La Côte Basque

Kaixo, everybody. This is my last post for this blog. My train leaves Donostia tomorrow morning at 6:36. I thought I would end my blog with a glimpse of the surrounding countryside, especially the gorgeous Basque Country coast. Yesterday morning, I went to the fortified Renaissance city of Hondarribia, formerly known as Fuenterrabia but which has reverted back to its original Basque name. It´s the only town left in Gipuzkoa that still has its old fortifications.

Occupying a key position on the Spanish/French border, it has seen much history. Holy Roman Emperor and Spanish King Carlos V began fortifying it in the 16th century.

Within the thick walls and ramparts are lovely, sloping streets with beautiful houses.

This house built during the Renaissance is now a music school.

Some of the "newer" houses look oddly like Swiss chalets. Balcony after balcony is bursting with geraniums.

Seemingly every town in Gipuzkoa has a plaza named for the province. This is Hondarribia´s.

Earlier this week, I took the short bus ride (you can also take a three-hour coastal hike) to Passajes, which is essentially one town with four distinct parts. The most celebrated and the one which draws tourists is the section you see behind me, San Juan or Donibani in Basque. To reach it, you need to take the bus to San Pedro across the river and then board a boat.

A single road runs through San Juan and continues to the river´s mouth and the ocean.

Victor Hugo came here in 1843 and wrote in detail about the beauty of the landscape and the peculiar nature of the town and of Basque houses. The house where he stayed is now a gem of a museum and you can listen to his words in either Basque, Spanish, French or English. After seeing this beautiful town, it was especially moving to hear my own impressions so beautifully and inimitably expressed by Hugo as I poked around the few rooms he occupied.

The inhabitants live in houses that are stacked on the hill which rises above the street and which can be reached by a zig-zagging series of stairways and pathways.

Three regional symbols are here on the wall behind this church and children´s school: the sun, the lau buru each leaf of which stands for one of the four Spanish Basque provinces (Gipuzkoa, Nafaroa, Alaba and Bizkaia) and a shell which means that this town is on the pilgrimage route of Santiago de Compostela.

Eskerrik asko (thank you) to all who´ve kept up with my blog and...

...agur (good-bye).

Food

Txarriboda is the name of the annual slaughter of the pig. This is an ancient, rural ritual. Farmers help each other slaughter the pigs each has raised and fattened. Several men hold the animal down while the farmer who has coddled this intelligent and affectionate animal from its infancy cuts its throat. It´s a very slow death. From this is made blood sausage, ham, bacon, chops, loin, pigs feet but only for the family and their friends. This form of processing food would not be up to EU health standards for sale in stores.

Very familiar to me in Southern California, this tying together of peppers for drying is an important part of Basque cuisine. Introduced to Europe from the Americas, the Basque pepper is sweeter because it ripens in a sun that is less harsh than the Mexican and Southwest United States sun.

Every morning, most of the bars and the restaurants set out pintxo which is the term in Euskera for tapas. Plates and plates of a wide variety of food, most of it with seafood, ham or chicken. Lots of breads and sweets, too.

This is a Spanish tortilla. To me, a tortilla is a cornmeal or wheat crêpe but to the Spanish it´s an egg and potato torta.

Typical morning customers gathered for pintxo. Fast food is perhaps a Spanish invention.

Makailaua is Basque for bacalau is Spanish for cod. It was in their ever-widening pursuit as they depopulated the waters of the Bay of Biscay of this lucrative fish (as well as whale), that the Basques were drawn ever further out into the Atlantic and closer to the Americas. To make the trip, over the centuries the Basques learned to build and navigate strong, seagoing vessels and became the best mariners in Western Europe.

Basque cuisine is considered by many to among the finest on the planet and pil pil is considered by those same many to be the ne plus ultra of all Basque dishes. Essentially, it´s made of cod, garlic and peppers.

My teacher Naroa´s parents go to this bakery every day to buy their bread fresh. Most Basques buy their bread fresh daily.

It´s very hard not to get fat in Donostia.

The large open-air market area and covered market areas from the late 19th century have been modernized and turned more or less into malls and food courts. But, outside, you can still go and get fresh vegetables. Little stores throughout the city also sell fresh, delicious fruit.

Donostian

Donostian means "in San Sebastián" in Basque. I leave San Sebastián in two days. I have to confess that this makes me sadder than I´d expected to be. It´s been an incredibly fast two weeks. I´ve seen and done a lot and I would like to come back and live here for at least a year to really learn the language and see as much of this beautiful country as I can.

Here are some of the things I saw on a daily basis and to which I´ve grown very happily accustomed.

The railing along the long promenade above the beach is unique to the city in its shape and ornament and there are souvenir bookends and little pencil sharpeners for sale mounted by plastic replicas of its peculiar "o" shaped ballustrading.

Leaving Nº 26 Boulevard every day and turning into the alde zaharrean (Parte Vieja or Old Part), this is what I typically ran into. Small, ancient streets filled with restaurants, bars, purveyors of food and luxury items and, of course, tourists.

A beautiful old house.

A beautiful apartment building.

Everything is benevolently dominated by the Sagrado Corazon atop Mount Urgull.

Antique monuments dedicated to great Basque mariners, usually accompanied by a prayer asking Mary to intercede on behalf of the town´s sailors and spare them for their waiting families as they searched every farther and ever longer in the ocean for cod and whale.

More recently, for many decades, Donostia hosted the royal family every summer. Where they went, so went Spain´s wealthy, powerful and famous. San Sebastián is no longer host to Europe´s crème de la crème but their traces can be found in the elegance of the boulevards, the names of the most pretigious buildings and in the grandiose villas built on the best promontories of the city. Above is Miramar, an English tudor palace built by the regent Queen Maria-Cristina.

With la reina Maria-Cristina came great prosperity and the township expressed its gratitude in monuments throughout the city. The statue above was erected in 1929, the year of her death.

Another monument to the regent who saw the nation through one of its darkest years, 1898, the year Spain lost the Spanish-American War and the last of her colonies in the Philippines, Cuba and Puerto Rico. From that point on, the Spanish have been trying to decide who they are if not a great empire. It´s a process that is still evolving as not only the Basque Country but Catalonia and Galicia make ever stronger demands for ever greater independence.

Donostia is also a modern city. Above is the Kursaal, a large exhibition, performance and conference center right on the beach at the mouth of the Urumea River.

This is where I have lived for two weeks. Maritxu and Valentin Legorburu´s spacious, airy apartment is the one on the top floor, in the center, Nº 26 Boulevard...

...Quinto Izquierda.

Eduardo Chillida

Donostia´s favorite son is probably the late sculptor Eduardo Chillida. There is a beautiful open-air museum dedicated to his work a short bus ride from San Sebastián and his works can be seen in public squares and even out-of-the way places throughout the city and Gipuzkoa.

The most famous of his works on display is El Peine del Viento, the wind comb. It consists of three massive iron shapes, each anchored in two places to the rocks at the western end of the Bahia de la Concha. I saw it on a wonderful, moody stormy day. I have to say that the wind did not whistle as it moved through the sculpture, as it´s famous for doing, but it certainly did blow and if I had long enough pelo, I would certainly have needed a peine myself.

This last piece is his Homaje a Fleming, Chillida´s homage to the Scottish doctor who discovered penicillin. It´s located roughly in the middle of the promenade that runs the length of the bay above the beaches.

Spain Wins Its First World Cup

It used to be a dangerous thing to fly the ikurriña. Now, I would think, it´d take a lot of nerve - or insensitivity - to fly the flag of Spain in Spanish Euskadi. But, that´s just what a lot of people did last night after Spain won its first ever World Cup.

Even my hostess Maritxu, who has to struggle a bit to come up with something positive to say about the Spanish, readily admitted that Spain played an excellent and a thrilling game against a very worthy adversary, Holland, last night.

I watched the game on a very hard little wooden stool towards the front of a small restaurant (actually, there are no large restaurants) last night. It was a very long game. After nearly two hours, I could nurse that one glass of beer no longer, so, I got up to stretch my legs in the slight drizzle in the Plaza de la Constitución, adjacent. And that, of course, is when Spain made its winning score. The only one either team made in the entire game, every other moment of which I had witnessed as I sat on that hard little stool waiting for one of the teams to make a goal. Ah, well. I enjoyed the replays.

The family that watches fútbol together stays together.

And the despised Spanish flag made a triumphant appearance. All night long horns honked and crowds yelled. A nearby dog, perhaps abandonned for the evening by its celebrating owners, barked for hours, frightened no doubt by the explosion of fireworks and the shouting in the streets.

Bilbao - Part 2

Bilboa is a big city. For the Basque country. In a more global sense, it´s quite a small city. However, it does give itself big city airs. Its boulevards, plazas, vistas and buildings are on a scale comparable to anything like them that you´d find in Madrid or Paris or London. The startling thing, though, is to stand in the middle of a large plaza and look up the streets that radiate away from it. Just beyond, you can see very clearly the nearby hills and mountains, dotted with farm houses that are the countryside.

The ikurriña, the flag of Spain and the flag of the European union.

Of course, the most famous thing in Bilao is the Guggenheim Museum. It´s what really put the city on the map and got the world taking about the Basque Country in a way that didn´t include thoughts of either quaint local custom or terrorism. This is Jeff Koons´s famous floral Puppy which greets you at the entrance.

Behind the museum is Louise Bourgeois´s creepy Mamá. If you stand under the sculpture and look up at the thorax-like part of the figure, you can see large, white marble eggs in a sort of sac.

Here´s a view of the museum itself. I must confess that I did not go inside. I was quite content to see the outside but I´d spent most of the day in the Museo de las Bellas Artes (which was wonderful) and wasn´t particularly curious about the exhibitions inside the Guggenheim.

Bilbao - Part I

On Saturday, I went to Bilbao, the industrial capital city of the neighboring province of Vizcaya. In the arte zaharran or the old part of town is the Museo Vasco, the Basque Museum. There were some beautiful artifacts to see. Since prehistoric times, the Basques seem to have been fascinated by the sun. This ancient tombstone features a disc, which is omnipresent in artifacts and furnishing throughout Basque history. This disc came to be filled in with the rays of the sun or the petals of the sunflower. When that most famous Basque of all, Ignacio de Loyola founded the Jesuits, he chose as their symbol not the cross but the sun.

As with all prehistoric peoples, animals figure greatly in the earliest known art and artifacts of the Basques.

The sacred tree of Guernica where every year allegiance to the ancient fueros or laws was sworn has, in reality, been a series of trees. There´s always a seedling waiting to replace the tree when it dies. This is a part of the tree that grew in the square in Guernica at the end of the 18th century.

A medieval sarcophagus.

A beautiful chest from the Renaissance also features the solar symbol.