Spanish roads

I thought it would be an appropriate time to give an indication of the state of the Spanish roads. I did this in France, and thought a comparative report would be a useful thing to recollect.

1. Danger and madness: when reading about the Spanish road system, I had found out that it was an aggressive and unforgiving system, where, for example, you have to try and fight your way onto motorway junctions and roundabouts etc. This has proved not to be true, and so far we have been pleasantly surprised.

2. Signage: the Spanish seem to have a system of navigation, whereby it is imperative that you know your national geography. For example, the road signs seem always to sign to the end destination rather than the intermediate points that you may wish to go to. Therefore, you have to have some sort of knowledge of the country before setting off on the journey. We have come unstuck a few times due to our woeful understanding of this country. Without a satnav, which by the way is more fun, we are having to use the position of the sun to help us get some sort of bearing as to whether it's a left or right that we take. Retro navigation.

3. Signage part 2: if you do find a sign that helps, it has rarely been the case that the one sign you find is ever followed up on. Therefore, when for example, we were looking for the campsite, we found the sign that pointed in the vague direction of the site and then said 3.5km. However, from that point on, there were no further signs, 5 roundabouts and a multitude of options! So we had many chances at getting it wrong before getting it right.

4. Pointless traffic lights. So when is sitting in the middle of an apparent desert, at a lonely set of traffic lights, no traffic around and no slight intimation of a junction, a sensible thing?

5. Motorway junctions: I really like this. They don't label their junctions as a set of ordered numbers. Their junctions are labelled as distances. E.g. Junction 57 would be 57 km from 'kilometre 0' as previously mentioned in another post.  I like that, it's sensible!

So those as the findings thus far. I suspect a Portuguese road entry will follow in due course as within the next 3 or 4 days we aim to follow some of our friend Abilio's advice and enter the country through a beautiful drive.

Ed