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.
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Soria was a sunny and contented little place. A regional capital that didn’t act like one. It has the population of a small town and the countenance to go with it. As was so often the case in Spain, as soon as you left the big few cities - Madrid, Barcelona, Malaga, Valencia, Bilbao, Sevilla - everything sort of fell away and collapsed gracefully into a world of provinciality.
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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.
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