Greetings,

I'm planning on going to Spain in September with my wife. I've been there numerous times as a youngster with my parents seeing how we have family there. However, we always stayed with relatives and this time my wife and I will be touring alone. My question is, is it absolutely neccesary to make reservations at hostals before going? We don't exactly know what time we will be in which city since we want to see things as they come. So, for example, if we decide to stay in Sevilla a few more days, then so be it. Can we just show up in a city that time of year and expect to find accomodations? or does it also depend on the city? Roughly our trip will be as follows, we will be going to Granada to stay with my aunt, so accomodations won't be a problem there. From there we will go see Ronda for a day, mabye stay the night, not sure yet. Then go to Sevilla, stay there atleast a few days. Go up to Toledo, probably stay one night. Then go to Madrid and stay atleast 3 or 4 days. From there we will go up to Valladolid, where pretty much all my family is located, so once again accomodation won't be a problem. Any specific cities, where we may have difficulties finding accomodations without reserving first, for that time of year?

Well..not really necessary. If you arrive in a town and don't have reservations (like I did in October for Barcelona, Valencia and Sevilla) the train station is the first place to start looking for a place to stay.
In Sevilla, they had a real nice desk for accomodations at the train station. In Barcelona, I was lucky enough to find one of the many people offering pamphets for his hostal. These are a lucky find, because people hawking there hostals also offer all kinds of assistence for people arriving in a strange town, such as where to catch the bus and where to buy tickets for the bus/metro.
In Valencia I had the most problems, but got the best results. I simply left my wife at the train station with our luggage and walked around. The hostals near the train station were old and scary, but I walked around until I found a nice three star hotel, reasonably priced.
A couple of notes, the hostals that are closest to the train stations are kind of old and scary, but you don't have to walk over half a mile to find nice accomodations, or get a taxi. Also, not having reservations means that you must spend a little bit of vacation time finding accomodations.

My suggestion would be to research acommodations ahead of time, as on this message board and other Web sites, and perhaps get an idea of availability around the time you plan to be in a city. September is probably a good month in terms of that, as the summer crowds are gone.

There should be no problem just walking into a suitable place in Madrid if you stick to the Sol/Santa Ana/Plaza Mayor areas. Its often better than booking ahead as you can see a selection of rooms before choosing the one you like best if you dont mind half an hour's door knocking. Other advantage is you can haggle for a discount too. Try Hotel Santander on c/de Echegaray, who we got down to 55 euros from 65.