The Alcazaba before the heat. Then a boat, then a table.
Which Caminito del Rey tour includes the bus and which drops you at the gate. What an afternoon on a catamaran out of the port costs. Whether Ronda or Gibraltar is the better single day away. Reviews of every tour you can book on this coast.
Four bookings a first week on the Costa del Sol hangs off.
The gorge walkway, the Moorish fortress, the Picasso rooms and an evening on the water. What each costs, and what the people who took it say.
01The famous oneCaminito del Rey Guided Tour with TransportationThe walkway pinned to the El Chorro gorge, with the transfer from Málaga built in. Entry is timed, so the tour that carries the bus is usually the one that works.
02The first morningAlcazaba and Roman Theatre Guided Tour With EntryThe fortress and the Roman theatre stacked below it, on one guided entry. Go before ten, while the ramps are still in shade.
03Two hours indoorsMuseo Picasso Málaga Entry TicketThe Picasso collection sits in a Renaissance palace five minutes from the cathedral. The best plan there is for a hot afternoon in the centre.
04The eveningSunset Catamaran TripOut of the port under sail as the light comes off the Gibralfaro. Short, cheap, and the photograph everybody takes home.
The days out this coast books more than any other.
Every review on the site →The tours more travellers take than anything else between Nerja and Estepona, and what earns each of them the slot.
1
Caminito del Rey Guided Tour with Transportation
Review of Málaga's Caminito del Rey guided tour, with direct transport, bilingual guides, cliffside walk, practical tips, and honest drawbacks.
From · $69
Read our review →
2
Guided Tour and Entry Ticket
from $35
3
Museo Picasso Málaga Entry Ticket
from $15
4
Caminito del Rey Guided Tour
from $67
5
Caminito del Rey Guided Tour with Shuttle Bus
from $44
6
Tour with Official Guide and Drink
from $34
7
Alcazaba and Roman Theatre Guided Tour With Entry
from $14
8
Entry Ticket
from $17
Málaga city, the Marbella side, and the gorge an hour inland.
A working port with three art museums and a beach, a marina town with a mountain behind it, a walkway bolted into a limestone canyon, a white town split by a gorge, and a cliff coast full of sea caves. Six places to start from, and the best day out in each.
Catamaran, dolphin boat, kayak, or your own hull. Pick the afternoon.
A hundred and fifty kilometres of shoreline, and a working port in the middle of the city. Four kinds of day on the water, what it costs to get aboard each one, and where each sails from.
★★★★★★★★★★ 4.6 · Sunset Catamaran Trip
Catamaran and sailing daysShade, a swim ladder, lunch cooked on board.
Dolphin boatsCommon dolphins off Benalmádena and Fuengirola, most mornings.
Kayak and snorkel morningsThe Maro cliffs, and the waterfall you paddle under.
Boat hire, no licenceA small motorboat for the afternoon, no paperwork.
All 36 days on the water →
The best days on this coast happen an hour inland, or across a border.
Málaga works as a base partly because of what sits close to it. The Caminito del Rey and Ronda are both morning drives. Granada and the Alhambra are two hours north, Seville two and a half west, and Gibraltar and the Tangier ferry are at the far end of the same coast road.
Málaga: the fortress early, the galleries when the sun turns.
Everything in Málaga →
Take the ramps up to the Alcazaba and the Gibralfaro first, drop into the cathedral streets, then spend the worst two hours of the day under a roof. The centre is small enough that the order is the whole plan.
- 1Museo Picasso Málaga Entry Ticketfrom $15
- 2Alcazaba and Roman Theatre Guided Tour With Entryfrom $14
- 3Gibraltar Tourfrom $38
Alcazaba, Gibralfaro, or both on one ticket
The Moorish citadel steps straight up from the Roman theatre, and a combined ticket carries you on to the castle above it. The path between the two is steep and completely unshaded.
Where the Picasso collection actually is
The Museo Picasso fills the Buenavista palace a few streets from the cathedral, and his birthplace on Plaza de la Merced is a short walk further on. The Pompidou cube down at the port is a separate ticket and a separate mood.
Flamenco in a room, not a theatre
The tablaos here seat a few dozen and run one or two shows a night, which is why they go early. The later slot is the one locals take, and dinner is usually an add-on rather than the point.
Marbella is a marina, an old town and a mountain, and they rarely meet.
Puerto Banús is the postcard and the most expensive twenty minutes on the coast. Behind it the Sierra Blanca drops into river canyons you can abseil before lunch, and the water off the bay holds dolphins most of the year.
Every Marbella day out →
Ronda is a town with a gorge running through the middle of it.
The Puente Nuevo spans a hundred metres of vertical rock, and the old quarter on the far side empties the moment the coaches leave. Most trips pair it with Setenil de las Bodegas, where the houses are built in under an overhanging cliff, and the climb up through the Serranía is half the day.
- 1Ronda+Setenil de las Bodegas with Little Trainfrom $34
- 2Ronda and Setenil Guided Tour Day Tripfrom $65
- 3Ronda and Setenil Tour with Scenic Trainfrom $28
What a day out on the Costa del Sol actually costs.
Every tour on the site, grouped by price. A good number of the best days on this coast come in under the cost of dinner in Puerto Banús.
Old-town walks, museum entries, a sunset sail out of the port and the shorter runs up to Ronda.
- 1Guided Tour and Entry Ticketfrom $35
- 2Museo Picasso Málaga Entry Ticketfrom $15
- 3Caminito del Rey Guided Tour with Shuttle Busfrom $44
The full-day standards: Caminito del Rey with transport, Granada and the Alhambra, Gibraltar, the Tangier ferry.
- 1Caminito del Rey Guided Tour with Transportationfrom $69
- 2Caminito del Rey Guided Tourfrom $67
- 3Granada Full-Day Trip with Alhambrafrom $128
Private guides, chartered boats and the canyon days that come with a guide each.
- 1Tangier, Morocco Day Trip from Costa del Solfrom $198
- 2Tangier Full-Day Tour by Ferryfrom $186
- 3Alhambra Guided Tour with Entry Ticketsfrom $153
Three things you can only do in Málaga province.
Beaches and marinas run the length of Spain. A walkway bolted a hundred metres up a limestone gorge, the rooms where Picasso’s own family collection ended up, and a burial chamber older than the pyramids do not.
The King’s Little Path
A metre-wide boardwalk runs three kilometres along the wall of the Gaitanes gorge, a hundred metres above the river, on brackets left by the hydroelectric workers who built the original in 1905. That version rotted through and killed enough people to close it; the walkway you book now was hung above the ruins in 2015, and the old concrete is still visible underfoot. It runs one way, north to south, so every tour has to solve the transport at both ends.
- 1Caminito del Rey Guided Tour with Transportation★★★★★★★★★★ 4.8 · 12,183 reviews
- 2Guided Tour and Entry Ticket★★★★★★★★★★ 4.6 · 11,286 reviews
- 3Caminito del Rey Guided Tour★★★★★★★★★★ 4.7 · 7,488 reviews
Picasso’s own Málaga
He was born on Plaza de la Merced in 1881 and left at ten, and for a century the city had almost nothing of his to show. The Museo Picasso opened only in 2003, after his daughter-in-law and grandson handed over more than two hundred works the family had kept. It is a small collection by the standards of Paris or Barcelona and a far more personal one, hung in a sixteenth-century palace with a Phoenician wall in the basement.
- 1Museo Picasso Málaga Entry Ticket★★★★★★★★★★ 4.4 · 11,138 reviews
- 2Center Pompidou Málaga Ticket★★★★★★★★★★ 4.3 · 656 reviews
- 3Museo del Automóvil y la Moda Ticket★★★★★★★★★★ 4.8 · 584 reviews
The Antequera Dolmens
Three burial chambers on the edge of a farming town, raised around 3700 BC from slabs weighing up to 180 tonnes. Menga is aligned not on the sun but on the Peña de los Enamorados, the mountain shaped like a sleeping head that fills its doorway. UNESCO listed the site in 2016. It is twenty minutes off the Caminito road and almost nobody stops.
- 1Caminito del Rey & Antequera: Dolmens and free time★★★★★★★★★★ 4.9 · 605 reviews
- 2Dolmens and El Torcal Tour with Transfer★★★★★★★★★★ 4.8 · 124 reviews
- 3Guided tour of the Dolmens and El Torcal★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 94 reviews
Four bookings on this coast that will not wait for you.
Most of Málaga province can be arranged over breakfast the day before. These four run on capped entry slots, ferry timetables and rooms that hold forty people, none of which care when your flight lands.
- 01Caminito del Rey Guided Tour with TransportationEntry is timed and the daily number is capped. In spring and autumn the morning slots go weeks out, and the walkway runs one way, so a missed slot is a missed day.
- 02Granada Full-Day Trip with AlhambraAlhambra tickets carry a fixed time for the Nasrid Palaces and are released on a set calendar. The day trips from the coast sell out with them, not after them.
- 03Tangier, Morocco Day Trip from Costa del SolThe Tangier trip is built around one ferry crossing each way. There is no later sailing to catch, and it needs the passport most people leave in the hotel safe.
- 04Teatro Flamenco Malaga Live Flamenco ShowThe tablaos seat a few dozen and run one or two shows a night. Turning up on a Friday in August is how people end up watching a hotel show instead.
Málaga in August: the terral turns the city into an oven by noon.
Most of the year the breeze runs in off the sea and the coast stays mild. Then the terral swings the wind around off the mountains, drops the humidity and pushes the city past forty degrees while the beach towns twenty minutes away sit in the low thirties. The answer never changes: be out early, then get under a roof or under the water.
- 1Museo Picasso Málaga Entry Ticketfrom $15
- 2Hammam Al Ándalus Entry Ticket with Massagefrom $71
- 3Center Pompidou Málaga Ticketfrom $10
Sweet wine from the barrel, espetos off the fire, a market under a Moorish arch.
Málaga pours its own wine sweet from casks behind a marble counter, grills sardines on canes in a boat full of sand, and keeps its produce under a fourteenth-century gate at the Atarazanas market. Take the tapas walk on the first evening and the paella class through the hot afternoon.
- 1Malaga Wine & Tapas Small Group Guided Tourfrom $83
- 2Caminito del Rey/White Village Tour & Tapasfrom $75
- 3Wine & Tapas Tourfrom $77
By place — the coast and the towns behind it
Málaga, the gorge, Ronda, Marbella, Nerja: the week most people end up doing.
GibraltarThe newest reviews from the Málaga coast.
The rest of the new ones →
E-Mountain Bike & Wine Tour from Marbella to Sierra Blanca
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e-Bike (Self-Guided) Setenil Circular – 41km Easy
Read our review →
Wine & Tapas tour by electric bike (e-bike) including Ronda pickup (half day)
Read our review →
Tour the Sanctuary and Walk with the Donkeys and Share their Love
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Wine & Tapas tour by electric bike (e-bike) including Ronda pickup (full day)
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Vip Transfer from Malaga Airport to Malaga Fuengirola or Marbella
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Half-Day Malaga Small-Group Hiking and Snorkeling Tour
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Transfer from Malaga airport to malaga city,marbella,banus,etc
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Photoshooting in Malaga – Photo session by OhMyGoodGuide
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Malaga Airport (Costa del Sol) Private Arrival Transfer
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