Four days in Málaga: Picasso's home town, and it only recently started saying so

Three nights on the Costa del Sol: a Moorish fort above a Roman theatre, two hills of ramparts, the Picasso museum and the palace he was born four streets from, and a day on the boardwalk through the El Chorro gorge.

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Length
4 days, 3 nights
Where you stay
Málaga
Places
8 across 4 days
OpenFreeMap © OpenMapTiles Data from OpenStreetMap

Almost everybody who comes to southern Spain lands at Málaga and leaves within the hour, for Marbella or Nerja or a rented villa in the hills. That habit is old and it is wrong. Málaga has a Roman theatre with a Moorish castle stacked on top of it, a cathedral missing a tower, and a run of art museums a city ten times its size would be pleased with.

The turn happened this century. Málaga was a working port that had let its centre go shabby, and it rebuilt around culture: the Picasso museum in 2003, the Carmen Thyssen in 2011, a Pompidou outpost on the harbour, the whole grid of the old town closed to cars and paved. Picasso was born here in 1881 and left as a boy, and for most of the last century the city had remarkably little of his to show.

Four days gives you the old town, the two hills above it, and one real day out of the city. It is warm and sunny for most of the year, the sea is at the end of the street, and dinner is at ten.

Highlights

  • A Roman theatre found in 1951 under a building site, with an Islamic fortress climbing the hill above it
  • A cathedral the city calls the one armed woman, because the second tower was never built
  • Two hundred works by Picasso in a Renaissance palace four streets from the house he was born in
  • Sardines cooked on a skewer over an open fire in a boat full of sand
  • A metre wide boardwalk pinned to the wall of a gorge a hundred metres above the river

Where to stay

Málaga, three nights

Stay in the old town, inside the ring of the Alameda and the Alcazaba. Everything on the first, second and fourth days is within a ten minute walk of the cathedral, and the station for the day out is fifteen minutes further.

The beach at La Malagueta starts where the old town ends, which is the odd luxury of this city: you can be in a Moorish palace at noon and in the sea at five.

Day by day

Day 1 in Málaga

The cathedral, the Roman theatre and a long dinner

The old town is a small triangle of marble paved streets between the cathedral and the fortress hill, and the first afternoon is for walking it without much of a plan.

The cathedral is the strange one. Work began in the 1520s and stopped for good in the eighteenth century with the second tower unbuilt, so it stands lopsided over the town and everyone calls it La Manquita, the one armed woman. Go up to the roof if the ticket office is selling the walkway: it runs along the vaults with the harbour on one side and the hills on the other.

The Roman theatre sits at the foot of the Alcazaba and was found in 1951 when they were digging foundations for a cultural centre. You can see the whole thing for nothing from the square in front.

  1. 16:00

    Málaga Cathedral

    Religious

    Renaissance inside, with carved choir stalls and a pair of enormous organs still in use. The unfinished tower is the point, and the rooftop walk is the best hour in the city centre.

  2. 17:30

    Roman Theater

    Historic

    First century seating cut into the hillside, buried for centuries and dug out in the 1950s. The interpretation centre beside it is small and the theatre itself is visible from the street.

  3. 20:30

    Bodega-Bar El Pimpi

    Other

    The bodega everyone ends up in, barrels signed by bullfighters and actors, sweet wine by the glass and a terrace under the Alcazaba wall. Busy and touristy and still good.

With more time: The harbour promenade, Muelle Uno, is ten minutes away and open late, with the Centre Pompidou Málaga at the end of it under a coloured glass cube. It is a small outpost of the Paris collection and an easy hour if the queue for anything else is long.

Day 2 in Málaga

The Alcazaba, the Gibralfaro and the Picasso Museum

Start at the Alcazaba gate early, because the climb through it is in full sun by eleven. The fortress was built in the eleventh century by the Muslim rulers of Málaga and it works like a set of nested traps: gates at right angles, a walled ramp, courtyards of clipped hedges and running water, and a small palace at the top.

A covered rampart called the coracha runs on up to the Castillo de Gibralfaro, a second fortress on the higher hill. The walk takes about twenty minutes and is steep; bus 35 does it if the legs have gone. What you come for is the circuit of the ramparts, with the bullring directly below and the whole coast laid out.

Come down for the afternoon and the Picasso Museum, which is indoors and air conditioned. It opened in 2003 in a sixteenth century palace, filled by a donation from the painter's own family, and the collection is domestic rather than famous: portraits of his wives and children, ceramics, prints, the working end of a long life.

  1. 09:30

    Alcazaba

    Historic

    The best kept Moorish fortress on this coast, and a proper climb through gardens, gateways and horseshoe arches to a palace with the harbour behind it. A combined ticket with Gibralfaro saves a couple of euros.

  2. 11:30

    Castillo de Gibralfaro

    Historic

    The upper castle, built in the fourteenth century to garrison the Alcazaba below it. Walk the full circuit of the walls: the view down onto the bullring and the port is the picture everyone takes of Málaga.

  3. 16:00

    Picasso Museum

    Culture

    Around two hundred works given by the family, hung chronologically in the Palacio de Buenavista. Quiet, well lit and rarely oversubscribed, and the Phoenician and Roman remains in the basement come with the ticket.

With more time: The Malagueta beach is a fifteen minute walk from the museum and the water is warm from June to October. For dinner, the seafront at Pedregalejo is a twenty minute bus ride east and is where the sardine fires are.

Day 3 in Málaga

The Caminito del Rey through the El Chorro gorge

One long day out, and the best thing within reach of the city. The Caminito del Rey is a walkway bolted to the side of a limestone gorge an hour or so north west of the city, a metre wide and a long way above the river, built for hydroelectric workers a century ago and named for the king who walked it in 1921.

The original crumbled, people died on it, and it stayed shut for years. What reopened in 2015 is a new boardwalk pinned above the wreckage of the old one, which you can see below your feet the whole way. The walk is one way from north to south, about three kilometres of boardwalk in a route of seven or so, and takes three to four hours with the bus back to the start.

Tickets are limited, sold online, and sell out weeks ahead for weekends. Trains from María Zambrano reach El Chorro in about forty minutes, but check the timetable against your entry slot before you book anything: there are only a few trains a day.

  1. 08:00

    Train to El Chorro

    Travel

    About forty minutes from María Zambrano on the Seville line. Take water, a hat and shoes with a grip; helmets are handed out at the gate.

  2. 10:00

    King's little pathway

    Other

    Three kilometres of boardwalk clamped to the gorge wall, a glass floored balcony near the end and a suspension bridge over the drop. Vertigo is a genuine consideration; there is no way back once you start.

  3. 14:30

    Late lunch by the reservoir

    Eat

    The restaurants around the El Chorro dam do a plain, large and cheap lunch for people who have just walked it.

With more time: If the tickets have gone, El Torcal is the other one: an upland of weathered limestone about thirty kilometres north near Antequera, stacked into shapes that look machined, with marked walking loops and no booking needed.

Day 4 in Málaga

Picasso's birthplace and the Carmen Thyssen

A short last morning in the streets north of the cathedral. Picasso was born on the Plaza de la Merced in 1881 and left Málaga as a child, and the flat his family had is now a small museum of his beginnings rather than his work.

Five minutes away, the Carmen Thyssen is the museum to see if you want to understand Andalucía rather than modern art: nineteenth century Spanish painting, a great deal of it Andalusian, in a restored palace off a courtyard.

Then a coffee, a last plate of fried fish and the twelve minute train to the airport.

  1. 10:00

    Picasso's birthplace

    Visit

    The family's flat on the Plaza de la Merced, with early drawings, photographs and the ordinary furniture of a nineteenth century Málaga household. Half an hour, and worth it for the context rather than the art.

  2. 11:15

    Museo Carmen Thyssen

    Culture

    Opened in 2011 around Carmen Thyssen's own collection of Spanish painting from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Strong on Andalusian scenes, and the sixteenth century palace it occupies is half the pleasure.

With more time: With a later flight, the Interactive Museum of Music near the birthplace holds a very large collection of instruments and lets you play a good many of them, which is more entertaining than it sounds.

Before you go

Getting in

Málaga Airport is the third busiest in mainland Spain and half of northern Europe flies into it, which means cheap fares in every month. The C1 suburban train runs from the terminal to María Zambrano and on to Málaga Centro in about twelve minutes for under two euros, every twenty to forty minutes from early morning until one at night. The A express bus is a little slower and costs about four.

María Zambrano is also the AVE station: Madrid is under three hours, Córdoba about an hour, Seville around two, sometimes with a change at Córdoba. Granada is two and a half by bus rather than by train, and the bus station is next door to the railway one.

Everything here except the day out is walkable from the old town, so a hire car is a liability rather than a help. The centre is pedestrianised and parking is underground and expensive.

When to go

Spring and autumn are the best of it, with days in the low twenties and enough sun to eat outside. July and August push past thirty five and the coast fills up with the whole of Europe.

Winter is mild, quiet and cheap, and it is the one time the Alcazaba is empty, though some coastal places shut for the season and the wind off the sea can feel colder than the thermometer says.

Two weeks to avoid unless you are coming for them: Semana Santa, when the brotherhoods carry enormous thrones through the streets night after night and the centre is impassable, and the Feria in the middle of August, which is a week of daytime drinking in the old town and fairground at night.

Eating

Málaga eats fish. The dish to look for is espetos, sardines threaded onto a cane and cooked over a wood fire in an old boat filled with sand, and they are done properly at the chiringuitos along the beach at Pedregalejo and El Palo rather than in the centre. Fried fish, boquerones, comes in a paper cone.

In town, tapas are ordered at the bar and paid for at the end, and the local wine is sweet: dark moscatel and Pedro Ximénez, poured from barrels in the old taverns and much better than that description sounds.

Lunch runs from two, dinner from nine, and the beach places serve later than that in summer.

Málaga is the city that got tired of being an airport. Ten years of museums, pedestrianised streets and a cleaned up port have made it the one place on this coast worth several days rather than a transfer.

Four of them buys you a fortress, a gorge, a good deal of Picasso and as much grilled fish as you can eat.

Or make it a longer trip

These trips pass through here on the way somewhere else.

Make it your trip

Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.

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Common questions

Is Málaga better than the resorts along the coast?
For a city break, yes, and it is not close. Málaga has the history, the museums, the food and the transport, and you can still be on a beach in ten minutes. Torremolinos and Fuengirola have the beach and very little else.
How far ahead do I need to book the Caminito del Rey?
Weeks for a weekend or a holiday, days at a quiet time of year. Tickets are timed and limited, the walk is one way, and there is no ticket office at the gate worth queueing at. Book it before you book anything else on this trip.
Do I need to book the Alcazaba and the Picasso Museum?
The museum is easy to walk into outside August. For the Alcazaba, buy the combined ticket with the Gibralfaro online and go at opening: the ramp up is unshaded and it is a different experience at nine than at noon.
Can I do Granada, Córdoba or Ronda as a day trip?
Córdoba is an hour each way by AVE and works as a day. Granada is about two and a half hours each way by bus, which makes for a long day and a rushed Alhambra, so give it a night or two of its own instead. Ronda is a couple of hours by train and the ride itself is worth the ticket.
Is three days enough instead of four?
Yes, if you drop the gorge. The city itself is comfortably two full days plus an afternoon, and the fourth day here exists because the Caminito del Rey deserves a whole one.
Can I copy this itinerary and change it?
Yes. Copy it, swap the walk for a beach day or the Thyssen for the Pompidou, and move the museums to whichever afternoon looks hottest.