Where Spain gets quite English

You can certainly have too much of a good thing. One of the benefits of moving to Spain, compared, say, to staying in England, is that you get a lot better weather. But you can even get too much of that.

Here in Valencia, July and August have a certain tendency towards excess, as warmth trends towards heat, and then on quite a bit further. We’re fine in the high twenties (that’s Celsius, American friends: it translates into Fahrenheit as pretty damn warm), the low to mid thirties start to get uncomfortable (that’s hot, guys) and the high thirties are frankly oppressive (that’s the same in Fahrenheit).

I can cope, having lived from my birth to my teens in Rome. But even I welcome a little relief. So I was happy to follow in the footsteps of many Valencians, up to the region between the cold Atlantic waters of the Bay of Biscay, and the Cantabrian mountains, a coastal strip known as ‘Green Spain’.

The contrast is striking. we drove through Aragon on the way, and that fine region is little short of parched in the summer. And Cantabria, that part of Green Spain where we ended up, is many things, but parched certainly isn’t one of them. I’m not going to describe the difference to you, I’ll just leave you to marvel at the photo.

Aragon, in the hinterland of Spain,
and Cantabria, on the north coast

Now, some might have felt that Cantabria also gave us a little too much of a good thing. A little too much in the way of English weather. There was sun, on the beach for instance, but there was also rain, up in the hills where we were staying, and on a couple of occasions, the weather even chose to throw some fog at us. 

That was admittedly at the top of a mountain pass, but even so, it was surprising for a Spanish summer. And it was curious that such a range of types of weather, sun or rain or fog, could appear within twenty-four hours of each other, and not more than 40 kilometres apart.

The sun, the water and the fog
The many faces of Cantabria, within 24 hours and 40 km

In addition, to be fair to Cantabria, the rain never lasted long. Continuous drizzle drives me crazy; a good downpour can be refreshing and leave the green deeper than before.

Danielle approaching the Guggenheim
in perfectly characteristic Bilbao weather

Last year we went to the west of the region, but this year we were at its eastern end, on the edge of the Basque county. That allowed us to visit the great city of Bilbao, which neither of us knew. Inevitably, we went to the Guggenheim Museum. I was impressed by several of the collections, in particular paintings of local scenes by local painters, but I have to admit that some of the material described by the museum authorities as ‘master works’ left me thinking that the building was a great deal more impressive than much of its content.

Sunrise by Adolfo Guiard, in the Guggenheim, Bilbao
A local painter I found great fun

We also enjoyed a Bilbao lunch of ‘pinchos’. These are tapas, little snacks, but unlike most tapas, they start with a slice of bread topped with various interesting things. Sometimes there’s a taco shell instead of the bread. Even, in one case, a layer of mashed potato. The key is that they’re small, so you eat several. In most of Spain, they’re dull, but the Basque country likes to do them well, and Bilbao was great.

Even greater, though, was Logroño where we stopped on the way home. This is the main city of the Rioja country, so as you’d expect there’s lots of wine everywhere. But the less well-known specialty of the place is their own selection of pinchos, and there’s a whole district around Laurel Street (in case you ever go looking for it) that’s full of restaurants serving them. 

The street of Pincho restaurants in Logroño

That means you can go on a ‘pincho crawl’, as opposed to a pub crawl, or specifically a ‘Rioja Wine crawl’, though the evidence around us suggested that plenty of people saw no reason to separate the two and were indulging in both. But we were driving so we stuck to the pinchos and enjoyed them very much.

Me enjoying pinchos in Logroño
in what turned out to be my all-weather hat

The other striking thing in Bilbao was the ‘hanging bridge’. This is nothing to do with a brutal form of punishment for crime, but a rather unusual way of getting people and even vehicles across a river, by a travelling platform hanging on long cables from an overhead gantry. Fun to see.

The puente colgante in Portugalete, near Bilbao

Of course, Bilbao’s in Green Spain too, so we got our shower of rain there. The hat I wear as protection from the sun in Valencia helped me against the rain on the north coast. I mentioned that to our wonderful hosts, Ainhoa and Aitzol, in the house where we stayed in Cantabria. They’re both Basque. He, Aitzol, commented that being rained on in Bilbao means that we’ve had an authentic experience of visiting the city. He added that this what the two of them specialise in: offering people from blazing Spain a chance to enjoy a ‘refrigeration holiday’.

It would be fairer to describe our holiday as refreshing rather than refrigerated. Ainhoa and Aitzol certainly helped make it all the better. So much so, in fact, that they deserve their own blog post. I’ll soon be returning to them and their wonderful ‘Casona del Valle de Soba’, where they put us up royally and fed us superbly. 

Watch this space.