Apparantly Carrefour have recently lost their MVNO licence.

Several new players have also joined. One of the more interesting ones is the low cost spanish airline Vueling have just launched Vueling movil, tu telefono movil.

Currently they have a deal that gets you a free flight with them provided you spend €15/month with them for 3 months! They have a good deal of getting a cheap handset and SIM package (ALCATEL OT211) for €19. This includes €20 of credit. To make it more appealing there is coupon code in a newspaper here today to get a further €10 off! The code is: VLG200XI.

Basically, you spend €9 and get a phone, €20 of credit and for €35 more spend in the first few months, a flight thrown in too! (Note that the taxes are not included in the flight!)

MVNOs in Spain:
Comparativa de las OMVs - BandaAncha.st

My Lebara SIM has just expired without warning, despite the fact that I had carefully sent an SMS or placed/received a call on it every couple of months; I had never been charged the "monthly account maintenance fee" that occurs if you don't do this. It still had credit of €15 on it. I'm a bit annoyed, as I was keeping it alive for my next visit to Spain.

That is bad! I have no experience with them here, but it sounds like you should perhaps speak to their CS. They have a geographic number here in Madrid. I heard that they have a few English speaking operators, (and many Eastern European speaking ones too). From Germany, try (+ 34) 91 276 9170

The newest comparision:
http://img.xatakamovil.com/2009/08/complowcost.PNG
Comparativa tarifas móvil low cost: Movistar, Vodafone, Orange, Yoigo y OMVs

Lebara's cheap but watch out
 

LEBARA IS INEXPENSIVE
I've gotten two Lebara cards, each for less than $30 with €10 of credit (so basically, the card costs €10/$15). Each time I top off €20, I get a free €10. That's worked both in the spring and fall of 2009. So far, it seems to be a permanent promotion.

The rates are terrific to call the U.S. €0.06/min.+connection, and good for within Spain €0.15/min+con. Coverage is excellent. Not having a monthly fee if you're using it makes it great.

Incoming SMS messages in roaming are FREE. That was a lovely surprise.

THE CAVEATS
Though they claim they only deactivate your card if you don't use it at all in a 90-day period, this ends up not being true. They deactivated it (though it was still able to be reactivated) a month after I sent an SMS from the U.S. I had to call their customer service center to have them reinstate it, and the agent told me to call the customer service center every 30 days or so to keep it active. She said once they permanently deactivated the card, that was it.

CONCLUSION
In the future, I should probably not even bother trying to keep the card/number active. It's just that I had €17 left on the card and my phone number this time was so easy to remember.

By the way, Carlo and Andrea,
what a terrific website you have here!
la tua Suzie

That's pretty much standard for most places other than the U.S. - there's not a single European operator that charges for incoming SMS, roaming or otherwise.

Another comparision: Comparativa tarifas de voz low cost

MÁSmovil nowhere in stock
 

Just wanted to share my recent experience of MÁSmovil SIM cards being unavailable on the whole island of Gran Canaria. I checked half a dozen Cepsa gas stations, several Correos post offices in larger cities and all Telecor shops on the island and none had SIM cards in stock. Only two Telecor shops had some months earlier, while the others mostly even never heard of MÁSmovil.
So better purchase it online and let it be delivered to your Hotel.

I finally ended with a Vodafone SIM with the "Bonos por Tiempo Semenal" pack giving unlimited traffic for 7 days for € 19 (throttled to 64 KBit/s after exceeding 1GB). Unfortunately there are two issues for non-Spanish customers with Vodafone: On the one hand you can't recharge your credit from an ATM with foreign debit cards and on the other hand they don't accept foreign credit cards for online recharges at http://tienda.vodafone.es/recargas, which would give a 30% bonus for each recharge.

Anyway compared to countries like the US and France (the axis of wireless evil) Spain has absolutely great and widely available prepaid internet offers!

Wow! And I though I was alone in doing that sort of thing on a holiday! i.e. Driving all over an island looking for a SIM!! (of course very much to my girlfriends delight....) :p

If you want, drop me a PM/email with the number and I will top it up with my Spanish card and you can paypal me later.

:rotfl: