It really endeared us to the town (a place, incidentally, that I had visited in 1985 when I was 19).

Tossa de Mar ended up being a highlight of the month and we extended the 5 days we had planned to 9 days. Tossa has a fortified old town topped with a castle, beautiful rocky beaches and some incredible hiking (the Cami de Ronda extends from the French border down to the town of Blanes). It is spectacular geography and I wrote this post detailing why (I think) the Costa Brava is the most spectacular coast in Spain. We loved our stay and will be back to the region (as I mention in the post, March was not the time to go. Next time we’ll go in September or October).

Note: We also visited Lloret de Mar, the much bigger, more commercial neighbour of Tossa. Really, it’s a crappy beach town and my advice if looking for a base is to choose Tossa de Mar. The one great thing about Lloret though is that the coastal trail (Cami de Ronda) runs through here and there is a fantastic walk between Lloret de Mar beach and Fenals beach. So while I don’t recommend staying here, it is worth a visit just for the coast walks.

 

 

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We had a bit of a dilemma. The original plan had been to discover more of the Costa Brava but with most of this coastline pretty much dead this time of year with very few transport options, we decided to hit a couple of the cities and towns south of Barcelona.

So we backtracked to Tarragona, a city known for its Roman ruins. The city was in fact the Roman capital of Iberia for more than 600 years. First impressions weren’t great (Tarragona’s old town just struck us as dirty) but the city grew on us: the center is modern and pretty and people we met were friendly. In fact, we found the people in Catalonia to be overall very open and welcoming.

 

 

The next stop was Sitges, a seaside resort about 40 minutes (by train) south of Barcelona. Really, Sitges isn’t our kind of place: it’s a very international, very gay-orientated party town. The old town gets incredibly loud at night and incredibly crowded on weekends. It reminded me of Torremolinos, another party town in proximity to a large city (Torremolinos is 30 minutes from Malaga).

One of our readers (Josie) told us that we should check out Vilanova i la Gertru, a seaside town about 15 minutes south from Sitges. So we did. A very pretty town with incredible beaches that has a very different vibe than Sitges (it gets very few foreigners). Genuine and authentic. Thanks Josie!

 

 

Finally we finished the month in Girona, a gorgeous city in Northern Catalonia. We really, really liked Girona, it made us think of Italy with its colourful buildings, hilly streets, neoclassical buildings with porticos and a river flowing under historic bridges (come to think of it, it’s like a mini-Florence).

In short, we saw some beautiful places in March, all of which I’ll be writing about on our Spain-only blog MappingSpain.

 

Weather-wise, March was rough: unusually cold and windy for this time of year. For those unfamiliar with buildings in Spain: they are generally very drafty and very poorly insulated. We both came down with colds several times during the month and I had a combination of low-level fever and running nose at least 10 days of the month. Lissette fared a bit better but had a deep cough for a few days that had me worried.

We’re looking forward for the weather to warm up a bit.

 

 

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March 2026 Costings

I mentioned March was expensive. It was in fact much more expensive than February (where we spent a total of 3,540 Euros as I cover in my February summary).

 

 

Accommodation was the biggest difference. In February, our accommodation averaged 70 Euros in Andalusia. That stayed constant our first week of March while still in Andalusia but ballooned when we went north: our Airbnb in Madrid averaged 121 Euros/night (for 6 nights) and our stays in Catalonia averaged 112 Euros/night (for 17 nights). Overall, our average accommodation cost was 102 Euros/night for the month. I knew northern Spain would be more expensive than southern Spain but was surprised by just how much more expensive it was.

 

Long distance travel: from 153 Euros for February to 515 Euros for March. That’s easily explained: long-distance high-speed trains from Cadiz to Madrid (50 Euros each) and from Madrid to Girona (81 Euros each). We also took a taxi from Girona to Tossa de Mar (75 Euros each way, so 150 Euros total). In hindsight, it would have been cheaper to take the train from Madrid to Barcelona and then the bus to Tossa de Mar (surprisingly, it’s easier to get connections to the southern end of the Costa Brava from Barcelona than it is from Girona, despite Girona being closer).

Restaurants and Cafes. We spent a lot more eating out in March (compared to February) just because we travelled faster. Sometimes when you stay somewhere for 3 days it’s just easier to eat out than to do a grocery shopping.

 

Extraordinary costs

Dental expenses; it cost 80 Euros to get Lissette’s tooth fixed. Her experience was so good that I decided to have a cleaning done while in Tossa. That cost 70 Euros and it was the best dental cleaning that I’ve had in Spain. So that was a total of 150 Euros spent on dentistry.

North face pants: I’ve been travelling with 2 North face pants. I’ve lost weight over the last few months and they were suddenly uncomfortably loose…so we went to the North Face store in Madrid and I bought 2 new pairs of pants.

New suitcases: 335 Euros. I explain that below.

 

Money saved in March: If you organize yourself, you can see all 3 big art museums in Madrid for FREE. The Prado museum is free the last 2 hours of every day (ie 6 pm to 8 pm). The Thyssen-Bornemisza museum is free on Mondays and the Reina Sofía museum is free Sundays from 12:30 to 2:30. Between the two of us, we saved 84 Euros visiting these museums on free days (a ticket combining the 3 museums costs 41.90 Euros/pp).  

 

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Downsizing

I mentioned in our February summary that we just felt we had too much stuff. We didn’t really (2 carryon-sized suitcases and 2 backpacks) but with each stop we kept analyzing what we had and what was really necessary. In March, with all the fast travelling we had, we made some difficult choices.

• Lissette got rid of her old Cannon camera and the 2 extra lenses that came with it. That freed up a lot of weight and space. She’ll now be using her Google Pixel 9 phone for photos.
• Avi and Pinky. Our two stuffed pluff animals we used as pillows. A bit heart-wrenching but they took up a lot of room. We donated them to a church in Tarragona.
• Clothes and shoes. I only had 1 pair of shoes but Lissette had 2. She’s now down to 1. We also went through our clothing and narrowed it down to basics after we realized that really, we only have 2 sets of clothes that we wear. We are now both down to about 3 t-shirts each, 2 pairs of pants, 1 pair of shorts, 1 pair of shoes, 3 pairs of socks, 3 pairs of underwear, rain jackets, 1 warmer sweater each. We also still have our cotton duvet and pillowcases which takes up some room but which has already proved a necessity considering the polyester sheets and hard blankets provided by most hotels and Airbnb apartments*.

*shocking how crappy sheets/blankets/pillows are in hotels and apartments. Really, sleeping is the most important part of any stay and we’re always surprised by some of the stuff we see. Even just 2 months in, our cotton duvet and pillowcases have made a huge difference in our comfort level.

 

Getting rid of all the above, we both got new suitcases:

• I replaced my Level 8 suitcase with a smaller, lighter American Tourister suitcase. Still carryon-sized but even smaller.
• Lissette replaced her carryon suitcase with an even smaller carryon which is lighter: she no longer has to ask me to hoist her bag onto the luggage rack on trains.
• I still have my Level 8 backpack but Lissette got rid of hers. She now just has a small pouchbag which is the size of a small handbag.
• I should mention that we bought some packing cubes at Ale-Hop. 10 Euros and you get 6 different-sized packing cubes. They’ve helped us in organizing the contents of our suitcases.

 

We didn’t have to do this now: we have some long stays coming up in different places and won’t be moving around as much. But long-term this really makes us lighter which is always the goal when travelling full-time.

 

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Our Plans for April

In a couple of days we’ll be entering France. We’ll have a short stay in Carcassonne before a couple of long stays in the Provence region.

After 2 months of fast travelling, especially in March, we look forward to slowing down and having a couple of bases. Our costs will also come down dramatically in April: surprisingly accommodation costs are less in Southern France than they are in Northern Spain and that’s compounded by longer stays which brings down the cost even more. In fact, our average accommodation cost in April will come out to just under 64 Euros/night which is even less than what we paid in February in Andalusia. I’ll be covering that in detail in my April summary.

But more importantly, we’re looking forward to seeing France. Surprising that during all our years of travel we’ve never visited France. The next 3 months will be spent there and we look forward to that 🙂