Northern Spain

Week 24 — February 1st - 15th (Sally)

Santiago de Compostela (The end of the Rainbow). After seeing many pilgrim sites on the way to Santiago: Vezelay, La Charite, Mossiac to name a few, it was interesting to finally reach the ultimate destination, the Cathedral at Santiago and the tomb of the apostle James the patron Saint of Spain. We saw some of the pilgrims who had completed the walk to Santiago in the cathedral and a few more around the city and this was in the middle of winter. We were informed that in a Holy Year, when St James day falls on a Sunday the city receives 11 million visitors. How lucky we have been to have spent this all this time in this wonderful country and never felt harrassed by the crowds which must be part of travelling in Spain in summer. As well as the cathedral there is a very well known university and the city has a large number of students who study in a wonderful selection of historic buildings. We loved our two days in the city before moving on to explore the rest of northwest Spain.

We left Santiago in rain, (in our 75 days away this was only our fourth day of rain) and headed for the Atlantic coast where for some reason, we are not sure why, we ended up at Gijon, a small town on the coast. What a delight to find a Leonardo da Vinci exhibition in the town. Such was the quality of the exhibition one would travel a hundred miles to see it, comprising two levels of drawings and working models developed from his designs. It was unbelievable, and the fact that we found it in such an out of the way place made it even more amazing.

The next day was Bilbao, and the Guggenheim Museum, which we have long wanted to see. Not only did it live up to all expectations but we got the added bonus of a travelling exhibition of "300 hundred years of Art from America".

Our stop that night was Zumaia, another small coastal village where we stumbled into a Saturday night Carnivale. Everyone in town was in fancy dress, and out to have fun, whole families in matching costumes dancing in the streets, so we found a seat, ordered a drink and a Tapas and became part of the festivity.

Sunday, we reasoned, would be a good day to go to San Sebastian; no traffic, easy to find a park. Wrong... We arrived in the middle of Carnivale, and as soon as we did find a park we were the spectators to a fascinating procession of brass bands and dancers dressed in flower bedecked costumes and masks doing a dance which required lots of bows and curtsies. Looked like something out of a BBC period drama. While we watched 12 o'clock struck and they all dispersed never to be seen again. We then wandered into town, found a hotel and were told that at 5 o'clock it was all starting again. And sure enough it did. At 5pm we found a viewing spot and for two hours the streets were full of floats and huge throngs of dancers all dressed in quite elaborate costumes. We reasoned that every schoolchild in San Sebastian was in the parade. The one that took our eye was "Grease" complete with the pink car, John Travoltar lookalike and several troupes of different coloured costumes. The boys had jackets with GREURE written on them,which we had to presume was Basque for Grease yet they were all singing in perfect English all the hits from the show. Broadway composers and Andrew Lloyd Webber have as much to do with the spread of English as Microsoft for everywhere we went you can hear their songs. There were also several ethnic groups, Bolivia and Equador. The Bolivians were the most appropriately dressed in heavy felt national costumes which gave much more protection from the wind than the traditional carnival garb.

Monday, after an interesting day exploring the city we were preparing for a quiet night in town when we stumbled onto another parade: drumming troupes, groups in national Basque costume and some dressed in what had a close resemblence to the KKK. We asked at the hotel the significance of that parade and the answer was "Nothing, there is always something on in the city." Certainly makes it interesting for tourists.

Carnivals, parades and fancy dress aside, one goes to San Sebastian for the food. We used as a guide the latest pages from the Qantas flight magazine (thank you Deb) and set off to discover in their opinion the cities' best Tapas bars. Jackpot with the first one, a wonderful selection and I even had the recommendations. The next bar was called Txuloti, shouldn't be hard to find with a name like that. Wrong again, we found three other bars starting with Txul before we gave up on that one. The Basque language is incredibly difficult, it looks like a language invented by someone who got all the high scoring letters in scrabble. I can imagine some scrabble player with T,K,Z,X,Q,U,E,E saying "I could really make something of this if I could just get rid of these E's."

Next morning we drove inland to explore more of the interesting countryside. This area of Spain is a complete contrast to the other parts of Spain we have seen. There are still the mountains, one cannot get away from mountains in Spain, but it is green, so green, and with trees. As we travelled along the coast with Atlantic Ocean on one side and green foothills and mountains on the other we both remarked on the resemblance to the West Coast of NZ. We went inland as far as Logrono, the wine growing area of Spain's Rioja and were interested to see the high plateau that stretches as far as one can see but after a picnic lunch overlooking a small wine village we turned north and made our way through the Pyrenees to France.

After a night on the coast just south of Biarritz we turned inland again to explore the French Basque area and made our way to St Jean Pied de Port, another stop on the pilgrims' way. Our hotel there boasted a Michelin star restaurant which was something to look forward to as we drove up and up into the mountains. We actually reached 1,300 metres, and stopped almost on the Spanish border (but not for long as it was slightly chilly) to admire the panorama of the snow clad peaks. We were in snow at one time but our trusty little car by now is used to high altitude, we have certainly given it plenty of practice, and she carried us safely through the peaks and green valleys. It was a beautiful day full of great scenery and a fitting end to our holiday. We concluded our day with a memorable meal where every course was a work of art and as usual we ate too much.