Yo, Curious Travelers! We have released Curious Spain for you. Create your interesting road trips anywhere in Spain by the points & places you know and want, within the time & budget you have. You can check it out right away here https://curiosio.com/country/?iso=es but we encourage you to keep reading how we were making it.
Spanish Signature Trips
As always we tested the Curious Spain in the Lab to make sure it is smart enough. We parsed lists of points from several travel articles and fed them into Curiosio to create interactive trip plans from them. Curiosio decides how much time and how much funds to allocate. Curiosio decides to add more points if they are available in the perimeter and are cool. By doing so we also test the density and the quality of our knowledge graph for Spain.
The Don Quixote Drive
Being inspired by this Don Quixote Route we set Madrid as a starting and finishing point and made a loop for a drive through La Mancha windmills.
Here is an interactive trip plan. You can bend it to your liking by changing the dates/duration, number of travelers, and total budget. You can add more points or places. Click a red [Supertrip] button to start tailoring it.
Spanish Rondo
Ever heard about a town under the rock? It’s Setenil de las Bodegas. Here is a cool drive in the area. Start in Costa del Sol, and visit Ronda with its famous bridge, Setenil de las Bodegas, and gorgeous Sierra de Grazalema.
Technoart Loop from Barcelona
Obviously, you know about Barcelona with Antoni Gaudí, Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso. Curious travelers usually know this. We wanted to show you Barcelona and the south of Catalonia a bit differently. In Barcelona pay attention to hyperbolic paraboloids, hyperboloids, catenoids, and other math. Make a visit to the absolute beauty — the MareNostrum supercomputer inside the former chapel.
We created an itinerary that blends technology and art in the region. Salvador Dalí blended the tech into his art. Just go to the Dalí Theatre and Museum and watch yourself.
Special thanks to Ivan Danyliuk for making, giving, and allowing us to use his geeky pictures of the MareNostrum in this signature trip plan.
Top Gear Special Spain
We took the route those three geeks drove 10 years ago and made an interactive trip plan from it so that you could drive it. It took place during the good old times of Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, James May — Series 20, Episode 3.
“The trio head for Spain, for a road trip with three new ‘budget convertibles’ — Hammond in Ferrari, Clarkson in McLaren, and May in Audi R8. On their trip across the country, the trio test their cars at being inconspicuous, how noisy they are, travel along a mountain road in the Sierra Nevada mountain range, use the disused Ciudad Real airport for speed test and drag race, before concluding their journey by making a street circuit in an abandoned housing project in Madrid…” — Wikipedia.
This itinerary starts outside of Spain in Gibraltar. We united Gibraltar with the rest of Spain for convenience. Read about the weird geography below.
Curious Geography
Plazas de soberanía is a series of Spanish overseas minor territories scattered along the Mediterranean coast bordering Morocco in Africa. There are major places of sovereignty — two autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla. There are minor places of sovereignty — a number of islands and a small peninsula along the coast.
As Curiosio is about road trips for now there is a need for routing between the points. If there was a ferry between Ceuta and Melilla we would probably include those cities to the knowledge graph. OSM shows only ferries between each city and European Spain.
On the other hand, there is a non-Spanish piece of land — Gibraltar. We included it in Curious Spain. The Top Gear Special Spain itinerary is starting in Gibraltar and finishes in Madrid. We also included a sovereign landlocked country and microstate of Andorra aka Principality of Andorra. There is a UNESCO site Madriu-Perafita-Claror Valley. Though Andorra is cool to visit even because it is a microstate nowadays.
There is a piece of Spain in France — Llívia. It is a Spanish exclave surrounded by the French département of Pyrénées-Orientales. It is separated from the rest of Spain by a corridor about 1.6 km (1.0 mile) wide. It had to be included in Curious France. Probably Llívia is not there yet :-O
Why So Long
Curiosio is powered by our own Travel AI Engine called Ingeenee. AI is getting smarter when exposed to diversity in the real world. We believe that Artificial Smartness is more valuable than Artificial Intelligence. AI can do not so smart planning like people do, just automating the burden of planning but not improving the quality of travel. Our bet is on the AI that can do smart planning, smarter than people do, and the smartest travel planning on the planet for people together with people.
The diversity of the real world is multidimensional. One dimension is the size of the knowledge graph of a country. Countries like the United States, United Kingdom, France, Italy are so rich with points and places for travelers. They are on one side along the axis, while countries like Australia, Bolivia are very sparse. Another dimension is the road network. Countries like Italy, the UK evolved between the waters. While countries like the Netherlands, Poland, and Germany are well-connected with their neighbors.
An interesting dimension is the extreme geometry of some countries, such as Chile (a long vertical) and Canada (a long horizontal, there is not so much in the Arctic archipelago). There are many other dimensions that matter and shape the evolution of AI. The next dimension for our Ingeenee will be islands and archipelagos — Japan and Greece — so stay tuned for these two super interesting countries.
As we already released France and covered the specific needs for the AI we left Spain for the future. It could go vice versa — we could release Spain as one of the richest travel experience countries, partially bounded by water, having a convex shape, flats and mountains, etc. Then France would have been put on hold for the future. It happened as it happened. We are happy to finally release Spain road trips for you all.
Spaniards sped it up. The people of Spain sped up the release of Curious Spain. Spaniards helped a lot Ukrainians to defend themselves from the furious Ruzzian Horde. Once Ukraine received military help from Spain. The Ukrainians found Spanish sausages among the boxes with grenade launchers and a postcard saying: “I wish you victory! With love, Letizia”. It took them a moment to understand that it was from the Queen of Spain.
There was and is more military help from Spain. Thank you Spaniards for your help. As our gratitude — now you can plan curious road trips in your beautiful country with Curiosio!
