sussex2 wrote:You can go skiing a 90 minute drive from the Mediterranean coast There are ice warnings in the suburbs of Barcelona and the country as a whole is one of the most mountainous in Europe; snow chains/tyres are compulsory in large tracts of the country.
There is less traffic density of course and this helps a great deal.
I've actually been to Northern Spain a couple of times. It is a more European part of the country both in terms of weather but also in behavioral and adminstrative terms, as it were. The state of roads, as well as driver behavior, is in accordance with that.
In historic Barcelona, they actually trimmed the edges of buildings in order to extended vision in junctions, not to mention their multiple (and very complex, to me) roundabouts.
Compared to that, the rest of Spain is more Medditernean not just in terms of weather but in just being entirely disfunctional. The two parts of the country are not unlikely to split ways in the future, and we should inspect them as seperate.
It's also much the same with Italy: North of Rome it's just a part of Austria where people for some reasons speak Italian. Going south, I never think I was more terrified to be on the road, except for Chinese roads.