When to book: the Spanish photography calendar

Spanish demand is not spread across the year — it is stacked into a handful of weekends, and the dates are not the ones a visitor would guess. This is what the diary actually looks like.

February: book your communion

First communions land on four or five Saturdays in May and the first half of June, and twenty families from one parish want the same one. By March there is almost nothing left, and the family that calls in April is choosing between a Sunday afternoon and next year.

It is the least movable date in the whole catalogue, and it is booked three months ahead by the people who know and three weeks ahead by the people who then cannot understand why.

March to June: weddings, and the timetable question

The Spanish wedding season runs May to October, and the question that decides the photographs is not the venue but the ceremony time. Eight in the evening is the correct answer in July in Seville. Five in the afternoon is not, and it is what a venue will suggest if nobody pushes back.

If you are marrying between June and September, the conversation about moving the group portraits to twenty minutes after sunset — which means moving the aperitif — has to happen in March, with the venue, not on the day. Every venue in Seville, Marbella and Mallorca has done it before and none of them will suggest it unprompted.

The weeks to avoid entirely

Not because they are bad, but because nothing else can happen around them.

• Fallas, Valencia, the week to 19 March. The centre is closed to traffic, there is a mascletà at two every afternoon, hotels triple. Extraordinary to photograph as itself; impossible to schedule anything else inside.
• Semana Santa, everywhere, and especially Seville. The processional routes cut the centre into sealed sections for hours. A session booked that week is a session spent behind a barrier.
• Feria de Abril, Seville, two weeks after Easter. Accommodation quadruples.
• Aste Nagusia, Bilbao, third week of August. Every bed in the province.

Each of these is worth photographing as a commission in its own right, booked months ahead. None of them is a week to put a family session in.

Ibiza's season is six weeks, and not those six

The island's commercial season is May to October. Its photographic season is late May, June and the second half of September — warm water, full light, and a fraction of the people. In July and August the road to Cala Comte is a queue from seven in the evening and there is no parking within a kilometre.

The same logic applies to Mallorca, where the Cap de Formentor road goes shuttle-only, and to the whole Costa del Sol, where the twelve kilometres from Marbella to Puerto Banús take fifty minutes in August.

The months nobody books, which are the best ones

Late October to early December, Andalusia. The best light of the year in Seville, Granada and Málaga: 22 degrees, low sun, and the cities back to themselves. Almost nobody asks for it.

November to March, Madrid. Low sun, dry clean air, and short queues. A December session has no bad hour. The Templo de Debod at sunset is not four deep.

December to April, Granada. Snow on the Sierra Nevada behind a city at 17 degrees. In February the almonds flower in the vega underneath it, and the combination exists for about three weeks.

December to April, Málaga and the Costa del Sol. 17 to 19 degrees, empty beaches, and a low sun on the water all afternoon. The only place in Spain where winter is the main season rather than the compromise.

January and February, Bilbao and San Sebastián. Grey, wet and photographically excellent — see the light article. Nobody is competing for the dates.

How far ahead to book what

The holiday and couple sessions are short notice because they have to be: the useful decision is which morning of the trip, and that depends on a forecast you cannot read in March.