Is the Alhambra a special case? Ticket resale at Spain’s ten most-visited monuments

In June, Maldita.es and Indicator reported how several Spanish companies buy Google ads to appear above the official websites of 15 tourist attractions and resell their tickets for up to three times the price. According to the investigation, the most affected attraction was the Alhambra, with three unofficial domains.

Four months later we wanted to answer a question the report left open: is the Alhambra an isolated case, or just the most visible example of something general? On 22 and 23 October 2026 we checked Spain’s ten most-visited paid monuments and museums: the Sagrada Família, Park Güell, the Prado, the Alhambra, the Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba, the Royal Alcázar of Seville, Seville Cathedral, Casa Batlló, the Reina Sofía and the Royal Palace of Madrid.

01The short answer

• On prices and domains, the Alhambra is not an exception. All ten monuments have at least one live unofficial website with their name in the domain, and in every case the markup is between 1.6 and 3 times the official price. The Alhambra sits at the top of that range, but not outside it.
• On Google it does stand out. Its official website is first in only one of our six searches, and more results from unofficial websites bearing its name appear above it than for any other monument.
• And it is a special case for two more reasons: it is the only one of the ten where we found the resale ban in a regulation published in an official gazette, and its manager is the only one that, speaking to Maldita.es, called the activity “lawful” and said it had taken no action.

02Prices: the same pattern at all ten

We compared the most basic product on the unofficial websites (ticket with audio guide) with the official price. Where the monument sells its own audio guide or includes it in the ticket, we compare against that ticket; otherwise against general admission.

* Figures published by Maldita.es in June 2026; we could not re-read either the official or the unofficial website. “From” is the lowest price advertised on the website’s home page. Feel the City prices are the ones its own website loads for the next available date.

Feel the City’s websites state, on each product page, what the official ticket they include costs. The Alhambra page reads “Ticket price: 22,27€; the remaining amount corresponds to added services, audioguides and booking services”. In other words, of the €66.90 the visitor pays, €44.63 goes on the audio guide and the booking.

03Domains: the Alhambra has the most, but it is not alone

For each monument we tried the same ten domain variants (for example name-tickets.org, nametickets.com, entradas-name.com or name-entradas.org) and added the ones Maldita.es had already identified. We only counted websites that were live and selling or brokering tickets; parked pages, sites under construction and redirects to unrelated businesses are left out.

Behind almost all of them are the same networks Maldita.es described: Feel the City Tours and The Walker Tours on one side, My Top Tour and Al-Ándalus Tours on the other. We also found two cases that were not in their sample: casabatllo-tickets[.]org, whose footer gives a Feel the City Tours email address, and a third company, Tours & Tickets Worldwide SL (tax ID B75401927), which runs catedraldesevilla-tickets[.]org and mezquitacordoba-entradas[.]org.

04On Google, the Alhambra is among the worst placed

In June, Maldita.es documented paid ads appearing above the official websites. To see what Google’s first page looks like today, we ran 90 real searches through DataForSEO covering the ten monuments in this analysis and five more (La Pedrera, the Guggenheim, the Thyssen, the Alcázar of Segovia and El Escorial), in six markets: Spain on mobile and desktop (“entradas” plus the name), and the UK, the US, France and Germany on mobile, each in its own language (“tickets” or “billets”), which is how foreign tourists search.

The first finding is that text ads from these websites are now rare: of 12 text ads across 90 searches, only three were for unofficial websites bearing the monument’s name. Two were for mezquita.tickets-cordoba[.]com, which appeared as the first result when searching from Germany, and one for Feel the City’s realalcazarsevilla[.]com, at the foot of the page. The rest were for Booking, GetYourGuide, Viator, Civitatis and La Pedrera’s own website. What does appear, in 12 searches, is the “Sponsored tickets and tours” block, with platforms such as Civitatis, GetYourGuide, Booking or Trip.com.

The second is that the problem has moved into the organic results, and there the Alhambra stands out. Its official website is first in only one of the six searches, from France. It is fourth on a phone in Spain, fifth on a computer and third from the UK, and off the first page from both the US and Germany. From the US it is preceded by alhambra[.]org, alhambraonline[.]com, alhambragranada-tickets[.]com, two Facebook pages titled “Official Alhambra Tickets Website” and mytoptour[.]org. In all, 12 results from unofficial websites with “alhambra” in the domain appear above the official one, more than for any other monument.

It is not the only one in trouble. The Royal Alcázar follows closely, with 10 results bearing its name above the official one, and its website is off the first page in three of the six searches. Park Güell and El Escorial are also missing in three; El Escorial is pushed out by agencies and tourism portals rather than by websites bearing its name. At the other end, the Thyssen is the first result in five of the six searches and the Sagrada Família in four, although from Germany it drops to ninth.

05What else makes the Alhambra special: its own rules

The Alhambra’s visiting conditions are not a commercial text but a regulation of general application. In February 2023 the High Court of Justice of Andalusia struck down the previous 2020 rules because they had not been adopted as one, and the regional government replaced them with the [Order of 29 May 2023](${ORDEN_2023}) (BOJA no. 121, 27 June 2023). That order says:

The same order states that the ticket is “personal and non-transferable”, that each visitor must be named at purchase, that the ticket must be shown with an identity document on request, and that the site’s annual capacity is 2,763,500 visitors, with at most 300 tickets per 30-minute slot for the Nasrid Palaces. At none of the other nine monuments did we find a ban of this kind published in an official gazette.

That limit helps explain why the Alhambra attracts so much resale: when Nasrid Palaces tickets sell out on the official website, anyone still looking ends up at the first alternative the search engine offers.

06And its response

Despite that rule, the Patronato de la Alhambra y Generalife told Maldita.es it had taken no action because “it is a lawful activity outside the Patronato’s management”, while noting that there are no authorised intermediaries and that its website is the only official channel.

The other managers in the Maldita.es investigation act differently. The Prado has reported these websites and logged around 83 complaints in 2025. Córdoba’s Cathedral Chapter filed a police complaint in February 2025. The Reina Sofía met one of the companies. Patrimonio Nacional works on its search ranking to reduce their visibility. Among those not covered by the report, the Sagrada Família states in its conditions that it “will not accept any ticket bought through a reseller” and reserves the right to cancel it, and Park Güell bans resale “street, online and/or by any other means”.

The Alhambra is therefore the monument on the list with the strongest legal basis to act against resale, and its manager the only one that has publicly said it has not done so.

07What has changed since June

• The three Alhambra domains flagged by Maldita.es are still live under the same names.
• Several My Top Tour domains for other monuments now redirect to generic names: museodelprado-tickets[.]org to museoprado.madrid-tickets[.]es, sagradafamilia-tickets[.]org to sagradafamilia.ticket-barcelona[.]org, palaciorealmadrid-entradas[.]org to palacioreal.madrid-tickets[.]es, mezquitacatedralcordoba-tickets[.]org to cordoba-ticket[.]es and realalcazarsevilla-tickets[.]org to realalcazar.ticket-sevilla[.]es. The Alhambra ones have not changed.
• Feel the City’s websites carry Google Ads conversion tags, which indicates they are still buying traffic through advertising.

08Open questions

• How does the Patronato reconcile calling this “a lawful activity” with the express ban in rule 3.1.E of the order that governs its own visits?
• If every ticket is issued in the visitor’s name, in whose name do the agencies buy the tickets they resell, and does the Patronato check that identity at the gate?
• Has the Patronato referred these cases to the consumer authority or to Andalusia’s competition and economic regulation agency, which the order itself names as competent?

09How we did it

We selected the ten paid monuments and museums with the most visitors according to the latest public figures; Santiago Cathedral is left out because entry to the church is free. Official prices come from each monument’s website, checked on 22 and 23 October 2026, except for the Prado (its website did not respond to our requests), the Royal Alcázar and the Royal Palace, for which we used Maldita.es’s figures. Unofficial prices are the ones each website showed on those days.

Unofficial websites were found by trying the same ten domain variants for each monument and adding those identified by Maldita.es; this is a sample, not a census. Google positions come from 90 real searches run through the DataForSEO API (Google Organic, first page) on 23 October 2026, covering 15 monuments: Spain on mobile and desktop with “entradas + monument”; the UK, the US and Germany on mobile with “monument + tickets”, and France on mobile with “billets + monument”. Google results change with time, place and person; this is a snapshot, not an average. We count as an “unofficial website with the monument’s name” any domain that is not the manager’s and contains that name, without assuming it sells tickets. The legal texts quoted are linked in each case.