Hi Roy,
You're travelling in Easter Week. Easter Week in Spain is not all bunnies and chicks and the supermarkets closed for 20 minutes... it's a serious religious holiday. If it was me I'd push straight down from Bilbao to Malaga but you'd need to book a hotel in Malaga and spend the Friday watching the processions - the floats are up to six tons and it goes on to about 4 or 5 am on the Saturday. Seriously colourful, seriously crowded, seriously noisy! You may find that lots of places on the way down are closed but all the services should be functioning and they are much, much better than the UK version. There's a hotel in Malaga that we have used and it has underground parking but I don't know the height - don paco hotel, malaga brings up their website. Sunday becomes a quick blat down to Gib. Spanish fiestas like this are something else....
re Madrid, which is not big on Easter, stay on the main A1 then M30 straight thro follow Granada/Jaen signs . Don't bother with the ring roads/motorways and if you get stopped by a plain clothes cop car that only shows a badge against their windows - demand to see proof that they are cops - an old trick stop the cars with foreign plates tracking false euro notes and relieving the occupants of money!
course if you don't want to go to a lively Spanish city I can tell you of some nice mountain places to visit in the Sierra Nevada mountains... but it's still Easter in the villages! There is always Mini Hollywood, where Clint did the Spaghetti Westerns at Tabernas in Spain's desert.
Hope that helps.
Regards,
