About Mara Vale
Mara Vale is Eurly’s lead European travel writer. She grew up in Valencia, Spain — the daughter of a cartographer father and a secondary school French teacher — which probably explains why she ended up spending her adult life navigating Europe in detail and writing about it for people planning their first real trip abroad.
She moved to Paris at 26 after completing a journalism degree in Madrid, originally intending to stay for a year. That was five years ago. She now lives in Le Marais, knows the RER B better than most Parisians, and has spent time on extended research trips to Barcelona, Rome, Edinburgh, Amsterdam, and Lisbon, among others. Every city she writes about is a city she has navigated as both a first-time visitor and, eventually, as someone who has been back enough times to understand what first-timers actually get wrong.
At Eurly, Mara covers all city guides, itineraries, budget guides, neighbourhood breakdowns, and airport transfer pages. She also writes the comparison pages — Paris vs London, Amsterdam vs Rome — because those are the decisions that most confuse people at the beginning of a trip, and she enjoys untangling them.
Her approach
The most common mistake first-time visitors make is planning activities before they’ve made any geographic decisions. They build a list of things to see, book a centrally-listed hotel without understanding what “central” actually means in a city of 2 million people, and then spend four days in transit.
Mara’s guides start the other way around. Where to stay comes first — not which hotel, but which neighbourhood, for which type of trip, and why it matters which part of the city you’re sleeping in. The activities are chosen after that, shaped around realistic walking distances and transit logic rather than a highlights reel.
She also writes about the friction that guidebooks skip: which museums are closed on which day, how far in advance you actually need to book the Eiffel Tower summit, whether the airport taxi is worth it at 6am. The practical edge cases are what make or break a first trip.
Background
Mara studied journalism at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid, wrote city-desk pieces for a regional Spanish paper for two years, and then spent a year at a travel desk in Barcelona before going freelance. She moved to Paris in late 2021 on what was supposed to be a reporting assignment for a European travel publication, stayed in a rented room in the 11th arrondissement for three months, and never went back to permanent life in Spain.
Since then, she has contributed to European travel publications, been a source for trip-planning round-ups in UK and US outlets, and written the Paris content that makes up the core of Eurly’s library. She still visits Valencia every December — her parents live in the same apartment she grew up in, off a courtyard near the Mercado Central — and uses every trip back as an opportunity to revisit what it feels like to navigate somewhere deeply familiar through the eyes of someone who lives somewhere else.
Editorial standards
Every page Mara writes carries a Last verified date that reflects a real, recent review of the content for accuracy. Prices and transport details are checked against official sources — museum ticketing pages, metro operator websites, national rail timetables — before publication. When something changes (a museum raises its entry fee, a metro line is rerouted, a neighbourhood shifts character), the page is updated and the verified date is refreshed.
She does not publish price estimates from aggregators or crowd-sourced reviews. If the official booking page says €22, the guide says €22.
Languages
Spanish (native), French (fluent — she has lived in Paris for five years), English (fluent), conversational Italian, functional Portuguese.
Contact & editorial enquiries
For editorial or press enquiries: editorial@eurly.com
Pages by Mara Vale
Paris
London
Routes
Comparisons
Last verified: 2026-04-26