…the now insignificant village of Palos de la Frontera. It was form this port that Columbus sailed on Aug. 3rd, 1492, on his voyage of discovery with this three small vessels, the Santa Maria, the Pinta, and the Niña. - Baedecker;s Spain and Portugal, 1901
Read moreThrough the Ham Towns...
It was a hot, cloudy sky that covered the world south of Badajoz as we peeled southwards. These were roads less travelled, far flung dusty stretches of tarmac than ran parallel to Portugal. Simple countryside that recalled the Serengeti and which produced manifold conquistadores. Did they simply want to get out?
Read moreThe Road to Badajoz...
There were always corners of Spain, far-flung places with historical and political significance, that you never seemed to quite get to. Badajoz was one of those places. A provincial capital of 150,000 people, a legendary border town near Portugal where battles and skirmishes raged between French, Spaniards, Portuguese and the British, and a city that I was always told wasn’t worth visiting. So more my desire to go then. With me it was never a direct route. In this country gems were always scattered along any route.
Read moreMunching around Mallorca!!
Mallorca recalled to me a paradise island perhaps ruined by tourism. My thoughts turned to places like Magaluf; a Benidorm-like hive of young Brits obliterated on cheap alcohol, scabby beaches with crystal clear waters and high rise apartments and hotels. An island then where the national drink was surely cold jugs of fake sangria and where everybody ate defrosted paella and had churros for dessert. The capital, Palma, came as quite a surprise.
Read moreNortheast Snapshots #6
La Rioja is almost more of a viticultural concept, an alcoholic sliver of history, than simply a mere region; the smallest of Spain’s 17. Much like Bordeaux, Napa Valley, Chianti, the word Rioja precedes the place itself and instead implants in the mind an idea of wine, a clear image of bottles of red, usually Tempranillo. But then the images fades and we are once again just left with the words La and Rioja.
Read moreNortheast Snapshots #5
The Yesa Lake shines shines a bright unworldly cyan under a cerulean sky. The waters flirt with turquoise and the banks are dry and bone-chalk. Fields of furry yellow reeds peel back from the shore to rolling green hills. This was a place of dead towns and broken walls sitting juxtaposed with intense, pastoral beauty.
Read moreNortheast Snapshots #4
73km from San Sebastián - 52km from Vitoria - 64km from Bilbao.
Oñati, a Basque Toledo, or so it was described, is the monumental ancient heart that beats at the centre of the País Vasco. A diminutive town of little over 11,000 inhabitants, the ‘place of many hills’ is clothed in honey-stone and ecclesiastical heritage. You can cross the town in only 15mins but it feels like a slice of grandiose Salamanca has been stolen from Castile and deposited, hidden and secret, in a cleft of nature surrounded on all sides by green peaks.
Read moreHow to be Spanish - a response...
On the 21st January a Times Travel section journalist called Christ Haslam wrote a piece called ‘How to be Spanish’ for a Spain Special segment in the newspaper. I think I understand what he thought he was getting at. I (hope) it was supposed to be an overly exaggerated piece playing on stereotypes and dripping with supercilious irony.
Unfortunately it was not written well enough, or obvious enough, for this to come across. Other elements were simply wrong or lazy and the whole piece lacked a nuance of either knowledge or endearment that would have helped the article come across as tongue in cheek as opposed to a little mean and haughty.
Read moreNortheast Snapshots #3
On a sunny morning, warmer than it should be in a place so green and wet, Bilbao is magnificent. Curling out around the prim and taught little cathedral, no higher than the three-story apartment buildings, the old town bustles with weekenders. Unlike the homogenous white-washed villages of the southern end of the country, the northern regions adopt individuality. Each building, stuck to the one before it and clinging to the one after it, has its own design and colour scheme. Covered balconies called galerias stick out in reds, blacks, maroons, sapphire blues, counter-coloured against pastel walls; peaches, pinks, vermillion, burnt honey.
Read moreNortheast Snapshots #1
Santander - Madrid
There is a lonely strip of road that takes the visitor who has arrived by the overnight ferry from England to that elegant old port of Santander onto Madrid. Logic would say take the motorway; but then logic has never much cared for the beauty or pleasure of the slow road.
Read moreCaves and Wine
The gastronomic throngs and beatings of the Spanish Christmas were long gone, but my body had yet to shuffle off its mortal coil of fat. It was yearning to be lighter, breathe more easily when exercising and give my liver a few days off. However, my addiction to restrained hedonism and well-thought out scholarly gluttony meant never saying ‘no’ to more eating, more drinking, and more travelling. So, along with fellow face-stuffers Joy and Debbie, a car was hired and we headed deep into the southeastern lands of La Mancha; to the province of Albacete.
Read moreEast From Madrid #4: War and Wine
The last morning started with a trip I had longed to make since my days at university. The old ruined village of Belchite; victim of the Civil War.
Read moreEast From Madrid #3: Castles from the Sea
The sea would remain our companion for the morning. The big aquamarine slab of glitter that was Valencia’s languid coast. The heat, palpable and clingy, met with the breeze on the hill at the first stop of interest through Valencia’s ugly northern outskirts. The monastery of El Puig - one of the region’s great houses - sat, bursting out of the titular village around it. A rosy pink crenellated slab of old stones surrounded by boxy hodgepodge houses that didn’t hint at luxury. Then rice fields. Then the line of holidays high rises and then the sea.
Read moreEast From Madrid #2: Pious Rice Fields
Summer had finally had finally rid itself of the long trousers and jackets and had hauled itself over the Valencian Community; Spain’s eighth largest region. The air had taken on that spongy tangibility only really present in celestially warmed coastal zones; and the decision was taken to finally drive roofless. Exuberance at its finest.
Read moreTapeo: a tapas crawl
Restaurant. A place of restoratives. We can thank the French for that word, for that establishment, that most common way of eating. Go, find a place, be seated and take the menu, flick through with the respective groans of thought, alight on whichever starters and mains you’d like, as well as a peep at the wine list, and order.
Read moreEscaping Madrid Up and Down
The need to escape a place and be alone is often tempered and countered by the desire to get away with friends and surround oneself with jokes and banter. The luck of life in Madrid is that both addictions are easy to fix.
Read moreSevilla: the Moorish picture book
The great Sevilla. Byron said it was ‘famous for oranges and women.’ V.S. Pritchett in his lovely book ‘The Spanish Temper’ claimed that ‘Seville is a city of shadows which tunnel under a dense foliage that is dead still, and pleasure seems to walk with one like a person’. That great travel poet Jan Morris spoke of the ‘dazzle of Seville’. It is not a city in need of writings. Less a hidden treasure like medieval Caceres or handsome and green Oviedo, and more a celebrated star of the south.
Read moreThe Expat's Home
“The World. That place you call home.”
So said the BBC advert that coolly asked the viewer to learn more about their world. But it was right. The world was the place that I called home. Of course my real home is my town. The small unimpressive town of Maidenhead that slinks off the River Thames. The house, my house, almost unchanged, for 28 years. Berkshire, my green county, stuffed with small villages, grand houses and fields and fields and fields. That is the home of my history. But maybe, Madrid is my home, or Moscow, or, as purred by the BBC, the World…
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