Author: Taran

Born into a middle-class English family, Taran was educated at a minor UK public-school and graduated from Imperial College, London as a mechanical engineer. He worked variously as a marine engineer, a marine surveyor, a company owner and as an industrial accidents investigator. He is a family man although now divorced from the mother of his two sons. He has travelled the world extensively, often as part of his employment, but also many times simply for the pleasure of experiencing new countries their cultures and their people. As well as calling England his home for much of his life, he is also a citizen of Canada where he lived for seventeen years and has had homes in Nigeria and Kuwait. Now retired, he lives in California, happily married to his second wife, and close to both his sons and his grandchildren. He continues to travel as often as possible and is enjoying his dream of becoming a writer.

Discovering the Basque Country – Part two – pintxos and running the bulls

With only a month of our Grand Tour remaining, we upped sticks from our palatial pad in Gatika and drove east towards the town considered to be the gastronomic capital of Spain, and certainly the pintxo capital of Basque Country, San Sebastian-Donostia, another town with a Spanish-Basque hyphenated name. The old main road, the N634, took us inland for the first part of the journey, first to Gernika and down to Durango, and then passing through several small towns like Erma, Eibar, Elgoibar, San Pedro and Mendaro. All of these towns are in deep narrow valleys and crammed full of factories, old and new; high density apartment buildings, up to nine or ten storeys high, fill whatever space is left, a somewhat shocking contrast to the natural beauty of the hills that surround them on all sides. The newer AP-8 “autopista” follows much the same route, ironing out the bends with a series of tunnels, bridges and viaducts, as the two roads snake over and under each other, the one, a fast, open, toll road, the other, slower, sometimes constricted, but more interesting. Soon after Mendaro, their paths separated and, after passing yet another enormous stone quarry that seemed to have consumed a complete mountain, we headed towards the sea through Deba, a small town on the estuary of the Deba Ibaia. Then, following a winding road and zigzagging in long loops north and south through pretty farmland, we eventually arrived at the larger port town of Zumaia on the Urola Ibaia estuary, where there was a pleasant older town on the left bank of the river, and a marina and the shipyard of Astilleros Balenciaga on the right bank.

Getaria tucked between Mount San Anton, the sea and the hills

A short 3km drive along a road hugging the coast down at sea level and we arrived at our last Spanish digs, and what a greeting we received!

Our opportunities for living free having dried up, we had reverted back to AirBnB and found an apartment overlooking the sea at the small fishing port of Getaria, with the all-important parking garage. Yet again we found ourselves in accommodation that is even better than its on-line description. The two-bedroom apartment was on the fourth floor of a modern glass-fronted building with floor to ceiling windows, and as we first entered the living room the view took our breath away.

Our apartment was right on the sea-front, in the large blue fronted building

A short peninsular with a large rocky promontory at the end creates two bays for Getarians to enjoy. The fishing port is to the right of the rock as you look out to sea, well protected from the Atlantic swells that push far into the Bay of Biscay, and a sandy beach extends further to the east of the village. To the left of the peninsular is the small bay that we overlooked, exposed to those aforementioned ocean swells, with rocks at each side and a small beach, well washed twice a day by the tides as they pushed right up to the sea wall with long regular waves that were popular with the local surfing community. Huge windows in both the living room and the main bedroom ensured we never missed any of the action twenty metres or more below us, either on the part of the surfers or of the ever-changing actions of the wind-swept ocean itself.

The fishing fleet in the little harbour of Getaria

Getaria is a small community, fishing, vineyards and production of Txakoli, the local wine, and a door fittings factory (owned by our building landlords) being the only obvious industries, though we came to understand it is popular with mainly Spanish tourists in the season. One can easily walk all around the village and the port in an hour or so, although the temptations of the many small pintxo bars and two or three good ‘panaderia’ inevitably tended to slow our own progress.

With so much freshly caught fish available, Getaria also has a reputation for its local restaurants with their outdoor grills upon which that day’s catch is cooked to perfection. So our first stop was to take lunch at “Iribar Jatetxea” where we shared a squid and fava bean salad, followed by grilled monkfish and a dessert of apple tart with cider ice-cream. This gourmand feast was accompanied by a glass of the aforementioned Txakoli, a slightly sparkling, acidic white wine, that needs to be drunk within one year of bottling, and is rather dramatically poured from a height to maximize the effervescence; a pretty good way to celebrate our arrival in this delightful place!

Small as it is, Getaria has a couple of justifiably famous sons, Juan Sebastián Elcano and Cristóbal Balenciaga Eizaguirre. Whilst many people have heard of Ferdinand Magellan, the famous Portuguese explorer who discovered the Strait of Magellan and became the first European to cross the Pacific Ocean, not so many are aware that of his five ships that set out to find a western sea route to the Spice Islands, only one, the “Nao Victoria”, completed the circumnavigation of the globe and returned to Spain. That lone ship and its much-diminished crew of 23 eventually returned to Spain in September 1522 three years after the expedition’s departure, under the command of Juan Sebastián Elcano.

Happy families around Elcano’s statue in the village square

This very able sailor was born in Getaria and, later, much revered, there being no less than three memorials to him; one is a fine statue in the small village square, next to the community Basque pelota court where the children played various ball games every afternoon after school,

and a second statue is on a small terrace overlooking the port, and a few yards away from the site of his home that overlooked the same bay that we were enjoying.

The last and most impressive is a stone barbican at the entrance to the village, topped with a flying angel figure in the Art Deco style, thirty or forty feet high above the main street. The angel figure is a representation of the Virgin Mary in recognition of her role for those at sea, as a sign of hope and the guiding star “Stella Maris”.

The flying angel monument to the crew of the sailing ship “Nao Victoria”

Cristóbal Balenciaga Eizaguirre, however, was cut from a very different cloth. Born in Getaria in 1895 to a seamstress mother, he began work as an apprentice to a tailor at the age of twelve, and went on to become a fashion designer in his own right and the founder of the Balenciaga fashion house. His memory is maintained in Getaria by the Cristóbal Balenciaga Museoa, a very modern museum up the hill above the village. The exterior of the museum is not very fitting to its picturesque surroundings – perhaps a reflection of Balenciaga’s own aversion to following fashion? However, the spacious museum inside is a quite superb collection of his creations displayed to show how this man, who learnt how to cut material at a very early age, was able to translate that experience into his career as a designer.

Balenciaga often took inspiration for his creations from the clothing of local people.

His creations drew inspiration from the clothing of Basque people from all walks of life, offering costumes both stunning and comfortable, and earning him his reputation as a “couturier of uncompromising standards”, much admired, even by other famous designers of the same era such as Christian Dior and Coco Chanel. Naturally Celine enjoyed the exhibition immensely, but even for a dedicated non-fashionista such as myself, the work of this leader in fashion design, and a true artist, was fascinating, especially as many of the exhibits reminded me so much of the clothes worn by beautiful young things in London’s West End in my student days in the 60’s. Perhaps reminiscing for those days, and realizing how ugly today’s world has become in so many ways, I believe the lovely quote in the introductory video we watched before entering the exhibition says it all, “. . . fashion is something we love today and hate tomorrow, art is something we hate today and love tomorrow”.

The port of Getaria is also attractive to walk around, even if history, the world of fashionistas, and delicious food are not high on one’s ‘bucket list’. Built at the bottom of a steep hill, at the top of and beyond which one finds rolling farmland, vineyards, sheep grazing in the fields and the occasional raucous donkey waiting at the roadside to greet new visitors, every part of the village has views over the sea with the large promontory of Mount San Anton in the foreground, and nestled beneath it, the commercial port protecting its fleet of a dozen or more tough-looking offshore fishing vessels and dozens of much smaller workboats, as well as the occasional pleasure craft, moored alongside and anchored within the sturdy stone sea-wall. After our visit to the Balenciaga Museao, we walked further up around the outskirts of the village, then down past the seaman’s club, the Flying Angel, and then further down into the port itself. There, on some evenings, women and sometimes men, would be busy checking through and mending the piles of nets to make ready for the fishermen’s next trips out to challenge the whims of the sea, to return with full holds and the promise of better bank balances, for, romantic as the life can appear to be, to these people fishing is simply a way of making a living, and their very survival still depends on their knowledge of the sea and their ability to harvest its riches in all weathers. We were rarely alone, as we would stroll around the port and along the sea wall, as clearly the locals also enjoyed such simple pleasures as the evenings drew in and the sun disappeared below the surrounding hills. But for our first visit, in the early afternoon, we continued our walk to the base of the large rock, found the entrance to Parkeo San Anton and followed the footpath that zigzagged up the rock’s eastern slope where one is protected from the weather. The big fishing boats in the harbor started to look quite small as we climbed, passing a small gathering of cormorants sunning themselves on a rocky outcrop after their fishing exploits.

Sculptures carved into the rocks beside the path leading up to the top of Mount San Anton

Some artist from the past had sculpted three life-size figures out of one of the rocks beside the path that led up to the Pharo de Getaria. Halfway up, we rested awhile beside a grassy sward dotted with daisies and dandelions, and then strolled on gently upwards through green glades where camellias were in bloom, towards the lighthouse perched on the seaward side, visible from the village only as a light flashing on the night-time clouds. The rock is a softish sandstone and, where exposed to wind and rain, the elements have eroded and pockmarked the surface so that it looks like a giant sponge in places, with the seagulls enjoying the shelter of the many small holes and crevices, after their aerial sorties over the bay far below. But we still hadn’t reached our destination, a squat watchtower at the very top of Mount San Anton, now unused except as a resting place and shelter for the likes of us, as we savoured the view of our little village 100m below. We descended by a different route, a narrow footpath that initially switchbacks its way steeply down from the top of the hill, and passed by the rusting hulk of a very old diesel-driven road-roller on a pedestal in another grassy clearing, that, according to a plaque riveted to its side, had “served well the department of works of the county of Guipuzcoa from 1931 until 1983”; it was, however, difficult to work out quite how it had reached its final resting place!

Rusty old road-roller parked in a clearing near the top of Mount San Anton

Arriving back at sea-level, we completed our wonderful day by walking back to our glass-fronted eyrie, along the top of the seawall around the edge of our little bay as the sun finally disappeared behind the hills and night arrived, and the gentle whooshing noises of the sea against the rocks continued into the darkness.

An umbrella is a necessary accessory in N.Spain in winter.

The sun doesn’t shine everyday in Basque Country, a fact well demonstrated by the day we chose to drive inland in what began as a light shower, to follow La Ruta de Los Tres Templos. According to the San Sebastian Tourist Office, Gipuzkoa is a land of “religion and spirituality” and is “home to three of the most reputed and important churches in all of Spain: La Santuria de Loiola, the birthplace of Saint Ignatius of Loyola and the cradle of the Jesuits, La Santurio de Arantzazu, and the Ermita de la Antigua which is one of the stages in Saint Ignatius de Loiola’s pilgrimage in 1522 when he left Loiola intending to reach Jerusalem.” Our first stop was at the tourist office in Azpeitia (=Loiola) where we had a very enlightening conversation with a young woman, eager to practice her English.

The Santuria de Loiola, an imposing 18^th century Baroque temple, was closed for the afternoon, in observation of siesta-time, and it had started to rain quite hard, so we opted to dash back to our car and drive to our furthermost goal, the Arantzazu Sanctuary, 700m above sea-level in Oñati. A picturesque drive through the foothills of the Pyrenees eventually led us into forbidding mountain country, and even though the rain had stopped when we arrived at the Franciscan sanctuary, the bitter wind added to the inhospitable feeling of the place making us disinclined to loiter.

The impressive basilica, rebuilt in 1950 with some ferocious stone facing on the outside and lots of wood inside, although not exactly magnificent, was an impressive if unusual structure, probably more praiseworthy to the pilgrims who make their way there, none of whom had made it that far on this grey day. So we soon started to retrace our steps back to the lovely coast, stopping briefly at an Eroski supermarket in Azkoitia for one or two essentials for our pantry, and to grab in their café the usual coffee and pintxos that, in those days, my tummy seemed habitually to demand around late afternoon. Not our most enlightening or interesting day, but we did enjoy yet more of the wonderful countryside that abounds thereabouts, in spite of a distinct lack of nice little roadside cafés!

Dramatic countryside on the drive back from Arantzazu

Statue in Pamplona celebrating the famous San Fermin Festival

Our last trip inland a few days later took us to Pamplona, or rather Iruña if we stick to the Basque names, an hour’s drive along the excellent A-15, a superb road through the foothills at the western end of the Pyrenees, with several high viaducts several hundred metres long as well as many tunnels, as it passes through wild rugged countryside. Probably best known for the San Fermin Festival and the running of the bulls which Ernest Hemingway described so vividly in his two books, “The sun also rises” and “Death in the afternoon”, Pamplona-Iruña turned out to be a fine city in its own right with lots of pedestrianised streets lined by beautiful Renaissance buildings, many of which sport the coats of arms of the great Basque families.

Running of the bulls has its funny side in Pamplona!!

It was a more enjoyable city to walk around than Vitoria-Gasteiz we had visited earlier, and after more than three hours strolling the older and newer parts and, of course, making our usual stops for afternoon sustenance, we came away well impressed. Just a shame that it is nearly 500m above sea-level and prone to a more continental type climate – colder in winter and hotter in summer – otherwise we could easily consider it a fine city to live near, praise indeed for your city-phobic scribe.

Last, but by no means least in this Spanish region of so many delights, mention must be made of San Sebastian-Donastia, one of Spain’s favourite luxury holiday resorts and famed as being the ‘tapas, or rather pintxo, capital of the world’! Squeezed up tight against the French border and tucked into the corner of the Bay of Biscay, this visually stunning city lives up to many aspects of its reputation. It was a pleasant 45 minute drive for us from Getaria, along the N634 which snakes through the valleys past Aginaga and Usurbil on the river Oria Ibaia till we reached Iru-Bide and the start of the industrial hinterland that is an integral part of every large city in this part of Northern Spain. Arriving in San Sebastian, we were immediately caught up in the onerous system of one-way streets and ended up at the far western end of the beautiful Bahía de la Concha, bordered by the small Playa de Ondaretta and the longer Playa de la Concha, two wide strands of golden sand from where one looks across at the Isla de Santa Clara in the mouth of the bay and the Castilla de la Mota on the headland above the old city to one’s right.

Our first stop was the Peine del Viento, or ‘The Comb of the Wind’, a set of three ten-tonne steel sculptures embedded into the rocks at the end of the promenade. The work of Eduardo Chillida, installed and arranged by the Basque architect Luis Peña Ganchegui, the installation includes a series of blow-holes in the pavement as you approach the sculptures, through which the incoming waves vent their force as blasts of cool sea-spray laden air and, if the waves are big enough, powerful water spouts, all of which must be lovely on a hot summer’s day but were not so appreciated on that rather cool February afternoon.

Thence, into the main city centre, where once again the weather really wasn’t very cooperative, it was still winter after all, and after a short walk in the drizzling rain around the area of the late 19^th century Artzian Onaren Katedrala, the Good Shepherd Cathedral of San Sebastian, we upped sticks again and drove across to the old town to seek out one of the many ‘pintxo’ bars. Again the one-way system caught us in its grasp and it took two circles of the east end of the city before we managed to get access to the entrance to the underground car-park on Boulevard Zumardia, cunningly hidden behind lanes in the street dedicated to the buses which managed to squeeze us out of the way every time we thought we were getting close. But the effort was well worth such low-level stress, for the old town was a joy to walk around, rain or no rain. We followed our noses past the market hall and through to Constitucion Plaza with its fine colonnades on all four sides and the old town hall topped by a clock and a fine coat of arms at one end. Three balconies along the length of all the buildings surrounding the plaza, all decorated identically with light blue shutters, yellow painted door frames and white stucco walls, had us puzzled for a while as every room had a large number over the doorway. It turned out that the numbers remain as a reminder of days gone by, when the plaza was used as a bull fighting arena, and every room was rented by the gentry, like boxes in a theatre.

As we continued our stroll along the old streets, admiring the renaissance architecture and the handsome wrought iron balconies, we mingled with the rain-dampened crowd and noticed many children, and the occasional adult, prettily dressed in what we took to be traditional costume of some sort. Little boys, similarly attired, carried small cooking pots and sticks which they used as make-shift drums.

Pintxos piled high from one end of the bar to the other in Casa Alcalde

Mystified, we eventually dove into a very busy bar, Casa Alcalde, where the bar was piled high from end to end with pintxos to suit every taste. Designed to be small snacks to accompany a beer or a glass of wine, the most common component to many ‘pintxos’ were ‘anchoa’ (anchovies), though not the excessively salty ones like those you find in a can. Usually served on a small piece of baguette or similar local bread, a veritable cornucopia of delicious flavours go into the building of a pintxo, ‘anchoa’, ‘jamon’, ‘queso’, ‘pimiento’, ‘aceite de olive’, many types of ‘pescados’, ‘huevos’, ‘pollo’, ‘tortilla española’, and goodness knows what else, mostly, though not all, served cold. One we particularly enjoyed was the “Gilda”, a spicy cocktail stick of anchovies, hot green peppers and olives, named in homage to that ‘hot spicy actress’ Rita Hayworth, after her role in the film of the same name! Anyway, as we were enjoying an eclectic mix of four or five pintxos apiece, washed down with a cool glass of ‘cerveza’, a slight commotion outside solved the earlier mystery. The Caldereros Festival, was initiated on February 2^nd 1884 to celebrate the Catholic festival of Candlemas, when a Hungarian carnival group, the Caldereros, paraded for the first time in San Sebastian-Donostia. It is now celebrated every year on the first Saturday of February, which happened to be the day we were there; the commotion outside was in fact the parade of the 18 tribes, or ‘calderero krewes’, groups of children and adults dressed in costume, banging their pots and pans, traditionally accompanied by a bear and a bear cub, though all we saw was a donkey or two, commemorating the arrival of the travelling people to the city. Great fun and a lovely happy way to bring a rather damp day to a close.

Naturally our time in Getaria was not all tourist sightseeing. We were there to try out this little corner of the world as a future place to live and to live like locals in some small way, and so the small town of Zarautz, about three miles west of Getaria played an important part in our considerations. This was also a town that relied heavily on tourism, and yet it had a well-lived in, neighbourly feeling, even if the locals made sure we didn’t forget we were in Basque Country!

We made good use of the local Eroski supermarket with a fish counter where sales assistants made an art form of filleting the very fresh fish, beautifully displayed on beds of ice. And back in Getaria, across the road from our apartment, there was a very friendly grocery whose owner was always happy to give us little tidbits about Basque life in general and the pleasures of living in the village. Everywhere we went, people were friendly and welcoming. These small, but important details all helped to confirm our feelings about the allure of this area.

Sadly, as always, time was marching on, and with only another week before our stay in Getaria would come to an end, we determined to fill the remaining days with visits across the border in French Basque Country, similar to its Spanish neighbour in many ways, but by no means exactly the same, as we were soon to find out.

Discovering the Basque Country –Part one – Bilbao and surroundings

Searching the Basque Country was one of our primary objectives when planning this trip as neither of us had ever stayed in the area before, and everything we read about this land of proud people had piqued our interest as being somewhere to one day build our new home. Known as Euskal Herria in Euskadi, the local Basque language, the Basque Country is located at the southeastern corner of the Bay of Biscay, straddling the western end of the Pyrenees, partly in France and a larger part in Spain. There are seven historical territories in Euskal Herria; Lapurdi, Nafarroa Beherea and Zuberoa are north of the border, whilst Bizkaia, Gipuzkoa, Álava and Nafarroa are on the Spanish side.

Our home-exchange in Gatika. Our apartment is to the right of the well pruned fruit tree.

Our Basque exploration starts in Bizkaia (Biscay in English) where we stayed for ten days on the edge of the village of Gatika, about fourteen kilometres northeast of the capital, Bilbao. Once again, we found our “free” accommodation through membership of HomeExchange.com and were delighted to find ourselves in what turned out to be the most comfortable, homely, elegant digs we had, up till then, had the pleasure to stay in.

Our hosts, Gonzalo and Marian, built this beautiful home about four years ago on land they had purchased more than ten years earlier. Gonzalo is a local businessman with contracting, cleaning and waste disposal operations and the opulence of this home gave every indication he had been successful in these endeavours. Our apartment was a duplex annex occupied by the eldest daughter until she left the family nest. The entrance into our living room was, rather strangely, through the large garage on the lower ground floor at the back of the building; our two bedrooms and the main bathroom were on what is the ground floor for the main part of the building, a French window in the master bedroom opening out onto the large family terrace. The views across the valley towards the hills to the north were full of green fields, many with sheep or cattle, forests on the hillsides, charming traditional houses here and there, a church tower and a small hamlet in the distance and on the valley floor two or three small factory buildings, for we must not forget that we were, after all, in Spain’s “Industrial North”.

Castello de Butron, a few miles from Gatika.

From this charming home, we set out to discover what Spanish Basque had to offer, starting with a walk uphill to the local village of Gatika, a community of some 1,600 people, best known for the eccentric Castello de Butron about six kilometres away. Pleasant enough, with a renovated church, a school and a small sports centre around a grassy park in the centre of the village, Gatika also has a more modern housing development on the other side of the hill, with a selection of single-family residences and two- or three-storey, apartment buildings. The village is set on the top of a hill with views over the surrounding countryside in all directions. To get there, we walked past a small field full of lambing sheep and their young offspring, lots of beautiful music as little lambs bleated to their mothers, and scenes of gentleness as others rested peacefully in the folds of the sloping field or suckled at their mother’s milk. We soon discovered that ‘leche de oveja‘ was readily available in the local shops and it became a staple of our diet in the region.

Our nearest small town, with around 17,000 inhabitants, was Mungia, five minutes drive away on the other side of the BI-631, the main road between Bermeo on the coast and Bilbao. We spent a couple of hours looking around the town before shopping at the local Hiper Simply supermarket, coming away with a couple of bagfuls of necessities, after entering with the intention of buying just three items, a regular habit of ours. Extensively damaged by Franco’s forces during the Spanish Civil War, neither the town, a concentration of fairly modern 4/5/6 storey apartment blocks, nor the large box-like supermarket on its edge were particularly special, though the latter at least served our needs well for our short stay in the area.The next day we visited the famed Castello de Butrón and found it to be closed to the public and rather decrepit. Mind you Kate Middleton, as was, thought it a suitable place to have her wedding to Prince William, an idea thwarted by royal protocol of course, so it must have some redeeming features in addition to the Disney-like faux architecture.

Driving on up to the nearby coast we found Lemoiz, a small village with a little harbor well protected by an imposing sea-wall which we walked along to get our first close encounter with the unruly waters of the Bay of Biscay, a thrilling contrast to the clear, blue, calm Mediterranean Sea. Continuing our exploration eastwards, we happened upon an eerie reminder of yet another phase of the sometimes-violent past experienced by the Basque people. After a few twists and turns through forests of eucalyptus, the road suddenly took a sharp turn inland for a few hundred metres and circled round a deep little valley, at the sea-end of which was a ghostly nuclear power station. Lemoniz Nuclear Plant was built as part of Spain’s nuclear power expansion plan. Although almost complete, its construction was stopped in 1983 after a change in the national government, and serious opposition by the Basque anti-nuclear movement and ETA, the Basque separatist organisation. ETA had successfully planted two bombs in the plant, killing at least three workers, and had assassinated two senior engineers. Protected only by a broken down wire fence, the site now stands empty and forlorn, a stark memorial to those who died there. Strangely, the nuclear plant is not the only blot on the Basque coastline that has caused resentment among the locals. The huge areas now forested with eucalyptus trees were planted in many parts of the Iberian Peninsular, to provide an important cash crop, raw material for the pulp used in paper manufacturing. Disliked by farmers and environmentalists alike, even nicknamed the “fascist” or “capitalist” tree in Portugal, it is said to create wealth for wealthy landowners and industrialists at the expense of poorer locals and their land and the fabric of rural society. The sight of eucalyptus forests was certainly a surprise to those who know it as being a species native to the Australian continent, and it is easy for anyone with a social conscience to understand why one night, thousands of newly planted seedlings were uprooted by the inhabitants of the small Asturian village of Tazones.

Even though we may not have found our local town of Mungia much to write home about, more impressive was the great city of Bilbao, best known in recent years for the audacious Frank Gehry designed, titanium-skinned, Guggenheim Museum. Built in the mid-1990s on the old port and industrial area on a curve of the left bank of the river Nervion, the museum started off the redevelopment of an area destined to become a centre of culture and leisure. However, our first foray into Bilbao inadvertently found us parking under Areatzako Park on the opposite bank. There we discovered, tucked into another curve of the Nervion, the very lovely old city, with its elegant Arriaga theatre right beside the river, the imposing Catholic Catedral de Santiago (St. James) and a very walkable, mainly pedestrianised warren of streets. Lining the streets were many fine, three to four storey, renaissance buildings typical to this region, in which most of the houses have a combination of open balconies and glazed enclosed verandahs, a design which is undoubtedly the architects’ answer to the relatively high rainfall of the region!

What a lovely surprise to find that my favourite British dish, braised oxtail, is also a staple of the Biscayan diet!

With lots of tempting restaurants around and in spite of the region’s reputation for tapas, I steered us into the “Amarena”, a cosy restaurant well populated by what appeared to be local office workers and shoppers, to sample our first Basque €13 mesa de huéspedes or menù del dia. The excellently cooked Sea Bream was not unexpected in this land, famous for centuries for its adventurous fishing fleet. However, the absurdly delicious braised oxtail, was a definite surprise to someone who normally associates such culinary delights with pretty country pubs in England. Fully sated by our tasty repast, we decided to walk it off by climbing hundreds of steps up to Parque de Maloa for a bird’s eye view of the river and city. Down to riverside level again we discovered the Plaza Nueva and its abundance of tapas bars, their counters laden with tempting selections of “pintxos” which we had learnt was the local Basque name for the famous Spanish tapas. A visit to a big city is never complete without a bit of window shopping and the occasional enquiring foray within, one of which resulted in us coming out each sporting a Basque “txapela” (beret), dark blue Navarra style worn to the front or the side for myself and red Pamplona style worn fetchingly over the right ear for my lady. Our only mistake was buying the cheaper models that turned out to be very ticklish, lacking the finely stitched lining on the headband of the more luxurious versions!

A few days later, we returned to achieve our original objective of visiting the famous Guggenheim Bilbao Museo del Arte. It is, quite simply, a museum of modern art, very little of which appealed to either of us, although the one permanent exhibit, “The Matter of Time”, sculpted from enormous sheets of 2″ thick steel, superbly curved in three dimensions, did impress this one time engineering surveyor familiar with the manufacture of heavy steel structures; all the same it probably left non-engineering types somewhat perplexed. The building itself is an artistic masterpiece in its own right and the star of the show, being the building that vaulted Canadian architect Frank Gehry to a new level of international fame when it opened in 1997. A somewhat eclectic mixture of shapes clothed in shiny titanium, it is definitely striking to look at, enhanced outside by some fun sculptures like the giant flower-covered “Puppy” and every arachnophobe’s worst nightmare, a 20ft high steel spider; and the museum certainly produced the required effect of making Bilbao a leading Spanish tourist destination.

A much more satisfying visit for us, was to the Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao which included in its collection some really lovely Basque paintings depicting interesting slices of Basque village life of yesteryear. And as a small extra fillip, the museum’s cafe served some very tasty pintxos, slices of Spanish omelette, a not-half-bad apple and custard tart and the usual tasty coffee.

No single photo could do justice to the great art to be found inside the Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, so enjoy the pintxos and coffee instead.

Finally, summoning what energy we had left, we walked back towards the river, across the enormous Plaza de Don Federico Moyau, a roundabout large enough to enclose a small park and a fine fountain at its centre, around which traffic flowed, eagerly seeking errant pedestrians, while buses in places drove in the opposite direction . . . a pincer attack on the unwary! Thus Bilbao was a real surprise, a fine combination of a traditional seaport town, a modern elegant business city with handsome architecture, and just fifteen minutes drive to get into the countryside.

Driving further west, and out of Basque Country, we visited the port of Santander, the landing place for so many visitors brought in by Brittany Ferries. The hinterland is very industrial, but the city itself was attractive with sandy beaches, lots of fine architecture and . . . some very tasty anchovy and bochorones pintxos!

Yep . . . another picture for the foodies!

And on the drive there we discovered the lovely old town of Laredo, very Spanish, locals chatting on every street corner and washing hanging everywhere.

Locals chatting on every street corner in Laredo . . .

Spanish Basque Country is much more than a wild rugged coastline and dramatic mountains and so, on our host’s advice, we took a couple of daytrips into the hinterland. The first took us south through the beautiful hills of the Gorbeiako Parka Naturala, to Vitoria-Gasteiz, a city with a hyphened name to reflect both its Spanish and its Basque roots. Unfortunately, we only found out how beautiful the drive was on the way home in the evening dusk because that morning there was heavy cloud hanging low over everything, which took most of the day to clear away.

The Brit stands proudly in front of the statue celebrating Wellington’s victory, while Celine enjoys the ambience of another fine Basque city.

Vitoria-Gasteiz is the capital city of the Basque Autonomous Community and the Spanish province of Araba/Álava; historically it is perhaps best known as the site of a battle in 1813 that put paid to Napoleon Bonaparte’s attempts to colonise Spain, when his army was notoriously defeated by the Duke of Wellington’s combined force of British, Portuguese and Spanish troops. A fine memorial to this “glorious” victory stands in Andre Maria Zurarien Enparantza/Plaza de la Virgen Blanca, overlooked by the 15th century San Miguel Arcangel Church.

Situated on a high plain about 500m above sea level, Vitoria-Gasteiz, a city of 250,000 residents, is an industrial town in the midst of a large farming area, and is ranked second in its standard of living among all Spanish cities, in particular for its green spaces (“European Green Capital” in 2012) and cultural activities. Whilst we got a glimpse of the former in our efforts to find a parking place close to the city centre, we never got to partake of the second, though we did find ourselves in yet another mainly pedestrianised, elegant old city centre with two cathedrals, neither of which were open during our short stay. The newer cathedral, Catedral de Maria Immaculada, only consecrated in the late 20th century was however, quite notable for its exterior frieze of finely detailed sculptures of goblinesque people, mainly artisans and families, going about their daily lives, an amusing change from the usual collection of religious figures that seem to adorn most of the cathedrals around Europe.

Fine sculptures of ordinary folk on the frieze around the Catedral de Maria Immaculada.

The city also had its fair share of churches, and plazas surrounded by restaurants, sculptures and street art, and was altogether a very agreeable place to visit and wander around. Was it a place that we want to live in or near? Probably not, mainly because of the cooler, humid winter weather and low, for Spain, sunshine levels, factors that are proving to eliminate quite a lot of places from our bucket list!

One day we asked our charming landlord where he would live if he hadn’t got himself settled in his lovely home in Gatika. “Elorrio” says he “I already have an apartment there, you’ll love it”. So, in total contrast to Vitoria, our second sortie away from the coast took us on a forty minute drive southeast from Bilbao, initially along a fairly busy highway through several small industrial towns along the valley of the river Abaizaba, a tributary of the Nervion, as far as Durango, and then following a prettier route through the countryside to the delightful small town of Elorrio, population about seven thousand.

Elorrio, a small town in the countryside, surrounded by green hills; seemed really quite liveable!

Even small towns like this one pedestrianise their centres and it makes such a difference to be able to wander round admiring all the old architecture without having one’s life threatened by traffic; all the same, scooters still thrive by a law of their own when it comes to traffic signs. We arrived just in time to catch the end of the morning’s market, and purchased from Señor Miguel Angel some smoked pork loin and a tasty roll of sheep’s cheese, ignoring the ‘buzkantzac’, not realizing that Elorrio is renowned for this local version of our favourite, black pudding. The gastronomic diversion completed, we started on our tour of this old town that back in 1964 was declared to be a “Centre of Historical and Artistic Importance”; it has in its midst, twenty-four palaces dating from 16^th to 19^th centuries, sixty-nine heraldic coats of arms on the walls of buildings and nine 16^th and 17^th century stone crosses, some of which were beautifully carved, placed at strategic points around the perimeter of the town to guard the citizens against a variety of dangers including the sea, somewhat surprisingly, the sea being forty kilometres away.

Fine old houses with their family crests prominently displayed need soldiers to defend them . . . and soldiers always appreciate the company of a pretty lady!

The Basilica de la Purisima Concepcion also appeared on the outside to have had some defensive purpose in mind, but maybe was simply built that way to safeguard the most sumptuous display of gold leaf that we found inside. Churches are to be found everywhere in this strongly Catholic country and we were both becoming pretty well “churched out”, but were extremely glad that we allowed ourselves to be beguiled inside this particular edifice, for it would have been truly sacrilegious to omit it from our itinerary. Promenading around towns and inspecting fine churches makes one hungry, so coming out of the church and finding ourselves across the square from “Porra Taverna” was heaven-sent, and to find inside yet more delicious pintxos, and to learn that the town hosts a successful local rugby team, were added bonuses. During a final stroll to help us digest our excellent meal – which cost the princely sum of €11 including coffees for the two of us – we also discovered that the town was renowned in the 15^th century for manufacturing fine steel swords.

Durango, an industrial valley town with a warm heart.

Taken altogether, Elorrio was a very attractive and interesting place, an impression that was further reinforced as we looked back from the Necrópolis de Argenita, on a hill high above the town. For even on a cloudy day, with its small perimeter of the ubiquitous Spanish high density housing, Elorrio began to look like somewhere we could live one day! And Durango, the nearby industrial town through which we had passed by without a second glance on the way out that morning, proved to have a quite attractive old town at its centre, which we strolled through as the sun started to disappear behind the surrounding hills, enjoying the early evening activity around the old church and marketplace, as children played and parents chatted and the shops started to re-open after the afternoon siesta.

The start of our second week in Basque Country, greeted us with clear blue skies and a bright sunny day with only a small threat of showers, and we decided to explore some more of the coast to the east of Bilbao. Our starting point was Gernika-Lumo in the valley of the Oka river, where in pre-Franco times there was a thriving old village, before it was infamously obliterated by aircraft belonging to Nazi-Germany’s Condor Legion during the Spanish Revolution. Gernika is now a fairly uninspiring modern town, full of yet more high density housing to the west of the river, and an equal area of light industry on the east, though it remains historically the seat of the parliament of the province of Biscay.

Mundaka, proudly flying the Basque flag.

Not wishing to waste such a glorious day, we quickly drove northwards towards the Bay of Biscay and stopped off briefly at the Centro de Biodiversidad de Euskadi, an ecological park from where we got our first views of the wide green estuary of the river Oka, before arriving after a short drive further north, at the delightful small town of Mundaka.

A fleet of inshore fishing boats moored in the small tidal harbour of Mundaka.

A small tidal harbor opens onto the river estuary, the Iglesia de Santa Maria stands on the waterfront, a pleasant mix of old and new, three or four storey apartment houses, bars and restaurants grace the town centre, and the 19^th century Baseliza de Santa Katalina faces the sea on a grassy peninsula of the same name, jutting out into the mouth of the estuary from where you can look towards Isla de Izaro and the Bay of Biscay beyond.

A kilometer further north, and directly facing the vagaries of Bay weather, was Bermeo, a town more typical of this region with lots of high density housing, a small fishing port with a fleet of tough sea-going fishing boats, and a boat repair yard.

Driving westward the coast again becomes fairly wild and heavily forested, though with several large clear-cuts and quarries which severely deface whole mountainsides in places. The ugliness of these is, however, well countered by several lookout points along the road that give beautiful views down to the rugged shoreline below, and the small islands of Akatxa Irla and Islote y Ermita de San Juan de Gazteluatxe. The latter is accessible by a rocky path and a stone bridge, parts of a dramatic man-made causeway connecting the island to the mainland, one of the tourist must-do’s of the area that sadly we failed to do . . . but as we were learning, you can do a lot in six months but apparently you just can’t do it all! And while talking about the attraction of some of the small ports along this coast, a couple of weeks later we happened upon the interesting small town of Mutriku, midway between Bilbao and San Sebastian. Founded in 1209 by the Castillian King Alfonso VIII, Mutriku is built on a steep hillside at the end of a small inlet where what is claimed to be the oldest man-made harbour in Basque country protects a small-craft marina. In more recent times, it became the site of the world’s first multi-turbine, breakwater wave-power generating station. With it’s narrow streets climbing up the hill away from the harbor, and steep hills down to the water’s edge on both sides, the town has a rather sombre appearance, but the interesting history makes it a place that should be on anyone’s itinerary to the area. We ended up our afternoon there, people-watching at a café in the old main square, at that time of day when all the families seem to congregate when school is out . . . lively and great fun.

On our last full day in Gatika, we spent the morning enjoying our delightful temporary home, catching up on e-mails and the like. Finally cabin fever set in, but only mildly “in view of the views”, and so we set off on one last walk around the neighbourhood. It was a cloudy day as we set off down a little footpath towards the valley below where we met a very amiable local and his five retrievers, and we chatted away together, neither party really understanding much that the other was saying, until the threat of rain sent us back up to the house.

We then took a drive to Erdigune across the valley and explored a bit more of the area, stopping to look at a couple of renovation projects, sadly, or perhaps luckily, without For Sale signs in view of our tendency to jump when we find ourselves in such beautiful surroundings.

A quick last look at the development potential across the valley in Erdigune!

It is certainly a very likeable part of the country, and with low crime rates and good property prices, we prepared to depart thinking it was definitely a place we could live, though it is still not quite ‘the perfect place’!

Home-exchange newbies, experiencing life in a very small, very rural French village.

Our European saga was nearly half-over by the time we arrived in the little village of Rouvenac, deep in the countryside of western Languedoc-Roussillon (now part of the recently created Occitanie region), and close to the foothills of the Pyrenees. Up till then, we had experienced big-city living in Lyon, spent six weeks exploring Provence, passed six glorious days on the Italian Riviera, cat-sat in Montpellier, and had another enjoyable week overlooking the Mediterranean Sea in Spain’s Costa Brava. Each experience was different in its own way and we were beginning to get a better idea of what it was we were searching for; we certainly had found out what we didn’t want, though as you continue to read our story you may begin to wonder if even that is true! [See my post “On finding somewhere to build a new nest . . .” published May 30, 2017]

Celine and her sister Dagmara admiring the Christmas decorations in Rouvenac

Whilst making the initial grandiose plans for this voyage of discovery, we had quickly realised that to be able to travel so extensively involved either unlimited finances or more judicious planning and, in the absence of the former option, researching the latter had led us to discover two new worlds, those of the house-sitter and of the home-exchanger. Our initiation into house-sitting, looking after a cat named Mr Darcy, had been a great success, and is certainly something we would be very happy to do again; it just requires finding the right host in the right place at the right time, and Montpellier had proved ideal. Now, in Rouvenac, we were about to experience our first entry into the world of exchanging homes, having met on Home-Exchange.com, Barbara and Michael, a pair of artists originally from England who had a yen to go and visit California at just about the same time as we wanted to be near to our sister, Dagmara, in their remote corner of France. The process was simple; we interviewed each other on Skype, came to the conclusion that we were compatible and sufficiently honest to trust each other with our homes and all our possessions, and finally met in the flesh the day before they started their journey westwards. We knew very little about Rouvenac, except that, to an Englishman’s way of thinking, it was no bigger than a small hamlet, and that it was a short ten-minute drive from Antugnac where Dagmara lived with her family. Our new temporary home overlooked the village square and after getting the Cook’s tour of the house from our hosts we quickly settled into this very different life.

Winter was approaching, cool winds whistled along the valley and through the village, and we were very glad of the large wood-burning stove in the living-room, along with the ample supply of firewood that had been left for us, and we soon learned the necessity to stock up on kindling during each walk into the surrounding countryside.

The family all helped with the vital job of collecting kindling.

My long-stated interest in living in a small French village was definitely being put to the test!

It’s difficult to know how we would have reacted to this new life if we didn’t have family living so close by, but with the holiday season fast approaching we found our days well-filled with visits to each other’s homes, as well as numerous forays together into the countryside and visiting the local towns and villages. We also had our eyes opened by experiencing a bit of the alternative life-style that is the reason so many ex-pats move to these quieter parts of the world [see my recent post, “It takes all types! An alternative view of the other South of France.” published January 4 2018].

Although we were deep in the countryside, there were many fine places to visit within a day’s drive. One day we visited Celine’s niece Martynka, in Toulouse, France’s fourth largest city and in spite of it’s size and being the centre of the European aerospace industry, we enjoyed walking around the partially pedestrianised city centre, which, like Montpellier, is very student oriented. The main church in the city is the enormous Basilica of Saint-Sernin; constructed at the end of the eleventh century, it is the largest remaining Romanesque building in Europe and has lots of superb sculpture of that era.

A very different city is Carcassone, famous for its medieval hilltop citadel, La Cité de Carcassonne, with its many towers and walled fortifications that watch over the newer city on the other side of the river. The Cité was extensively restored in 1853 by the French architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, whose fanciful designs and slate roofed towers are sometimes criticised for their lack of authenticity to the original structure. The new town was full of Christmas markets and amusements when we visited but we weren’t overly impressed.

The small market town of Espéraza was our main shopping venue, with a gas station, a decent supermarket, a very good Bio store and a couple of boulangeries that well satisfied your scribe’s needs for tasty carbs. It is also the home of an interesting museum, Musée de la Chapellerie, that celebrates the town’s past connections with the millinery trade.

Enjoying our new headgear after a visit to La Musée de la Chapellerie.

Somewhat further afield was Limoux, famous for the vineyard that produced the world’s first sparkling wine known as Blanquette de Limoux, originally made by the monks at the nearby abbey in Saint-Hilaire; it might not be champagne but it’s a pretty good, economical substitute! Limoux was also where we found a very accommodating young dentist who, finally, satisfactorily resolved the nagging toothache that had plagued me on and off since our stay in Lorgues; and he did the work at short notice and provided all the necessary prescriptions at a fraction of the price I would have paid back home in California.

Always wanting to see the seaside, one day we took ourselves down to the Mediterranean coast near the Spanish border, for a return visit to the little towns of Banyuls-sur-Mer and Collioure.

Pretty street in the old town of Banyuls-sur-Mer

It was a grey day with rain threatening but we still found Collioure in particular to be every bit as attractive as we remembered from our visit three years earlier. Not as quaint as Calella de Palafrugell, seventy miles south on the Spanish Costa Brava where we had spent a wonderful week in early December, it nevertheless appeared to be a much more liveable town, quite busy with locals on the streets, in the shops and dining out even at that time of the year; Calella had been virtually shut down for winter with 75% of it’s homes occupied only during “the season”.

The foothills of the Pyrenees make for some very attractive countryside in and around Rouvenac and we visited many beautiful villages; some, such as Ginoles, Quillan and Puivert, nestled like Rouvenac at the bottom of valleys, and others, such as Rennes-le-Chateau, were perched on top of one of the many hills with beautiful views of mountains and valleys in the distance. One never lacks somewhere to go a for a strenuous hike, or a gentle amble in nature.

A frosty morning along La Vallée de l’Aude.

For ski-bunnies, the slopes are not far away either, and another day Celine, Martynka and I had a fairytale drive along the Vallée de l’Aude, among frosty snow-covered woods, alongside the partly frozen river Aude which has cut itself a rocky ravine as it tumbles down from the mountains, up to Formigueres and thence higher again to Les Angles. We stopped for a picnic on the edge of the village, enjoying what little warmth the January sun still had at that altitude, the snow-covered slopes above us, a grassy plateau and a lake below us, the high Pyrenees in the distance and cars with ski racks everywhere.

Most country people keep guard dogs. Our neighbours were the exception!

In many ways the Languedoc is a magical environment, well removed from big-city life, full of eye-appeal, and well capable of satisfying your scribe’s desire to lead a quiet life close to nature. Real estate is very affordable, all the services one requires to ensure one’s comfort into old age are reasonably close at hand and we would even have family close by. It was a great experience for two newbie home-exchangers and we have nothing but good things to say of our hosts, Barbara and Michael, and their interesting artists’ pad in the boonies. But the lifestyle we led there, lacks most of the attractions of big city life, offers few, if any, cultural activities and requires a high degree of self-sufficiency that doesn’t suit everybody. So Celine and I realise that it is most probably not an option for future nest-building if we are to both be equally happy, which is a prime requisite to be satisfied by this long-term search we are on.

Heading west . . . the Pyrenees to our left!

After six weeks or more of this rural life, we were eager to experience another region we had read so much about. January was two-thirds gone when we picked up sticks, packed our life back into the car, and drove off in a westerly direction, keeping the peaks of the Pyrénées to our left. The morning drive to Foix can only be described as glorious, the countryside steaming gently in the morning sunshine. The route got even better as we climbed higher beyond Foix and continued to follow the sun till the countryside flattened out and we passed through lots of fertile farmland until we finally reached the city of Pau, and our first taste of French Basque life. That city is in a beautiful setting with the ever-present Pyrénées as its backdrop, some fine architecture and a very walkable city centre, the Boulevard des Pyrénées leading past elegant hotels and apartment buildings of an earlier era and up to the castle of Château de Pau.

We still had a long way to drive to our destination near Bilbao across the border for our second excursion into Spain, and we were only had enough time to get a cursory glimpse of what the city had to offer. This was a shame as Pau had been on our bucket list for a long time and deserved a closer look. (And to add insult to injury, every single photograph that we took of Pau disappeared in the hard disc drive disaster – see my earlier post of October 30 2017, “Mense horribilis!!” Or “I wish I had backed up my photos earlier!!”) Thus, after a necessary pit-stop at one of the many cafés, we strolled back down to our car parked alongside the river in the shadow of the castle, and, as the sun sank behind the distant mountains, (armed only with our mental photographic memories) we drove towards our next, very different home-exchange experience in the small town of Gatika, in the province of Biscay, in the autonomous community of Basque Country.

Au revoir Provence! Buongiorno Italia!

After six weeks of close encounters with nearly every aspect of autumnal life in all four corners of Provence, and entering 52 pages of analytical critique in our travel journal, we felt we gave that corner of France every opportunity to wow us in any way it cared to do.

We visited numerous “picturesque” villages, tramped our way around a good few towns and cities, took several long walks in the countryside and gave ourselves a superficial view of the famed French Riviera. We met many friendly locals, exercising our ever-improving knowledge of the French language as we learnt from them about local life, their attitudes to immigrants, the vagaries of the weather and simple politics.

One or two villages such as Cotignac, Bargemon and Tour Tour enticed us enough to want to go back for a second look, and we enjoyed a return visit to Aix-en-Provence which we had last visited a couple of years previously when staying with my step-sister in Nîmes. But in the end all the villages were either too remote from the culture to be found in larger cities, too small to offer us the mix of social life we enjoy, too grey and dreary, or catered too much to tourists and ex-pats at the expense of losing their French charm. Some aspects of one or two of the coastal towns and cities made us think they would be good to live near to, but overall the Côte d’Azur held very little allure for us. In particular, we didn’t enthuse at the idea of living with the massive influx of tourists five or six months of the year. It is a shame, though hardly surprising, that such a beautiful coastline has become so over-developed.

Our next scheduled stop was Montpellier where we had arranged to house and cat sit for a couple of weeks. This left us with a week to fill-in and, reckoning we had had more than our fill of la vie francaise for a while, a few days on the Italian Riviera seemed a pretty attractive tonic.

St-Jean-Cap-Ferat, the really posh part of the French Riviera!!

So one cool, mid-November, Saturday morning found us driving east along the Corniche, drooling at the gorgeous villas spectacularly located on promontories such as Juan-les-Pins, Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferat and Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, skirting round the edge of Monaco and eventually crossing the border just east of Menton.

Our destination was the little town of Ospedaletti where we had found an apartment with a balcony overlooking the sea. But before we even got there, we were struck by the contrast with the French coast we had just left behind. There were no high-rise apartments and hardly any housing developments on the hillsides to our left, just lots of vegetation, quite a few greenhouses, and unspoilt views up the many narrow valleys. We learnt that land that can be cultivated is very precious to the Italians – and to the Spanish Basque as we were to discover later in our trip – so much so that it is very difficult for developers to despoil such land.

Ospedaletti, our new digs overlooking the azure waters of the Mediterranean

We met our host, Simone, at a car park by the beach and followed him along a narrow road next to the sea, to an apartment building a couple of hundred metres away. Looking upwards, Simone pointed to our balcony five stories above us. Fortunately there was a lift, and we were soon inside a recently renovated one-bedroom apartment, delighting in the view from the balcony which, literally, seemed to be suspended over the rocky shoreline.

What a delight after our disappointing rental in Lorgues, with its view of the back wall of the local grape and olive crushing plant !

That first evening we dined on our left-over French groceries, as the evening sun disappeared down behind the distant headland. There is always something magic about watching sunsets across a large expanse of water and we indulged ourselves with the beauty of being so close to the sea.

The next morning we were greeted by bright sunshine and the sound of gentle waves washing lazily against the rocks below us. The Mediterranean was working its magic !

Ospedaletti is on the Riviera dei Flori, just a couple of kilometres outside the bustling city of Sanremo, yet our first impression was of a quiet little town with an unspoilt charm of its own. A 26km long cycle path, the Pista Ciclabile del Ponente Ligure, ran past the front of our building providing us with an easy walking route into the town centre. The path follows the course of an old railway line that once ran alongside the sea, all the way from Ospedaletti to San Lorenzo al Mare and is considered one of the best purpose-built cycle paths on the Mediterranean coast [pistaciclabile.com]; sorry to say we found so much else to do in and around Ospedaletti and Sanremo that we never got around to riding it.

The next morning was a Sunday, a day of rest for this travel weary couple, so after a relaxed late breakfast we took our first walk around the neighbourhood. We followed the bike path to the disused station building beside the little town beach at Piazzale al Mare and then climbed up to Corsa Regina Margherita, the main road through the town. There we beheld a fine avenue of trees behind which stood several elegant old villas dating from the turn of the twentieth century, pretty gardens on either side of the street, and a wonderfully located tennis club opened in 1962, where one’s game could easily be distracted by the views of the sea!

Our first priority was to replenish our pantry and, even though it was a Sunday, we did this very satisfactorily at Salumeria Alimentari da Nicola. It was just on 3pm when we arrived and the shop was closing; luckily the proprietor was very obliging and we came away with strawberries, apples, a tasty looking cheese and a loaf of Italian bread that made us want to nibble it as we walked on through the town. So a few minutes later we found ourselves sitting on a bench overlooking the beach munching a bread and cheese picnic, which we followed up with a very welcome coffee at the nearby Bar La Bussola. A good first impression of this pleasant little seaside town.

The next day we were greeted by clouds sent scudding across the sky by a brisk breeze, dramatising our wonderful view over the Mediterranean. Soon after midday, with the sun shining brightly through the wispy cirrus clouds, we set off on foot to explore the town further. As per usual we looked into a couple of small churches, Chiesa Parrochiale di San Giovanni and the delightful little Chiesetta dei Marnai Sant’Erasmo, another religious house dedicated to the seafarers of the Mediterranean, full of models of local ships and stories of danger on the high seas, much like the Basilica in Marseilles we visited a couple of weeks earlier [see my earlier posting “Provence part seven . . . “]. The Tora Saraceno, constructed to defend the area in 1579, is another interesting old structure in the town which appears to be permanently closed.

On Tuesday morning we decided to make a foray into nearby Sanremo, “La Capitale della Riviera dei Flori”, the self-styled “Riviera of Flowers” as they call this section of the Italian Riviera between Ospedaletti and San Lorenzo al Mare, which explains all the greenhouses on the hillsides.

Our first destination was the Villa Nobel, the long time home of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish scientist who invented dynamite, who owned Bofors the armaments manufacturer, and who, “after reading a premature obituary which condemned him for profiting from the sales of arms, bequeathed his fortune to institute the Nobel Prizes” [Wikipaedia]. Alas, when we arrived we discovered the house was closed on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. So we only had a brief walk down through the garden and out of the back gate, where we found ourselves on another section of the cycle path, which we followed back along the seafront, ending up at the Forte de Santa Tecla.

Memorial to Italian Resistance against Mussolini outside Forte Santa Tecla.

This impressive triangular bastion, which was built in 1755-56 on the orders of the Republic of Genoa after the citizens rebelled a couple of years earlier, remains abandoned and closed to the public, ever since the prison it later housed was closed down in the 1990s. However, on the grass sward outside its walls, there is a very impressive statue celebrating the sacrifices made by the Italian resistance fighting against Mussolini during WWll.

Feeling hungry after our walk, we investigated the many busy restaurants with alfresco dining along the waterfront by the old port, “Porto Vecchio”, and ended up at Ristorante delle Palme, mainly because they offered “polpa alla griglia”, which to my delight turned out to be a whole grilled octopus that I ate with great gusto as Celine enjoyed an equally delicious sea-bass.

Grilled octopus for lunch at Ristorante Delle Palme

Our gourmand needs fully sated, we headed away from the port and up the hill into the old town. Like a lot European cities that started to develop in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, many of the streets are narrow and buildings are five or six stories high. But it was clean, well maintained and very comfortable to walk around. In tune with other Riviera destinations there is the very elegant Casinò di Sanremo on Corso degli Inglesi, opened in 1905. And as one might expect in fashion conscious Italy, coming back down into the main shopping streets we found lots of good clothing stores; so realising how under-prepared I was for the onset of cooler, very un-South-Californian, weather, we bought for me a stylish winter coat.

It was dark before we retraced our steps to our car, parked near the main railway station, and found our way back to our delightful pad in Ospedaletti, where Simone, our very thoughtful host turned up with the missing spaghetti strainer, a must for any Italian kitchen! Already this combination of quiet little town next to a busy small city was starting to feel like a good place to live and when we said as much to Simone, he let on that he was a realtor and would be delighted to show us a few properties before we left at the weekend, how convenient!!

Wednesday arrived and, realising we were already half way through our little Italian tryst, we felt that we ought to get out and see some of the countryside. A river called Fora di Taggia flows down through the Vallee di Torrente Argentina from high in the Ligurian Alps until it reaches the Mediterranean Sea at the small community of Prai five kilometres east of San Remo. Near to the source of this wild river is the small village of Triora, known in the tourist industry as “The Salem of Europe” being the site of the last Italian witch hunt that began in 1587. That year a famine was the result of bad weather and pitiful crops, but the locals were convinced that their misfortune was the work of witches. This led to the imprisonment of 30 or more women and girls, their torture and, for some, their death by being burnt at the stake. What better place to visit on what was to turn out to be a grey, damp overcast day.

Strada Provinciale 458, the road we joined after leaving Strada Statale 11, followed the river closely copying every twist and turn that nature had dictated over many millenia. Dense green forests covered the slopes on each side of the river, with a scattering of houses clinging to the hillsides here and there. Eventually we came to the comune of Badalucco, where we stopped briefly to stretch our legs, and take a stroll along the bank of the river as it curled tightly around the edge of the village on it’s headlong rush to the sea. But with time pressing and clouds appearing over the mountains we decided to push on up the valley. However, as it so often does, nature soon called and we were obliged to stop in the hamlet of Montalto Ligure at a rustic looking little cafe, “Bar Trattoria Ligure”, to partake of the homely facilities and enjoy a coffee and a couple of croissants stuffed with Nutella, not super-healthy but very satisfying. We also bought a kilo of delicious rich dark honey, an inherited weakness of yours truly.

It was mid-afternoon when we finally arrived at Triora ; the clouds that had by then completely covered the sky had also started to descend, enveloping the village in a fine mist, adding to the spooky feel of the place. Triora was built on a formidably steep slope and the road up to it was a series of sharp hairpins. Only residents are allowed to take their vehicles inside the village’s maze of steep streets and we parked at the entrance among a fairly modern group of buildings that included a medical centre, a school and the town hall. A short walk and we were immediately in amongst a very ancient complex of houses, many of which were linked together, providing each other support, and many ‘streets’ were no more than narrow footpaths running between and often under buildings as they tumbled down the hillside. We headed up hill, following the sound of sheep bleating and their bells tinkling, the houses becoming more and more rustic the further we got away from the bronze sculpture of a supposed witch near the village entrance. Walking through a small farmyard we were greeted by a very official sign advising us that “Mushroom picking was regulated and banned to unauthorised persons” and then out of the forbidden mist-covered hillside a herd of sheep came rambling down the grassy path, nibbling on the way. The town was practically deserted as we wove our way back down along ancient cobbled passageways between the houses ; a group of children playing tag in the church square were the only reminders of which century we were in.

Sheep returning to the fold as the clouds descend on Triora

The next morning the sun was shining and the sea was calm as we had a leisurely breakfast during which we sampled our miele ligure ; with a rich, flowery flavour and the dark brown colour of damp autumn leaves, it has to be the tastiest honey this life-long honey fanatic has ever had the pleasure of enjoying. So good in fact that we made a return visit the next day to buy a couple more jars to see us through the upcoming holiday season!

Sanremo also deserved a return visit and we spent this November Thursday exploring the town. But first things first, it was lunchtime when we arrived, so following our landlord’s recommendation we sought out the strangely named seafood restaurant, “Ittiturismo m/b Patrizia” near the port.

Time for desserts at Ittiturismo m/b Patrizia. Unpretentious but again, the food was delicious.

There, in the company of two or three tables of businessmen and no other tourists, we had another very good meal of Tagliolini al gambero, cappon magro, a couple of glasses of a tasty dry white wine, closed out with tiramisu, zabaglione and coffee. How the Italian way of life was starting to change our eating habits !

We needed to walk off this sumptuous repast and so we set off uphill walking through yet more cobbled passages and climbing endless stairs till we reached a quiet lawned park, Piazza S.Costanzo where gnarled old trees pushed their roots over the edge of the retaining wall, and from where we had marvellous views over the city and port far below.

Symbiotic relationship ‘twixt roots and wall.

At the end of a short avenue there was the impressive Santuario della Madonna della Costa, another rich edifice dedicated to the Catholic faith. While I sat on a wall and admired the scenery, resting my knees after the long climb, Celine walked up to the church and reported back that it was typically decorated in standard baroque style and that I didn’t miss anything special. So I reckon I made the wise choice.

The afternoon was drawing in by the time we reached the bottom of the hill and out onto the busy commercial streets. We came across one square that had more scooters per square meter than either of us had ever previously encountered. We mentioned this to Simone the next day and he told us that Sanremo was renowned for having the highest per capita scooter population in Italy. And yet in spite of that somewhat alarming statistic we found most scooterists to be very polite and unthreatening, unlike my driving experiences in many other large European cities. We wandered around in the evening darkness, enjoying the busy atmosphere of an unpretentious, ordinary working town. It made us think that just such a town would be good to have close by wherever, and whenever, we find somewhere to build a new nest.

Friday arrived far too quickly for our liking as we were really starting to enjoy this little corner of Italy. We opted to spend the morning visiting Villa Nobel which was fascinating. Alfred Nobel was working happily in Paris for many years until the French government accused hom of high treason against France when he sold to Italy, his patent for ballistite, one of the many specialist explosives he had formulated. Sanremo was a popular health resort in the mid eighteen hundreds which well suited the ailing inventor. The Moorish-style villa that he purchased, and lived in for the final five years of his life, was formerly owned by a Polish poet, Josephy Ignacy Kraszewsky, who named it “Moi Nido”, “My Nest”, just the kind of place we would love to find . . . and be able to afford ! He set up a laboratory in the grounds of the villa, which reached down to the sea and carried on his research, in delightful surroundings. The villa, which the city bought in the 1960’s, is now a museum of his life and works and we found it utterly absorbing.

A Bofors cannon, hardly the kind of toy you’d expect to find in the garden of the man whose legacy led to the Nobel Peace Prize!

Time passes quickly when you are enjoying yourself, and as we had a late afternoon appointment with our host Simone, to visit one or two homes for sale, by the time we managed to drag ourselves away from the Villa, we only had time for another quick drive back up to Montalto Ligure to purchase two more kilos of that delicious honey, and a final short walk around Ospedaletti.

Simone picked us up and we drove into Sanremo where he nonchalantly double parked his Mercedes in typical Italian style, across the road from the Casino, and walked us to his office, stopping to grab an exceedingly quick coffee on the way. We had read somewhere, that one big difference between Italians and French was the way they consumed their daily doses of caffeine. And how true it was, we had no time to stop and people watch as we had got used to across the border, this espresso was gulped down standing upright at the counter of the rather posh cafe, and we were immediately off again! Unfortunately our friendly realtor’s interpretation of our stated likes and dislikes home-wise weren’t very close to the mark, and out of the four places he had picked to show us, only one was vaguely interesting. Part of the problem was the lack of properties with gardens, and the other was the shortage of anything other than apartments in our price range. However, unfazed, Simone promised us that now he had a better idea of what we were looking for he believed he had one more place he could show us the following morning, before we departed back to our next destination in France.

This was so close to becoming the view from our new home!!

And so it was that on that sunny but blustery Saturday morning, we found ourselves clambering across the rocks and through the grounds of a small resort apartment complex, enjoying the sea spray-filled atmosphere, till we arrived at a small apartment building with views of the sea nearly as good as we had been enjoying all week. It was in so many ways just what we were looking for but, for reasons you can read about in my earlier blog (“On finding somewhere to build a new nest”, posted May 30, 2017) we decided to pass, much to the disappointment of all three of us !

Thus, we sadly came to the end of our Italian tryst. Ospedaletti had done great things for us, our optimism was renewed and we set off in high spirits, back to France and a couple of weeks of cat-sitting in Montpellier. . .

Cat-sitting in Montpellier.

It was a big wrench leaving Ospedaletti and returning to France again. Something magical there had grabbed both of us and, as we got into our car to drive away, our final memory of our Italian tryst was the beautiful sound of waves crashing against the rocks twenty feet away. So, long before we arrived at our next destination, we were quite convinced that we had to spend more time in La Bella Italia and had already started planning our next trip to Europe!

Alas that was not to be for a while – hopefully in the last quarter of 2018 – and we had to focus our minds on living for three weeks in a stranger’s home, and looking after their beloved cat. Montpellier is a five-hour drive and we arrived there in the early evening darkness, eventually finding a parking space a short walk from the apartment building. We soon discovered that on-street parking is a major problem for Montpellier residents, and the locals were extremely adept at squeezing into the tightest of spaces, using a little gentle bumper contact to assist them as necessary, a technique we approached warily in our lease car!

Tight parking – the driver of the VW had carefully placed some sort of cushion between his rear bumper and the utilities box and then more or less levered his car into the space, leaving his paint on my rear bumper!

We dined well that evening at Bistro Alco, with Kevin our host, while his wife Sheila stayed home finishing off some on-line business before their departure the following morning. Our charge, a black house-cat named Mr.D’Arcy, was not overly excited by our arrival and immediately hid under the bed, quite obviously well aware that his “parents” were departing imminently; animals have an uncanny understanding of the meaning of a pile of suitcases by the front door!

The second floor apartment on rue de Barcelone was only a ten-minute walk from Place de la Comédie and yet, surprisingly quiet, which was a relief for my city-living phobia. With about a third of the city’s population being university students, there was always lots of life centred around the many cafes and bars in the old town. The University of Montpellier, officially established in 1289, is one of the oldest in the world and has been a centre of medical excellence from an even earlier date. The city is, of course, very much more than just a university town, but the atmosphere of studious, intellectual, youthful activity pervades many aspects of the life there and made for an agreeable ambience for this worldly pair of travellers. Which was just as well, as with the problem of parking, we were loath to lose our spot any more than necessary and spent much of our stay on Shanks’ pony, exercising my deteriorating knees to the max, but at the same time getting a good feel of the city-dwelling life. Actually this was quite a good experience, residing as we were in a city with so much to see and appreciate.

So it was back to a life of wandering the streets, seeking culture wherever we could, window shopping mindful of the approach of Christmas, and of course, enjoying French café culture yet again. But having said that, our first attempt to partake of same was a failure. On our second or third day, having finally made friends with Mr D’Arcy, we walked up to Place de la Comedie, thinking we would enjoy a brief late morning coffee and watch the world go by awhile, before taking an afternoon drive to the seaside. But our choice of venue was marred by a waiter who seemed to have no idea of time whatsoever, and after waiting more than fifteen minutes for our order to arrive, our patience frayed and, remembering our midday date with the parking meter, we upped sticks and hot-footed it back to rescue our car from imminent clamping or, worse still, being towed.

The nearest seaside in Montpellier entails a fifteen minute drive to Palavas-les-Flots. However we decided to go a few minutes further to the fishing village of Le Grau-du-Roi, the driver not wishing to stop at La Grande Motte, a purpose-built resort from the sixties, full of concrete apartment buildings, the only redeeming feature of which was the avant-garde architecture.

Avant-garde architecture of La Grande Motte

Le Grau-du-Roi was much more traditional, and hence more to our liking. We walked along the seafront, neatly paved with modern mosaics, braving the brisk wintry breeze raising white caps on the bay, until we came to a touching statue of a mother and her child peering into the distance, searching the horizon for their husband/father’s fishing boat; it was yet another reminder of this coast’s strong traditions with seafaring.

Statue of mother and child in Le-Grau-du-Roi

A canal passes right through the centre of the village, its banks lined with fishing boats, old and new and various pleasure craft and tour boats; tours into the étangs (lagoons) of the nearby Camargue are popular tourist activities, though not such an attractive proposition in early winter. We stopped awhile at one of the cafes lining the quay on the right bank (that’s the bank on your right as you float downstream!), before a late afternoon drive through La Petite Camargue, where we were happy to see some of the famous pink flamingoes.

Another day we drove to Sète, an interesting town built upon and around a hill, Mont St Clair, that was a separate island until the mid-seventeenth century when Louis XIV decreed that the town and port be built to provide an outlet to the sea for the Canal du Midi. This work included reclaiming land between the north-east corner of the island and the mainland, building canals and bridges, and constructing a long isthmus connecting the southwest corner to the land and effectively creating the sea-water lagoon, Étang deThau. The reclaimed land is where most of the town’s industry is found, and the isthmus has nature reserves and vineyards planted in the sand, the wines from which are said to have a distinct flavour of the sea. We spent an hour or more wandering the paths of the small wooded park that covers the peak of the hill, and enjoying the views. Eventually we drove back down into the port area, and looked around the shops before having our usual afternoon coffee break at a café on Quai de la Résistance, overlooking the fishing boats moored either side of the main Royal Canal.

One more trip to the seaside found us making a return visit to the Camargue, on a glorious, sunny, windless autumn day, stopping first to befriend, and feed with fresh green grass from our side of the fence, one of the handsome white horses for which the Camargue is so famous, before arriving at the quiet little low-key tourist village of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, where we hoped to find a place to eat a late lunch. In this we were totally thwarted, as everything closes down at 3pm sharp, so we contented ourselves with admiring the impressive old church that had been built to be as much a place of refuge as a house of religion.

From there we drove back through the Petite Camargue in the late afternoon sunshine, towards the splendid, small, medieval walled town of Aigues-Mortes, hoping, in vain sadly, to see some of the powerful Camarguaise black bulls, bred for the corridas in both France and Spain. This drive included taking the ferry across Le Petit Rhone, on a most unusual ferry that is guided by a cable strung across the river upstream from the boat; a simple effective idea as long as the river is always flowing seawards. It wasn’t clear how they handled an incoming tide!

It was getting dark when we arrived at Aigues-Mortes and we restricted our stay to a walk along the main street, Grande Rue Jean-Jaurès, stopping for a much-needed coffee at Café Express on Place St-Louis, and then succumbing to the temptations at La Cure Gourmande, famous for its sugar cookies, a tasty end to an enjoyable day away from the big city.

With Nîmes being slightly less than an hour’s drive from Montpellier, we arranged to meet my step-sister Selina for lunch one day, and unfortunately, chose a very damp rainy day, prompting us to drive straight to Parking de l’Arènes in the centre of town. We did a bit of shopping before the appointed hour, successfully finding Berenice Nîmes, a milliner we had patronised a couple of years earlier and, naturally, we failed to come away empty-handed . . . either of us this time! We had a good lunch at Ciel de Nîmes, personally waited on by the proprietor, one of Selina’s neighbours; the restaurant is located on the rooftop of the fine new library on one side of Place de la Maison Carré, its ultra-modern architecture being an interesting juxtaposition with the wonderfully preserved Roman temple which gives the square its name. On the drive back to Montpellier we stopped off at Sommières, a medieval fortified village, that I had believed could be a good place to live. This time the grey weather made the place seem a little less desirable, and we contented ourselves watching a huge flock of starlings doing their dramatic flying sculptures, catching sight of a couple of rare coypus along the riverbank, and admiring the graceful passage of a small group of swans which included a black one, another comparative rarity.

We returned to Sommières for a second look a few days later, seeing the town under clear blue skies and bright sunshine. As we were crossing the pedestrian causeway across the river, Le Vidourle, a hot-air balloon arrived, seemingly low on gas as it skimmed the treetops seeking a safe place to land. Nice day as it was, the town still seemed rather gloomy, and somewhat limited in what it offered, so we crossed it off our list of nest sites!

Apart from these few sorties to the countryside, we easily filled our time in Montpellier, strolling around that lively, elegant city. Celine’s niece, Martinka, joined us for one weekend and we enjoyed her young company as we discovered more and more new places.

The neo-classic architecture of Antigone.

Antigone is a new neighbourhood built in the early 1980’s, mostly comprising low-income housing (proving that where there’s a socially conscious will, even the less well off in society can live in attractive surroundings) plus public facilities and local shops. Designed by the Spanish architect Ricardo Bofill, it is an extraordinary collection of “grand neo-classical structures, enlarging classical motifs such as pediments, entablatures and pilasters to a gigantic scale” [Wikipaedia], and yet complimenting the aging grandeur of much of the town centre.

More classical imagery at the entrance to Le Polygone shopping centre.

It is definitely worth taking a couple of hours to stroll around, ending up at the Polygone shopping centre.

Another morning we chose to join a guided tour around the Faculty of Medicin. As we were the only non-Francophones in the group, the French-speaking guide kindly assured us that he would be happy to describe in English anything that we didn’t understand; but when we tried him out on that a couple of times, his English was far more difficult to understand than his French and we reckoned we would do better to rely on our own translations.

The imposing front door of La Faculté de Médecine.

The main building is very impressive with a lot of history and the portrait gallery of past professors includes such worthies as Francois Rabelais. However, it was Le Musée d’Anatomie that was perhaps the most memorable part of the tour. Glass cabinets lining the walls of the long hall, displayed an extraordinary collection of bits of bodies that have been preserved as exhibits for the students to study, dating back to the days when surgery was still very much the domain of those known affectionately as “sawbones”.

Cases of body parts lined the walls of La Conservatoire d’Anatomie.

And nothing was left to the imagination. Veneral disease was rife among students in the nineteenth century and all those stricken were required to make a very realistic scale model of their affected parts for the educational benefit of their colleagues; thus one fairly large case contained well over sixty scarily detailed models of genitalia in various stages of the diseases, which must surely have frightened many a young man away from the joys of casual sexual encounters! However, the display that particularly interested me was a case of dissected knee joints, making me realise just what I was letting myself in for, having committed to bilateral knee replacement surgery upon our return to California.

Two other places well worthy of a visit in this historic city of learning and culture are the beautiful elegant Opera House and La Musee Farbre. The latter includes in its treasures, a fine collection of Dutch and Flemish masterpieces, as well as various French works of art. The museum was practically deserted apart from us and several security guards who seemed to pop up around every corner. We chatted to one, an Englishman in his sixties who seemed to have a somewhat obscure past; he told us that he liked the work there as there was so little violence in art galleries . . . compared to???! Attached to the museum is L’Hôtel de Cabrières-Sabatier d’Espeyran, a lavish nineteenth century mansion, that gives the visitor a good taste of what life was like for the upper classes in those days.

Preparations for the holiday season were well under way by the end of our stay. The Jardin du Champs de Mars was filled with the little huts that are so much a part of Christmas markets everywhere, “Les Hivernales” as they called it in Montpellier, and we spent a couple of evenings supping gluhwein and consuming hot sausages as we perused the many stalls displaying the usual collection of seasonal offerings. A twenty-foot high, brightly illuminated globe, and giant inflated clowns wandering around, added to the festive atmosphere for the delightfully cosmopolitan crowd of revellers of all ages and from all walks of life, that crowded the square. The city also had its own take on the Festival of Lights, Coeur de Ville en Lumières. A dozen or more of the more significant public buildings were used as the backdrop for a series of excellent audio-video presentations that combined musical scores, both modern rock and classical, with graphics that ingeniously used the architectural details, to tell different stories, some historical and some pure fantasy. Each presentation lasted five minutes or more and they were phased so that we had time to stroll from one to the other; it was very impressive.

And, it seemed, no sooner had we arrived than it was time to move on again. Kevin and Sheila were on their way home and we started our own preparations to hit the road again.

Mr Darcy relaxing with his stuffed animals.

Mr.Darcy had been a very easy feline to sit for; he seemed content in his life as a housebound cat, was clean and tidy, and showed no inclination to follow us out into the great outdoors. As long as we fed him regularly and emptied his litter box, his only slight sign of frustration was a tendency to hump his stuffed animals, which was probably more his daily equivalent of an early morning stretch for us mere humans. And I have to say that, with its large balcony and views over the nearby rooftops towards the rising sun, their compact apartment was actually a very easy place to live. Being so close to such a vibrant city centre, I came to understand what attracts people to live like that. However, it didn’t dissuade me from my need to once more feel the freedom of living life in a smaller community with views of sea or countryside, and I looked forward to our next destination, Calella de Palafrugell in the Costa Brava of Spain . . .

PS Writing this over a year later, I am very conscious that the photos do not always do justice to the subject matter. I have told my Facebook friends earlier about my frustrations at having had a catastrophe with our HDD holding our enormous collection of travel pictures. Luckily we recovered perhaps 80% of the files, but the random way the damage affected them has left me without some of our best images. So, my apologies!