Bayonne, where tall half-timbered buildings reflect their greens and reds in the Nive I spent my last Basque days in Bayonne, where tall half-timbered buildings reflect their greens and reds in the Nive and Adour rivers. The riverside has a Middle Ages feel about it. It’s easy to imagine those same narrow buildings gazing down at the water traffic that made the city such an important commercial...
Inspecting bikinis on the Grande Plage Biarritz was once synonymous with glamour. Not just your run-of-the-mill glamour, either, but royal glamour. It started in 1855, when Napoleon III’s wife Eugenie built a palace on the beach. Empress Eugenie was born in the Spanish city of Granada, and her husband wanted her to have a home close to the border of her old country so she wouldn’t...
French Basque country Two sun soaked days of freedom on the Côte d’Argent, and then we shifted our base to the riverside town of Bayonne for a taste of French Basque country. It began with a drive through the foothills of the Pyrenees, where small villages locked architecture into a cultural time capsule and grew the staple foods of French Basque cuisine. Espelette shutters painted pepper red...
Surf’s up on the Silver Coast Winding mountain roads overburdened with speed cameras and toll booths led us over the edge of the Pyrenees and into France, where we’d take a brief detour from Basque country to swim on sparsely populated beaches up the coast. The geography flattened into an unremitting expanse of pine forests sheltered by massive sand dunes, and beyond them, beaches that...
San Sebastian’s picture postcard beach The Spanish village of San Sebastian makes an appearance in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, the brilliant first novel that would propel the expat writer and his sparse, direct style to international fame, and eventually to remaking American literature. It tells the story of a group of American and British expats who travel from Paris to Pamplona...
The streets of Santillana del Mar On my second day in Basque country, I left Basque country — but only briefly. We were heading to France in a few days, and I wanted to see more of northern Spain before wandering Basque villages on the other side of the border. We set course for Santillana del Mar, a beautifully preserved medieval village of cobbled streets and tanned stone walls lined with noble...
Bilbao, in the heart of Spain’s Basque country. I took a short trip to Basque Country to mark the end of Berlin summer with a week of overindulgence in what’s been called the foodie capital of Europe. The Basque people claim to be the oldest group to inhabit the European peninsula. No one knows exactly where they came from, but their presence in the region straddling the northern border of...
I drove back to the barbershop in Zejtun a month after we left the village. The door rattled aside on its warped metal track. The chihuahua behind the counter barked and glared. An old lady reclined in a chair like the sheeted dead. I smiled and said hello to the receptionist, and she smiled too. But when the barber turned to look at me, he staggered back a step and froze. The smile...
I noticed the old lady across the street watching me all summer when I slipped outside at 2am to put out the trash before bed. There would be a movement behind the slats of lit shutters and the window would open very slowly. It happened more often when the summer heat was at its worst. Sometimes a full moon shone down on our alley, and I would stop for a moment to look at it because I...
Dust crusted summer absent of rain By the end of summer in an island without rain, the roads were crusted with a carapace of filth. Trees were burned brown. What grass there was had withered to straw. Only the prickly pear and olives retained a pale green. Old ladies polished their front doors at dawn with buckets and rags, to no avail. The island thirsted for cleansing rain, as...
Author of Vagabond Dreams: Road Wisdom from Central America. Host of Personal Landscapes podcast. Editor-at-Large (Europe) for Canada's Outpost magazine. Writer at The Shift. Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.