(3.5 stars)
We did the Cicerone Guided tour of the Alhambra and Generalife for 52€ per person. The beginning of the tour wasn't exactly what I expected-- Cicerone picks you up at your hotel between 9:20 and 10 AM, and transports you to their office where a large group of people are all waiting for the tour. (This is the part I wasn't expecting - somehow I thought the small group of 10 or so people on our bus constituted the tour group). In the Cicerone office, you pick up a headset and get divided into tour groups based on language. Our English group must have had somewhere between 25 and 30 people, so larger than I was expecting. And off we went, walking toward the Generalife.
As for the tour itself, our guide was friendly enough though the amount and quality of information shared definitely decreased over the course of the tour, which I suppose was understandable given that it's a three hour tour and it was rather chilly (our guide also seemed upset because someone on our tour group lost a ticket to enter the Alhambra - the ticket was eventually found - but it seemed to really irritate her and she couldn't shake it). The information on the tour was definitely more in the way of factoids than historical overview, and had I not read a few books about the Alhambra before heading on the tour, I could easily walk away without a broad general overview of the complex (instead, I would know small things like - there's a tree where some people were beheaded). Our tour guide definitely didn't seem interested in answering questions or in engaging with the members of the group; I suppose the size of the group, and the fact that we were all wearing headphones made this worse, but when people did ask questions, she wasn't particularly gracious about answering.
And then, like most tours I've been on, there's the mid-tour sales pitch. This one was two-fold: first, we were directed to a shop where we were encouraged to shop. The tour stopped for about ten minutes. Second, we were all instructed to pose for a photo so that Cicerone can post it on Facebook, and encourage us to tag ourselves. (As a caveat, this was more benign than other sales pitches I've seen, like the Sandeman sales pitch)
That said, I do think a guided tour is the way to go for the Alhambra - like many monuments in Spain, there's very little to make this navigable on one's own, and the vast majority of folks here are on tours. Cicerone is a perfectly fine way of seeing the Alhambra; I'd just recommend reading up before the tour, and holding in mind that these aren't intimate tours. read more
