Basque Country

My last email mistakenly included two blog posts. The one on the architecture of Gaudi in Barcelona was included at the end. You can click on the underlined to read that now if you missed it. We were in Barcelona when I was writing several blog posts, and I wanted to capture my current thoughts on all the Gaudi buildings we saw.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled chronology!

Laguardia bills itself as the “prettiest town in Spain”. Well, I’m not so sure about that, but it sure was situated well on a hill surrounded by jagged mountains.

And the surrounding countryside wasn’t too shabby either -

As we drove north through Basque Country, towards San Sebastian, we crossed through some rugged areas…

… that became more rolling hills…

.. the further we went.

You can see in the picture above the relatively small apartment buildings. We’ve been very surprised to see how much of the living space in cities (and even small towns) is given over to apartments.

Some fun facts: Spain is about 75% of the size of Texas, but has twice the population. Spain has the most acreage devoted to grapes of any country in the world.

After the relative flatness and dryness of central Spain, the forest covered hills of this area were very refreshing -

We spent 4 days total in the Basque Country, mainly to eat! Our first stop was San Sebastian…

… with its gorgeous bay and beaches. We walked all along the Paseo…

… but it was a cloudy, blustery day, so I wasn’t brave enough to try out the water.

We headed for the “famous” sculpture, Comb of the Wind, installed in the rocks at the end of the beach -

When superimposed, it was pretty neat:

Along the way, we passed some restrooms (WC is “water closet”), and the signage made me smile -

From the paseo, it looked like men and women each had their own bush to crouch behind! Actually the little white signs were positioned at the top of narrow staircases leading down to the restrooms. :)

Now, on to the main reason for a visit to Basque Country - pintxos! This is pronounced “pinchos”, and they are small snacks eaten in bars. We have bar crawls in the US; in Spain - pintxos crawls.

We didn’t even try to speak Basque, but just pointed to ones that looked appetizing, and happily noshed while enjoying a glass of wine.

We weren’t sure what the squiggly things were, but they resembled tiny fish that we had had in a soup in Iceland, so we just went for it! They were actually pretty mild tasting, and at another bar, the English speaking waiter jokingly called them “fake baby eels”. We still don’t know what they were. {I just now looked it up — genuine baby eels cost $1,100/kg, while surimi costs $4/kg. Surimi is the same pollock- based fish base that is imitation crab.}

We did pintxos crawls in both San Sebastian and Bilbao, and for several different meals. Sometimes, we hit 2 or 3 (or 4) different places…

…or as happened in Bilbao, we might be so happy with the quality and selection of pintxos, we just stayed put for the whole meal!

Enough with the food! Next post will be back to landscapes.

Closing with a very cool mural that was in a pedestrian tunnel along the beach in San Sebastian -