Ophir Travel's own photographs
Seville, Jerez, Doñana, Ronda and the spa · between Huelva and the Algarve
A week of golf is five rounds and seven days. That leaves two full days and seven evenings, and there is almost always someone travelling who doesn't play. That part of the trip — the part no package mentions — is what decides whether they come back next year. That's why this page exists. From the Huelva coast you can breakfast at the hotel, spend the day in Seville and be back for dinner; Doñana sits across the water; the Riotinto mines and the Sierra de Aracena are an hour inland; and across the Guadiana, forty minutes away, is Portugal. From the Cádiz base, the same with Jerez, the bay and the white villages. None of this means changing hotels or missing a tee time.
Ophir Travel's own photographs
A little over an hour from the Huelva coast, less from Jerez. The Real Alcázar — Europe's oldest royal palace still in use — the cathedral, Santa Cruz and Plaza de España, with an official guide, on foot. Leave after breakfast and be back for dinner, or dine there and return at night.
At the Real Escuela Andaluza del Arte Ecuestre you watch “How the Andalusian Horses Dance”, classical dressage set to music and like nothing else. The city is walkable and full of bodegas — that has its own section. Half an hour away, Cádiz, held to be the oldest city in the West.
The marshland where birds pass between Europe and Africa, by 4x4 and with a guide. Next door, El Rocío: a village with sand streets instead of asphalt and horses tied outside the houses, empty eleven months of the year. An hour from El Rompido, and like nowhere else in Spain.
Mining here predates the Romans, and the river really does run red, from the iron. The landscape looks so much like Mars that NASA has used it to rehearse the search for life on the planet. You go down into the open pit, walk the mining museum and ride the narrow-gauge train that once carried the ore to port.
Holm-oak dehesa, acorn-fed Iberian pork and the villages around Jabugo. Beneath Aracena itself opens the Gruta de las Maravillas, the first show cave to open to the public in Spain. You visit a curing cellar, eat where the pig is raised, and return in the afternoon.
Twenty minutes from Huelva. The three caravels sailed from Palos de la Frontera on 3 August 1492; full-size replicas sit at the dock and can be boarded. Opposite, the Monasterio de La Rábida, where Columbus stayed before setting sail.
From the Cádiz base. Vejer is a white village perched over the countryside; at Bolonia, right on the beach, stands the Roman city of Baelo Claudia, which once salted fish for the whole empire. In Barbate and Zahara, tuna is still caught with the almadraba, a Phoenician-origin method: the season runs April to June, eaten right where it's landed.
The village split in two by a hundred-metre gorge, with the Puente Nuevo crossing above it and one of the oldest bullrings still standing. The long day for those travelling from Cádiz or Sotogrande, returning through the Sierra de Grazalema.
For those staying in Portugal. Silves was the Moorish capital of the Algarve and keeps an entire red-stone castle; the Ria Formosa is sixty kilometres of lagoon and sandbar islands toured by small boat, with flamingos, from Faro or Quinta do Lago. Fifteen minutes by car from most of the courses, and another Algarve altogether.
The one who doesn't play doesn't wait. It's the line we repeat most, and the one that has closed the most trips. In a golf group there's always someone who doesn't play, and the usual outcome is a week by the hotel pool waiting for the others to come back. Not here: while the group plays, that person is in Seville, in Doñana or at the spa, and they compare notes over dinner. That's the difference between a golf trip and a trip.
Not every day calls for getting in the car. These are already arranged at each destination, with a closed price:
We don't sell loose excursions. We fit them into the trip: the guide is official and speaks your language, the car collects from the hotel door, and the time is set so it never crosses the group's tee time. Guide and vehicle are charged per group, not per person — a private saloon for 1–3 or a minivan for 4–8 in Huelva and the Costa de la Luz, a Mercedes E, V or S Class in eastern Andalusia (with a seasonal surcharge in Málaga and Marbella from June to September), and a private chauffeured vehicle in Portugal. Almadraba tuna only runs April to June, and the bodega experiences have their own section. Tell us who's playing, who isn't and what they fancy, and we'll hand back the whole trip closed — rounds, tables and free days — with a single price and a single person on the other end of the phone.