'City break' means different things to different people. To me it normally means walking round a city, pausing to stop in every bar that sells beer along the way, as evidenced here in Prague (March '11) and Porto (October '10)...
... note to self: buy a new hooded-jumper.
If you do your research properly though, 'city break' can actually mean 'regional break', which often results in the thing that every traveller secretly wants to find, the near-mystical 'place off the beaten track', alternatively described as 'the place where all the annoying bastard tourists aren't'.
In Barcelona we went to Montserrat, which is quite a way out of the city but still fairly popular with tourists and therefore well-served by transport links. It still felt very much felt like the 'place off the beaten track', especially when it emerged that it was actually located in a cloud.
Drawing a very rough radius line with Barcelona as the centre and Montserrat as the edge shows that you can actually get quite far 'out of the way' on this principle...
...all the way to Google's copyright symbol, in fact. Doing the same with Madrid - which we're visiting at the end of next month - results in the following...
...which includes the very-interesting looking Segovia (NNW, or top left for the non-map readers amongst you) and the incredible Toledo (SS... oh, for God's sake - AT THE BOTTOM), which has
some stunningly picturesque views.
Visits to one or both are looking likely.
