Get off the well-trod tourist path and experience the Barcelona, Madrid and Valencia that local Spanish families see; with discounts for kids and grandparents.
Spain is bursting at the seams with delicious food, mid-day siestas and notorious late-night partying. For a multi-generational family vacation, however, you might be in search of a little more than the world’s best paella (although you can never go wrong with the traditional Valencian rice dish!). Here’s how to make the most of your visit with school age children.
Barcelona for Kids
Parc Guell
Ronder General Mitre 226
08006, Barcelona
34 (0) 93 413-2400
This park, now a World Heritage Site (designated by UNESCO), was designed by Antonà GaudÃ. The stunning architecture pulls visitors into a different world. Be sure to check out the famous mosaic dragon. Also keep an eye out for the Room of a Hundred Columns, with 84 crooked pillars of glass and ceramic mosaic, and the Gran Placa Circular, a balcony of brightly colored mosaics that also offers a spectacular view.
Poble Espanyol (Spanish Village)
Av. Marques de Comillas, 13
08038, Barcelona
34 (0) 935 086-300
The Poble Espanyol was built in 1929 as part of the Barcelona International Exhibition and can still be visited today. It includes a 12-acre open-air museum with architecture from Andalusia, Catalonia and Aragon. This “museum” depicts a Spanish village – with 117 buildings, streets and squares it is a “village within a city.” The Children’s Village has craft workshops and kid’s shows games and storytelling; check the website for a calendar of events. Reduced admission for seniors, students with ID, and children ages 4-12. Ask about family discounts as well.
Tibidabo
Pl. De Tibidabo, 3-4
08035, Barcelona
34 (0) 93 211-7942
This famous amusement park sits on top of a hill at the highest point in Barcelona. It can be accessed by the last remaining trolley in the city, the Tramvia Blue. A four-dimensional movie theatre, amusement park rides and Robot Museum are sure to provide hours of entertainment for the family. Reduced children’s admission based on height. The Tibidabo is open daily from 11 am between early March and early December.
Toy Museum of Catalonia
Carrer de Sant Pere, 1
Hotel Paris Figueras
17600, Catalonia
34 (0) 97 2504-585
The Toy Museum of Catalonia boasts more than 4,000 objects, including dolls, puppets, miniature theatre sets, tricycles and more. You can chart toys through time, and many are accompanied by old photos showing children playing with the toys. Several objects in the museum had famous owners, such as Salvador Dali, Federico Garcia Lorca and Joan Miro. This fun museum has extended hours in summer.
Madrid for Kids
Parque del Buen Retiro (Retiro Park)
Plaza de la Independencia, s/n
Madrid, 28001 Spain
34 (0) 91 588-8790
Family members of all ages will be delighted and amused by the street performers in Retiro Park. Here they can also ride in horse-drawn carriages, rent a rowboat to go out on the lake, or watch the puppeteers perform shows. This is the most popular park in Madrid, so it is a great opportunity to immerse yourself in the local environment and get a feel of what life is like there.
Museo del Prado
Ruiz del Alarcon 23
28014, Madrid.
34 (0) 91 330-2800
Housing European art from the 12th through 19th century curated by notable scholars including Pablo Picasso himiself, the palatial Museo del Prado was founded as a museum for paintings and sculpture. Today it houses thousands of drawings, prints, coins, medals, and decorative art. Entrance to the permanent collection only is free Tuesday-Saturday from 6-8 pm, Sunday from 5-8 pm and on certain Spanish holidays. Children under age 18 are always free.
Madrid Zoo and Aquarium
Casa de Campo
s/n 28011, Madrid
34 (0) 90 234-5014
The zoo has more than 5,000 animals from 5 different continents, and the aquarium has more than 500 species. A big crowd-pleaser at the zoo is the panda collection; two baby pandas arrived in December 2010. If you’ve got antsy young travelers with you, check out some of the great hotel/zoo package offers that grant families a room and breakfast, plus free admission to the zoo, aquarium and nearby Warner Bros. theme park.
Safari Park at Aldea del Fresno
Carretera de Extremadura N-V
KM32, Madrid
34 (0) 91 862-2314
The Safari Park offers an opportunity to see animals like elephants, rhinos, hippos and giraffes not native to Europe. Its prime location is close to a lake and the Alberche River. The safari aspect – viewing the animals from a car – offers a different experience than the typical walk-around zoo and makes for a fun day outing. Reduced admission for children ages 3-10; under 3 free. The park is open daily year round from 10:30am to sunset.
Madrid SnowZone
Puerto Navacerrada (Xanadu) 4
28939 Arroyomolinos, Spain
34 (0) 902 361-309
For a day of winter fun (even in the summer), check out Madrid SnowZone. The adventurous among you can tube down 800-foot slopes, and the calmer in the bunch can play in the snow. Building snowmen, making snow angels and even having a good ‘ol-fashioned snowball fight is a great way to relax from the stress of your travels and bond with the family. It’s also totally refreshing in Madrid’s humid summers. Staying in town awhile? Sign the kids up for their ski racing team.
Valencia for Kids
L’oceanografic at City of Arts and Sciences
Junta de Mars i Valls
Valencia 46013
34 (0) 90 210-0031
Europe’s largest marine park has 500 species of animals and 45,000 fish within a large science center complex. There are seven aquariums with different environments, underwater tunnels with sharks, and a dolphin aquarium. A contact pool allows you to get into the water and touch some of the animals. Regular activities such as Saturday morning music classes aimed at parents with children up to 4, in which music and stories about the sea are shared, as well as Shark Sleepovers, can be found on their website. L’oceanografic also has several restaurants where you can stop in to reenergize before you check out the rest of the facilities. This futuristic “city within a city” also has a Hubble telescope and rotating exhibits, a planetarium, science museum and performing arts center. Reduced general admission price for kids ages 4-12; group rates available as well.
Terra Miticia
Autopista A7, Exit 65A
Benidorm, Alicante
34 (0) 90 202-0220
Located on the Mediterranean coast south of Valencia, this large theme park offers a variety of rides and nearly 80 shows a day. Count on hours of family-friendly entertainment, including water rides for those notoriously hot days. Major rides have smaller replicas for young children. Grab the kids and go for a ride on the Magnus; Colossus, the longest wooden coaster in Europe! The attractions are divided into themed areas representing Rome, Greece, Iberia, The Islands, Ocionia and Egypt, so get ready to explore! Inquire about their reduced admission with the Family Pass; open seasonally.
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I poured my heart and soul into this!!! Hope you people enjoy! =)
Wow, this is wonderful! You are so lucky to have gotten this opportunity. You looked absolutely gorgeous at the show and the red carpet. Thanks for sharing this, it really made me smile. I used to have the biggest crush on Joe Jonas.. hahah!
Amazing trip!
I hope that my story will inspire and enrich your lives; even if it doesn’t touch you as much as it has touched me. I hope that this will be passed on and that people will take a few minutes just to read what I had to say and try to be in the mind of these children. Try to change your day and see your house, your possessions, your income, and those many great things that you possess and find a way to share them with others. We all need a wakeup call sometimes, a message to straighten us out and look at the life we were given. I hope to go back next year to repeat the experience all over again and try to change myself even more, I love those children and I love their compassion and selflessness. Words can’t fully express what I felt or what I witnessed but my words are clear, these people see the world much differently than us, they treat possessions differently and they know how to work as a community.
This is about when my family and I took a trip down to Central Florida for our Family Vacation.
Hope you enjoy!
This was a vacation that taught me a lot about how my religion is organzied and gave me more appreciation for it.
I will never forget the time I spent in Germany.
I hope you guys enjoyed my story!
Best luck.
South Africa is this amazing country that not only is beautiful for its animals and scenery but for its people and for its ability to overcome the greatest oppression: apartheid, the discrimination of the majority. I am so glad I was given the gift of traveling to South Africa. It is an experience I will never forget!
It was a great trip!
I hope everyone who takes the time to read The Awakening enjoys learning about my bus ride to reality.
My typed essay about my vacation in Vietnam. It seem poorly written or should I say typed :\
Bryan Gray Europe Tour.
My vacation to Panama became suprisingly meaningful, contrary to what I had initially expected.
Thank you
This was a fun and yet difficult project i truely have enjoyed sharing my vaction with you.
Mahalo,
Have you ever been to Maine? What did you like best?
This is such an amazing story and essay!!
Their were many more memories from this trip that impacted me as much as the ones that were included, but I just didnt have enough room. So, I shortened it and tried to write the best description of the trip without exceeding the word limit. But the trip was, indeed, as remarkable as I said it was.
Washington is a really nice place. It has many museums and historical places. it also has very delicious foods. Chinatown was my favorite place to eat.
Thank you for this scholarship opportunity!
IB York was a great experience, and a great opportunity to explore new ideas and innovations
So now I head to college without my classmates but i will always have this wonderful experience.
🙂
This is one of my many travel adventure stories from my trip to Europe in the beginning of the summer. Besides Prague, I traveled to Berlin, Munuch, and Nuremberg in Germany, Innsbruck in Austria, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, and France. My favorite place was Switzerland, but my favorite story was the one I shared. I hope you enoy reading it as much as i enjoyed experiencing it!
I want everyone to be able to expericence something like I did.:) Everyone desevers happines!
I hope you enjoyed my travel blog and I hope you plan to take your mom to the Peaks of Otter Lodge for the best brunch you will ever eat. For more information click on this link:
http://www.peaksofotter.com/
Finished product. I love PERU!
This eye-opening opportunity has shaped my conviction toward making change and developing the community. It is a great pleasure to meet all those Leadership Award Honorees and other49 ANNpower fellows from 24 states in the U.S. I will continue to make change and build a dynamic community, excursively to ethnic, social, political gender aspects of advantage, as my milestone to become a great leader!
This eye-opening opportunity marks the culmination of my junior year. I am so glad to meet all those wonderful women leaders from all around the world and 49 other ANNpower fellows from other 24 states. I will continue to explore the world and make change with eagerness and confident, and overcoming disadvantage exclusively toward the milestone of a great leader!
I hope everyone enjoys my trip to Catalina and Ensenada!
This trip was the best trip regarding family time. It is unforgettable.
To see more photography from the trip, check out my photojournal: http://www.facebook.com/pages/A-Photojournal-of-My-Grecian-Travels/213497035367351.
What a testimony!! Thanks for posting. You don't know how impactful this is. Let Jesus keep using you for His glory. 😉
I was saved in August of 2009. I was in my parents's room and we all prayed for m, becuase I was tired of not having a desire for God. There I gave my life to Him and let Him be my Lord. I already excepted Him as Savior, but though it was a license to sin. Thatt day, though I wanted to repent of my sin and let God lead me. Lord and Savior go hand-in-hand. My life is changed. Now I have convictions and am learning so much about seeking God, because He is seeking me. It's awesome to live in the security and hope of knowing I will see Him one day in heaven. I am so glad He lives in me, because my goodness outside of Him is nothing. I don't know what I would do without Him.
Jesus used that park to bring you and your dad back together. How beautiful 🙂
Each place I go, I leave a peice of myself. And everyplace I go leaves a peice of itself in me. The people I have met along the way have changed me in the deepest way. Their lives have touched mine and I can never return to life as was usual. Likewise, my life has touched many along the way. It is my hope that nobody I meet along the way may return to life as was their usual. This is how each thead pulls coth and fabric together as we the people of the world cover it like a quilt. We must double stitch each peice so not to fall apart or leave holes. We need one another.
To whoever reading this, I am the person wearing blue shirt and white shorts, sligtly leaning on the panda bear statue.
My essay that talks about my experience traveling to Lima, Peru aims toward encouraging others who are not too familiar with it to visit and appreciate the fun life changing experience they're gauranteed to get.
What a great contest! Hope to see lots of terrific teen travel stories here!
It was difficult for me to type a 600 word blog about an amazing experience I had in the month of July. It was also difficult for me to choose certain pictures from the ones that I have chosen, so I uploaded the pictures of my time at NeiHu elementary school. I really wished that I could have used more sightseeing photos, but unfortunately, those were too big to upload.
This trip was amazing and it also tested who I am becoming as a person. Seeing the woman in Central Park living out her dream, to the woman selling fruit throughout the day; New York is made of dreamers and hardworking people. I loved it. Hope I get the chance to go back.
This was an amazing experience! I am so grateful for everything it taught me!!
From research, I believe the ice cream shop was called Eisdiele Eddy. More information about the exchange program can be found at http://www.aatg.org/study-trip-faq as well as at the bottom of the page at http://www.aatg.org/NGE-awards.
These Picutures are both of my own creation (one being an acrylic painting). When I took this picture at the western wall in Israel, the man in the photo was crying his heart out wearing a tattered down bath robe, I thought it would make for an intersting picture. So it did, it also inspired to me to create a painting in which I showed the world what I believe he really is. A man who is down on his luck but seems to still find peace in his life.
My sophomore year of high school I went to Donner Pass in California with a group called The Woods Project (www.thewoodsproject.org) . I had to apply to go , I was really anxious and scared that I wasn’t going to get. When I got my acceptance letter I was excited. I was also nervous because I had never been away from home for more than a week and The Woods project was going to last for two weeks. I had chosen to go to Donner Pass because I wanted to experience something new. I was going to go backpacking for one week and hiking the other. I had never gone backpacking before. When I told my friends that I was going backpacking they started to laugh because I am the smallest girl in my whole school and they didn’t think I was going to make it. Getting that response from my friends made me super scared of going to the trip. I thought I was going to die while backpacking!
My dad went to go drop me off at the airport and then he left. I was already scared and freaking out at the fact that he had just left me there and I did not know anybody! . I got in the plane to California and I was already regretting going on the trip. I was going to be with complete strangers for two weeks! When we got to California we all got split .There were three groups going to different places, one to Yosemite, another to Marine Headlines and then mine, to Donner Pass. I got in a van and that’s where I met the people who I was going to spend two weeks with. We were in that van for hours! When we finally got to our cabin we had to go up a hill to get to the door.
The first cabin we stayed in was named Clair Tappan Lodge. It was really nice . It was made out of wood, had a pool table, personal chef, jacuzzi and hot water in the showers. I loved it there! Too bad it only lasted for two days then it was time to go backpacking. They gave us our backpacking materials. I tried on the backpack and almost fell over. My backpacking week had started. We went up and down mountains, through rivers and lakes, and I thought we were never going to set up our tents. When it started to get dark we finally started cooking. The food we had was not good at all. We couldn’t bring a lot of food because of the bears and other animals. My second day of backpacking went better than the first. Everybody in my group started to know each other better and soon we became really close. We would sing while backpacking to make time pass faster and at night we didn’t want to sleep because we would play games. While backpacking I got to experience many things I hadn’t before. Even though I was the smallest girl going backpacking I was always the leader of the line because of my stamina.
When our backpacking week ended it was time to hike. I had gotten the hardest part of the trip over with so I knew hiking was going to be a piece of cake. We would hike in the morning and hanged out at night. It was the best experience I had ever had! When it was time to go back home I didn’t want to because I knew I would miss my friends.
To watch my video go to : http://youtu.be/FLd7W71EnyU
My experience as a first time camper.
i hope i win