Spain

Spain covers most of the Iberian Peninsula and reaches far beyond it: the Balearic Islands of Mallorca and Menorca in the Mediterranean, and the volcanic Canary Islands off the coast of Africa. Madrid, the highest capital in the European Union, sits at its geographic centre, with Barcelona, Valencia, and Zaragoza spread along the north and east. Few countries pack this much variety into one border, from Moorish palaces and Gothic cathedrals to lunar volcanic plateaus and some of the darkest night skies in Europe.

Madrid

The Metropolis Building is where most photographers start in Madrid, and for good reason. I queued for an hour to reach the rooftop of the Círculo de Bellas Artes and watch the sun set behind the Metropolis and central Madrid, the Sierra de Guadarrama turning violet on the horizon behind the rooftops. Down at street level, the Gran Vía at night earns its reputation as the Spanish Broadway: I stood in the same position for over 40 minutes collecting the taillights that wrap around the French Beaux-Arts corner the Février brothers built between 1907 and 1911.

The royal quarter demands different patience. To photograph the Royal Palace across an empty Plaza de la Armería I blended 30 frames from the cathedral terrace to remove the crowds. The Almudena Cathedral opposite looks centuries old but was only consecrated in 1993, when Pope John Paul II visited Madrid. There is more in my full Madrid guide, built from a February trip when the city ran at Berlin’s late-spring temperatures.

Plaza de España and Buen Retiro Park

Madrid rewards walking between its set pieces. On Plaza de España, the Cervantes monument watches over bronze figures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and the personification of Literature on its rear side sits enthroned above five statues for the five continents that read Cervantes. The square empties of tourists late in the evening, which is when the gilded fountain light works hardest.

East of the centre, the Buen Retiro Park was laid out as a royal retreat in the 17th century, and the Crystal Palace above its small pond, built in 1887 after its London namesake, held an exhibition of birdsong the day we visited. Nearby stands the Puerta de Alcalá, the 18th-century gate that reminded us of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate; photographed at night from a traffic island, it took half an hour of taillight timing. For the modern counterweight, the inclined KIO towers lean toward each other at 15 degrees, the first inclined skyscrapers ever built.

Barcelona

Barcelona belongs to Antoni Gaudí. Casa Batlló came first on our list in 2023: built in 1877 and reworked by Gaudí between 1904 and 1906, its facade carries mosaic skin, bone-like balconies, and not one straight line. Inside, the ceiling above the chandelier whirls like the eye of a chameleon over the Noble Floor where the Batlló family once received guests. Up the hill, Park Güell shows the same naturalistic hand at city scale, commissioned by Eusebi Güell in 1900 and a UNESCO site since 1984.

The older city asks for earlier hours. I walked the Gothic Quarter before sunrise to catch the Pont del Bisbe with its lamps still burning, a Neo-Gothic bridge from the 1920s that reads convincingly medieval. And from our room in one of the city’s few tall buildings, the bullring La Monumental greeted us every morning, a Byzantine-inspired arena from 1916 filling an entire block of the Eixample.

Valencia

Valencia rerouted its river after the 1957 flood and turned the dry bed of the Turia into a park, then built its future inside it. The City of Arts and Sciences by Valencia-born Santiago Calatrava exceeded my high expectations: I walked beneath the white concrete ribs of the Science Museum at sunset, shot the Hemisfèric, the eye-shaped planetarium that opened the complex in 1998, and kept working past blue hour at the Prince Felipe Museum while Daria read in the café.

The old town holds its own against all that concrete. I memorized the way to Plaza de la Virgen one lively evening and returned at dawn while the square was being washed clean. The Valencia Cathedral beside it keeps the chalice venerated as the Holy Grail in a side chapel, and the Mercado Central covers 8,000 square metres in Art Nouveau ironwork and stained glass. Down at the water, the Juan Carlos I Marina still carries its America’s Cup polish. The full Valencia travel guide covers the city in depth.

Zaragoza

Zaragoza was the surprise of our Spanish travels. I found it through a map search after Barcelona, booked a train, and walked into a city of wide squares, buildings illuminated all night, and almost no tourists at dawn. The Basílica del Pilar anchors everything: the postcard frame with the city’s name set into the paving, the sunset reflection in the Ebro, and the Baroque facade lit warm above the river, a shot that cost me mud in my shoes. Tradition holds it is the first church ever dedicated to Mary.

The city’s name comes from Caesaraugusta, and its layers stay visible. La Seo stacks Romanesque, Gothic, Mudéjar, Renaissance, and Baroque on the site of a Roman forum and a mosque. From the Bridge of Lions locals watch the sunset over El Pilar on their way home from work. The Aljafería Palace, an 11th-century fortified Islamic palace that now seats the Aragonese Parliament, captivated me more than any building I had photographed before; even its Gothic Patio de San Martín stood empty while visitors rushed to the Moorish halls. And the Fuente de la Hispanidad puzzled me until I overheard a tour group: seen at the right angle, the water forms a map of Latin America. More in the Zaragoza travel guide.

Mallorca

Mallorca gets the jokes about being Germany‘s seventeenth state, and we answered them by skipping the loud southern coast for Alcúdia in the north, a town whose name comes from the Arabic for “the hills.” The reward was the sunset over Port d’Alcúdia, the water turning to liquid gold below the mountains. Another evening there, I was composing the port and the peaks when a couple stepped to the boardwalk rail to take a selfie against the sunset; their frame became mine.

Palma earns the detour. The cathedral of La Seu runs 121 metres long and 44 high, a Gothic mass that took from 1229 to 1601 to complete, with Gaudí himself reworking the interior from 1901 until he quit the project after an argument in 1914. From the park by the port you can frame the cathedral beside the Royal Palace of La Almudaina, still an official residence of the Spanish royal family. The complete Mallorca travel guide covers the island season by season.

Menorca

Menorca is the island I keep returning to, four times and counting as an instructor at the PhotoPills photography camp. Our base is Cala Galdana, a resort bay whose best panorama took Daria and me an unplanned hike to find, from the Mirador Sa Punta above the pines. A twenty-minute walk away, Cala Mitjana delivers the Balearic palette undeveloped: turquoise, white limestone, green pines, and no facilities at all.

The coast keeps surprising. Pont d’en Gil is a natural limestone arch I first mistook for the gate of an ancient harbour. In Ciutadella I guided a group toward the Castell de Sant Nicolau at dusk alongside Albert Dros and Elia Locardi, then found every landscape photographer had climbed down to the rocks while I framed the fortress with my wife waiting at its gate. I do not turn landscape photographers into cityscape photographers.

The Lighthouses of Menorca

Menorca’s character concentrates at its lighthouses. The Favàritx Lighthouse, finished in 1922, wears a black spiral up its tower and stands on dark slate that looks like a film set of the Moon; every visit hands me a different composition. Nearby, the limestone coast at Cap de Favàritx glowed pink for me at sunset with 39 other photographers spread along the rocks.

The north coast belongs to Cavalleria. Its lighthouse rises 94 metres above the sea, and photographing it at sunrise felt like meditation. On another evening there I stepped into a dark cave just as the setting sun lit its walls for a few seconds, long enough for one frame of the lighthouse from inside the glow. Menorca is the easternmost point of Spain, so a workshop morning on these cliffs means the country’s first sunrise, reached by climbing the headland in total darkness.

The Menorca Night Sky

Menorca became a Starlight Reserve in 2019, and the designation is earned. With the Mediterranean isolating the island from light pollution, the Milky Way spans the sky over Favàritx clearly enough to see with the naked eye. We go in May, when the galactic core stands highest; even from the edge of a village like Son Bou you can shoot the Milky Way over the town lights.

My first star trails happened here too, the hard way: my camera refused to fire its intervals automatically, so I counted to 30 and pressed the shutter, over and over, for an hour. No room for mistakes, and the curved lines came out clean.

Peñíscola

I went to Peñíscola for one view and I will not pretend otherwise. From the beach at night, the floodlit old town rises out of the sea behind a straw sunshade, the reason locals call it the city in the sea. The Templar castle on top was raised at the turn of the 14th century and later housed Papa Luna, the antipope Benedict XIII; El Cid and episodes of Game of Thrones were both filmed on these walls.

Below the fortifications, the old town’s alleys stack colourful facades, souvenir shops, and lantern light on cobblestones. When we visited, most of the tourists were Spaniards on their own summer holidays, which kept the town calm on the Costa del Azahar between Valencia and Barcelona.

Tenerife and Mount Teide

At 3,715 metres, Teide is the highest mountain in Spain, and its high plateau feels like another planet; films like Planet of the Apes have used it as one. For the panorama of the volcano in the last light I stitched nine vertical frames, the cable car a speck on the slope for scale. A bathroom stop saved the day at Roques de García: walking out of the plateau’s one hotel, I saw the sky ignite over the rock formations and ran back for the tripod, using the emptied path as a leading line.

The altitude serves science as well. The Teide Observatory sits at 2,390 metres, home to the telescope that discovered the first brown dwarf, named Teide 1. On the drive up through Las Cañadas I finally caught the Teide bugloss, the three-metre plant I nicknamed the ghost flower after years of seeing only its winter skeletons, framed against the slopes and the silhouette of La Gomera.

The Anaga Mountains

The northeast of Tenerife hides a forest 20,000 years out of its time. The laurisilva of the Anaga Mountains, a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, once covered southern Europe; walking it now means watching clouds drift between the trunks at eye level. On my favourite hiking trail from Mirador Cruz del Carmen I found mist breaking the light into visible rays over the path, and the mossy laurel corridors kept swallowing and releasing the sun as clouds walked through the forest around us.

The ridge roads deliver the wider views. Driving to the coast we pulled over as sun shafts chased clouds across the Anaga valleys, and the descent ends at Benijo Beach, 300 metres of black volcanic sand where the Atlantic forbids swimming and rewards cameras. The hamlet of Taganana, reached by a road of 180-degree turns, looked to me like a remote village in the Peruvian mountains, not Spain.

Santa Cruz and La Laguna

Tenerife’s cities carry their own material. In Santa Cruz, the Auditorio de Tenerife by Santiago Calatrava curves its white wave between the city and the Atlantic; I could circle it all day finding compositions, and it has appeared on Spanish stamps and euro coins. A calmer morning took us to the Market of Our Lady of Africa, where nobody rushes and the herbs and flowers scent the colonial-style courtyards. Down the coast in Candelaria, the white chapel by the basilica stood out in sunlight against black rocks and a storm building over the mountains, in the town whose Virgin is patron saint of the Canary Islands.

San Cristóbal de La Laguna, the island’s former capital, runs quieter and more historic. You can climb the tower of the Iglesia de la Concepción for the old-town view. From the Anaga heights, Las Teresitas shows off the rare golden sand the island shipped in from the Sahara. And at the tidal pools of Bajamar, a father raised his son overhead as a wave detonated behind them, one frame on our wedding anniversary that I could never have planned.

Photographing Spain

Spain is where I go from making photographs to teaching them. At the PhotoPills camp on Menorca I run workshop sessions on the cliffs and beaches, which is also where I keep learning: tube light painting with a dancer was new to me until Eric Paré and Kim Henry demonstrated it on a cold, calm night, shapes drawn in the air behind her with a moving tube.

The craft here rewards deliberateness. At the Teide viewpoint of Mirador Cruz del Carmen I spent half an hour on a tripod with a tilt-shift lens to get the palisade empty of people and the lines perfectly straight, with the cloud sea lapping at the volcano’s base. The same patience ran through 30 stacked frames at the Royal Palace in Madrid and an hour of counted 30-second exposures under the Menorcan stars. The subjects stand still; the work is in the waiting.

When to Visit Spain

Spain runs on more calendars than one. The cities photograph best outside high summer: we shot Madrid in February at late-spring temperatures, and Zaragoza’s monuments stay illuminated all night year-round while the squares sit empty at dawn. July and August bring real heat to the interior and full beaches to every coast.

The islands invert the seasons. We visit Tenerife in November and winter, when the Anaga cloud forest does its best work and the Teide plateau still delivers clear last light. Menorca peaks twice: summer for the calas, and May for the Milky Way season, when the PhotoPills camp gathers photographers from around the world. Teide has been listed as a World Heritage property since 2007, and its high plateau stays photogenic in every month; check the observatory webcam before driving up, because the summit makes its own weather.

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