We re-entered Spain from Portugal heading for Salamanca, another place we had been told "we must see". We liked Salamanca, another small city without the problems of the big cities. We had a nice time taking ourselves around, there were some lovely old buildings in good condition and history dating back to Roman times with an old bridge that was the main Roman road into the city. From Salamanca it was onto the big city with big city problems, Madrid. Unfortunately Madrid has the worst graffiti problem we have seen so far and this detracts from what is nice about the city, there were nice malls and squares to be seen, nice artwork done by local artists in the form of statues, some nice old buildings and some very nice parks, but it was often hard to Frame a picture to keep the graffiti out. The road network in Spain is amazing and it is the same in their cities. In Madrid the bus depot had two levels, both of them underground and this was tied in with there underground train network, brilliant. Next it was Barcelona, again we had been told good things about Barcelona and we hoped it would live up to it, it did. It was easily the best large city in Spain, it had interesting architecture, history and a great feel of being alive. There were live statues and artists all over the place, fountains, parks and street sellers. The main attraction was a cathedral that was started in 1883 and is still being worked on today, they expect to take another 30 years to complete it! We wish we could have spent more time in Barcelona, but winter is on its way and we need to get through the French Alps to Italy, so we had to move on.