Why playing escape rooms in Spain?

General scene

In 2013 the first escape room in Spain was opened. From then on, the scene has been growing, especially in the last years, increasing by a factor of five. Spain is, according to available sources, the third country in terms of number of escape rooms, not counting Asia (after USA and Russia). It currently offers more than 1.500 rooms.

There are several websites trying to rank the best escape rooms in the world. Even though their methodology is questionable, the presence of Spanish rooms at the top is constant.

Development in Spain is not only about quantity and quality of rooms, but also in terms of innovation.

The general scene is growing and an increasing number of people know what an escape room is. Many have played at least once, possibly in a family meeting or a bachelor party (a trendy plan nowadays). More and more people are getting addicted to room escaping and making an hobby out of this. There exist communities in some social networks, especially on Facebook and Whatsapp. Often players have a blog or, more frequently, an Instagram account where the team publishes played games and opinions. Some of these players end up opening their own escape room (after closing their blogs to avoid a conflict of interests).

However, the scene in Spain is still very heterogeneous in terms of regions.

Regions

Barcelona is, by far, the most important. Actually, according to many, it is the escape room capital of Europe. The province counts more than 400 rooms (including more than 40 top rooms) and is constantly growing. Both in the city and surroundings, escape rooms use to have large spaces and elaborated decorations, and the tendency is towards immersive, experience-based games, with very nice results. Innovation is present. The horror theme is gaining more and more importance, up to the point it has no match in Spain, with well balanced games, far from simple terror tunnels and maintaining the essence of an escape room, many of them showing an excellent quality. The rest of Catalonia has more than 100 rooms and is also constantly growing, but the best rooms are not handy from one another. Hence it is more convenient to plan a route in Barcelona and surroundings. You can use our ranking to choose what escape rooms to play.

The following stretch of the ranking is more questionable, since different regions offer different things.

An indisputable route destination is Basque Country and Navarra, with more than 100 rooms (approximately 10 top rooms). Bilbao concentrates around 50 of them. But it’s not the number of rooms what makes this region an undeniable destination. It’s their quality. The area has some very innovative rooms, with exquisite decorations, very immersive and focused on the player experience. It is worth mentioning Mad Mansion, the most veteran brand in the region, attracting alone a new escape room tourism. Currently it owns rooms in other regions of Spain also.

It was hard for Madrid to take off, but currently with more than 200 rooms (over 10 top rooms and a big bunch of very decent rooms) it earned a place among the important route destinations in Spain. Local legislation plus intrinsic features of the area make it one of the most expensive places to open an escape room, which led to a generalized profile: classic rooms with small spaces. But within this profile, those who dared to innovate got their reward. And those who dared to break out such profile, betting on large spaces, elaborated decorations and immersive games, got their reward too. With this, the growth of the escape room culture is promoting the opening of more and more rooms. While many new games still do not fulfill expectations of players currently demanding high quality, those succeeding in doing it stand out. Even in a field not explored in the capital so far: the horror theme. In this sense, Madrid now shows a very decent and promising scene. Additionally, its closeness to Toledo allows including such city in any route, a fairly interesting plan since, despite the small number of rooms, Toledo is betting on quality, being Mad Mansion involved.

The Valencian Community, with several top rooms, concentrates its games in the provinces of Valencia (around 100 rooms) and Alicante (around 70). Despite a smaller number of rooms, quality in Alicante is probably higher.

Asturias (more than 50 rooms) and Cantabria (around 30) also count several top rooms. They are not close to one another, but the landscapes and the idiosyncrasy of the region will take care of livening up your route. Galicia, with decent games and a constant growing pace, aims at being at the level of its neighbors.

As for the rest of Spain, escape rooms development is still behind.

Zaragoza does not have the largest offer, but it has enough top rooms for a whole day.

La Rioja and Murcia have 2-3 top rooms each, worth if you come on a touristic trip. But the short offer of good rooms does not probably justify a full route.

Andalucía shows a growing scene, but not as fast as other regions. Sevilla is the leader with around 60 rooms, followed by Málaga, Cádiz and Granada with 30 each. Less developed games as for decoration, mechanisms and immersion. You can find some very decent rooms, but far from the quality of top rooms in other regions. It is curious how every region takes its own path: for example, in Málaga, a score system associated with the game is very common.

Canary Islands have around 50 rooms.

In the rest of Spain, the presence of escape rooms is still very small.

How to choose?

First of all, there are websites that work as escape room directories. You can search by province and city, and get a list of all rooms with basic info. Some of them are: escaperadar (the most updated and recommendable; app for smartphones available), escapistas.club escaperoomlover and todoescaperooms. The first two show the available sessions in real time and allow to search by availability, very useful for improvised, last minute sessions. They include players ratings of every room, but as it happens with Tripadvisor these opinions are not reliable. On one hand, these rating systems reward for the number of opinions. A room that has been open for 3 years will have many more opinions than a younger room. But, due to the fast development of escape room scene, the newer room will incorporate more elements and would probably be of a better quality. On the other hand, even though there are more and more frequent players, most people play occasionally and rate high because they had a great experience, with actually no other rooms to compare with.

Then, what sources can you use? Currently, the most reliable source is frequent players’ opinion. You can find it in social network communities (especially Facebook and Whatsapp), Instagram accounts where teams upload their opinions and recommendations, and players’ blogs, some of them with rankings. Here you have ours. You can also talk to local game masters after your games, some of them are frequent players. World rankings are not reliable: due to the inherent difficulty of creating a large-scale ranking, they either use a large number of heterogeneous judges who played only very few games or perform meta-analyses based on Tripadvisor and similar websites.

A good way to plan a route is to choose a ranking, filter by city or region, sort by rating, then read and/or ask for opinions about the rooms you are interested in. If your team members do not speak Spanish, there is no problem, since most of the rooms are available in English, just make sure of it. Some escape rooms specify this information in the website (in the game description or during the booking process); if not, we recommend to contact them.

Good luck with your route planning!