San Sebastian

On Spanish Invasion Day we arrived at Donostia (San Sebastian), unaware of the protests that had been staged in various locations of the Basque Country, and the arrests of several members of the political arm of radical left-wing separatists ETA (hello, tourists)... to an idyllic seaside town where not much was going on, but in which for some reason it was nearly impossible to find a hotel room.

Starving and looking for a place we stumbled across another one of those happy culinary accidents, Juantxos (literally meaning "Johnny's"), a take away joint that specializes in the bocata with tortilla, a bagette stuffed with an omelette of whatever combination you want: traditional tortilla with potatoes, or whatever Spanish cured meat, fresh mushrooms, pimiento or asparragus. To drink, beer, wine or the local specialties: apple cider or kalimotxo (red wine & coke). The bartenders comunicate with the kitchen via what would seem a more sofisticated method than the traditional yelling, an tinny 70s intercom. After several attemps at getting an order through, the bartender gives up and says 'domo arigato' and other such random Japanese phrases. Reply from the kitchen: "Vale" (OK). Smoking inside is again totally fine, people walk in with dogs despite a no dogs sign on the door, everyone speaks in Basque except for us (and the Japanophile bartender) and we decide to make this our breakfast joint. The clientele in the morning included old men having a bocatas and wine at 8 am, construction workers, students, and office workers in suits, all locals. A bloody gem.

On Tuesday night things return to normal, every place in town is open and we venture into what until now has been the most memorable food experience in Spain (I think I speak for us both): the pintxo, I guess you can call them super tapas. The bars in town all try and outdo each other in coming up with the best possible combinations they can fit on a slice of bagette, piled on as many plates as can fit on the bar. You take your pick as in most places all pintxos cost the same, help yourself and be honest about how many you ate at the end of your stay when you settle the bill. The place to go, we decided after much experimentation, making and breaking of rules and consuming a large part of our budget, is Martinez on 31 Agosto street. The owner must have been a 2001 Space Odyssey fan as the ceiling is all curved white formica with sparse but bright white flouro lights, the bar a clean, wide slab of white marble packed with pintxos. Amelia's pick: the medallion of creamy bonito wrapped in salted cod and sprinkled with herbs and olive oil; my pick: the red smoked pimiento stuffed with cod coleslaw drizzled with lime and olive oil.

The town? Amazing. Made famous by queen Isabella who came to holiday there in the 19th Century, it's all grandiose colourful buildings with gargoyles, ornate streetlights, tree-lined boulevards and a great network of bike lanes...a bubble of cuteness popped when you see the bullet holes that pepper the town hall facade, the stickers of dissapeared unionists, and of course, the news: the latest topic to divide the Spanish. Should the radical left be allowed to resurrect their party? Are they showing signs of rejecting the violence of ETA? Is the government putting them in jail before they can answer questions?

Bilbao

So we arrived into Bilbao on the long weekend that was 12 Oct and felt the beggining of European autumn. Also, Saturday turned out to be the alternate national day in Bilbao, the celebration of the Virgin of Begoña.

At night the streets in the Casco Viejo, or old city, are packed with people hopping between pintxos bars. The pintxo is the Basque version of the tapa, and can be a true artform (more on this later). The other thing they do is sip small glasses of wine they call txiquitos (smalls) and eventually make a pilgrimage of sorts to the corner where Amelia and I were staying. We noticed a stone efigy of the virgin that looked more pagan than Christian and people came over to touch, then turned in a certain angle and crossed themselves. I asked a local what it was all about, she grabs Amelia and directs her to a tile on the floor pointing to the place everyone turned to. From that angle, between the laneways, you get a perfect view of a church way up in the hills.

Not only is the Virgin the patron saint of Bilbao, but she's also the patron saint of the txiquiteros, or the tavern owners, who came up with the idea of the small glass of wine so that people could handle their drink and share the love among the different pintxo bars, sampling little bits from place to place all night. You've got to love that way of looking at the world. Forget about becoming a colonial power, let's drink to the publican!

More still, every bar has its bunch of aficionados who form choirs, so you walk around town basically getting samples of choral ensembles on every block. Or, if you happen to be on the corner on Santa Maria Street, you get the chants from the choir of the Athletic de Bilbao Fútbol Club.

"Hispanidad" (parenthesis and rant)

At some point it was decided that Spain would celebrate the 12 October as national day. That way people could commemorate the arrival of Christopher Colombus to the Americas, and the beginning of this concept now widely known as "Hispanity". The date had before had been called "The Day of Discovery of the Americas", then abbreviated to "Day of the Race", then politically corrected to "Day of Hispanity".
It shares all the wrong things with for example Australia Day. They tell you it's the day they celebrate all the great things about being Spanish and the fact that they share this big love with 21 other countries that speak the same language.
What it really celebrates is the colonization of what are now 21 countries for 300 years and the gradual empoverishment of said territories after the theft of their natural resources; the extermination of indigenous language, memory and culture (priests in Mexico/Guatemala for example took the liberty of rewriting the Maya dreaming to make the creation of man seem a bit more like the bible); and the installation of endemic dictatorial bureaucracies we still have to this day in Latin America.
They call it the "meeting of two cultures". My arse. As if all the indigenous cultures of the Americas had been one big blob of indians, or the Spanish hadn't brought over any African slaves.
To give credit to your every day Spanish person, most people really don't care. A religious celebration from Aragon seems to have more relevance. Ask someone on the street what happens on the 12 October and they'll tell you it's the day of the Virgen del Pilar.
Just in case we did come across some form of nationalism, we headed north to the most fiercely independent region: Euskal Herria, or Basque Country, where 12 October really means nothing: only once in the history of the celebration has the Basque government sent a representative to the official national day celebrations in Madrid...

Córdoba

As I’ve said earlier, relations between Muslims and Christians in Spain have been like an unhappy marriage that went for about seven centuries. The most romantic, tourist friendly view of history tells us this time gave birth to the things that are quintessentially Spanish, and Catholics, Muslims, Jews and Gypsies managed to live in harmony. Currently it is widely understood that coexistence only happened for a brief period of time and never smooth.

Whoever was in power used their scholars to refute other religions and their soldiers to persecute their believers. Córdoba is a living example of this. We wandered around the laneways that like in so many other places in the South of Spain follow no logical planning, finding along the way little traces of buildings not wholly demolished from one era to another, recycled for the purposes of a new religion.

The mosque (or cathedral) of Cordoba is a stunning mish-mash of Islamic and Catholic symbols. Above arched doorways decorated with Arabic scriptures from the Koran are 17th century carvings of angels and saints. The private room where the Caliph would pray, all mosaics of the Koran were left untouched as the inside perimeter of the mosque became private chapels. The arches and pillars that support the flat, ornate ceiling of the mosque were also left untouched, bar the centre, where they became the support for a 17th century cathedral nave.

Why? When the Christians took over the city in the 1400s, they decided as was custom to demolish the mosque and build a cathedral on top of it, but the citizens of Córdoba threatened to riot if the plan went ahead and kill any builder who worked in it, so the new lords had to find a way to refurbish the place instead of destroying it. This is usually touted as example of how tolerant a society it was, but it doesn’t always add up. Every now and again, we were given grim reminders of what happened during the overlapping of religions and empires in Córdoba.

Walking down the street our hotel was at, we came across an abandoned building with an arched alleyway on the side, and on the front a plaque related Arab historian Ibn Hazn’s chronicle about how in that house one of the local defeated Christian lords was kept under arrest, while the severed heads of his seven sons were placed atop each arch as a warning to other Christians. The street we’re on is called Cabezas (Heads).

Amelia recommends Raymond Carr’s Spain: a History for some middle age mythbusting in Al-Andalus.

Granada

There’s something that happens to a place that houses one of the wonders of the world. I’m going to call it the Taj Mahal syndrome. The monument is so overwhelmingly beautiful that tourists from all over the world come around to see it, and destroy the town around it. Agra, the town that was there before the Taj Mahal has become a monumental shithole. People like me get to places like this cynical about the whole affair from the beginning, arriving with a ‘I’ve seen it all in pictures, but I’ve come all this way so why not’ attitude, and walk out completely slack-jawed, dumbstruck, and in love after taking a million photos. Now it’s happened to me at La Alhambra...

A poet once wrote there is no misfortune worse than being blind in Granada and he was right. Unfortunately I still have that niggling feeling that I went to a theme park. Even Federico García Lorca’s grave is a tourist attraction. I read a newspaper article about how Granada’s tourism board opposes the wish of a high profile judge to exhume the poet’s body and reopen the case of his still unsolved assassination by fascists in 1936. (There’s circumstantial evidence as to who it might have been, yet no one has ever been taken to trial). The family, who opposes the exhumation has reserved the right to decide whether they would prefer to have his remains cremated or reburied next to his father or mother if it eventually happens. But the reasons why the local government opposes also has some citizens of Granada livid; the site is a common grave for other republicans of the area who were killed in the horrible weeks around the coup de état that brought Franco to power. Lorca may be the most celebrated of the dead in the grave, but to say that if he’s not there the site has no value is quite offensive.

Guadix

During our brief stay in Guadix, we’re going to concentrate on the unhappy marriage that has been religious diversity in Spain.

As a tourist you go to various monuments and hear stories about how, as if by the clicking of fingers, the Catholics chased away the Romans and built a cathedral on top of their temple, then the Muslims came over and demolished that cathedral to make way for a mosque, and finally the mosque was destroyed to make way again for a catholic church. Same goes for various palaces and forts.

In the middle was a tide of poor people who really couldn’t do anything about the power and land struggles, yet needed somewhere safe to live. That old refugee chestnut in Guadix goes back to the 9th Century. The way that at various times persecuted Catholics, Muslims, Jews and Gypsies found a safe haven was to literally dig their houses into the hills as man-made caves.

Nowadays, the Cave Museum operator assures us, it’s quite a fashionable thing to do. The Barrio de las Cuevas, or Cave Suburb in Guadix has hotels, restaurants, bars, a church and souvenir shops all in the comfy settings of caves. Actually, it does work. Because the hills are mainly clay, it was quite easy to carve rooms into the hillsides and make them weather proof: a cave house maintains a stable temperature of about 18 C year round. And we paid to sleep in a cave? You bet ya.

What we ate: pretty much everything was a highlight, Calatrava’s free tapas – juicy, grilled lamb and potatoes, gherkin-stuffed olives, toasties with jamon and crushed red capsicum; and El Churrasco’s deer cooked in a cognac, mushroom, shallot and garlic sauce with fruits of the forest. The restaurant is owned and manned by outdoor enthusiast Rafael, who hangs heads of whatever he’s hunted throughout the years including two of his house specialties: wild boar and deer. He assures me that the former bodies of the trophies have all been hunted ‘in the region’ by himself and eaten at the restaurant, like the deer we just had on our plate. As Amelia has said, this country is no place for vegetarians.

The grim reality

We drove out of the mountains towards the sea, just to get a glimpse of the coast, and as we hadn’t read anything about the towns directly south of the Sierra in our guide books, we thought they may have been miles of unspoilt beaches free of British tourists.
What we found though was the answer to one of our constant questions on this trip. The Spanish like to eat so well but live in such an arid country, so where do they grow so much food? Answer: the coastline of Andalucia between La Rabita and Almeria, 70 odd kilometres of greenhouses. Is this the farming of the future...?



Click on image for bigger map. All the white squares are greenhouses. And if you want to read up on it, here is an article from the Guardian that goes back to 2005

Las Alpujarras

From Sevilla we jump on a train to Granada, sleep a night, pick up a car and drive straight out of town. The Alhambra will have to wait for a few days, as we make our way up the Sierra Nevada, the home of one of my family names, Serrano (literally meaning ‘from the mountains’).

It’s got to be one of the most impressive landscapes in the world: curvy climbs passing tiny towns that seem to grow from the sides of the mountains, built from mud bricks and whitewashed. It’s hard to know where one house starts and the other ends, and all roads have a gutter in the middle to channel the runoff from the melting snow of the peaks. All these places have a network of fountains that originate in natural springs somewhere up in the hills.

This is the Poqueira Gorge, a valley at one point populated by moors and now sparsely inhabited villages that fill up during summer by locals who left to work in the cities and during winter by skiers. As pretty much whole towns are on slopes, it’s pretty hard not to come by a room with a view. After lunch in the ultra-touristed Campaneira, where every house seems to have been replaced with a souvenir shop, we head up the hills to the quiet Bubión, which has an amazing view of the Valley all the way to the sea, and on a clear day, North Africa...

It would appear walking has been the mode of transport people have used here for centuries, as not only is there a network of drinking fountains, but also a network of walking paths, used to connect mainly abandoned cortijos, or shepherd’s huts built from stone, tucked into the slopes on terraces. We did the two-and-a-half hour trek from Bubion to Capilera among the ruins of rural life in the Sierra Nevada.

What we ate: Arroz cateto, or the mountain version of paella, with rabbit, chicken, green peppers and artichokes; choto, or goat kid (no older than 4 months) cooked in a peppery, herby gravy with patatas a lo pobre, poor man’s potatoes, steamed then in olive oil with onion, herbs and green peppers. Herb of preference: tomillo (we think that means thyme). What we drank: organic Crianza from Cadir, just down from the hills, and Alahmbra 1925 beer, brewed in Granada. All on the terrace of the tavern, only a few steps away from the bar filled with locals watching a Real Madrid v Sevilla match. Un partidazo (a superlative match): one all until Sevilla scored for a win in the 80th minute.

Sevilla

Part of the reason why I’m doing this trip is to find out what Latin America really inherited from Spain, apart from language, guitars and our surnames. The idea that because Latin colonial cities are all designed to a perfect grid, Spanish cities must be the same gets completely thrown out the window in Sevilla. It doesn’t seem sevillanos know what a straight road is - the centre of town is another maze of laneways that you must follow to certain combinations in order to reach a particular destination. If you get lost, there’s rarely any way of going to parallel/perpendicular roads to rejoin your original path.

The city has an incredible buzz about it. It’s hot, crowded, full of little tapas joints and flamenco tablaos. On weekends the city’s inhabitants come out in waves: old timers during the afternoon, young families with kids go out for dinner around eight or nine, and after eleven, the place becomes hostage to thousands of young people filling up tiny squares, as if there was a festival or public concert on, their chatter audible blocks and blocks away as others fill the streets on cars blaring out a mixture of flamenco and pop.

We meet up with Michaela and Jay (Amelia’s cousin and her partner) at a bar around one such youth-filled plaza to work out a plan of attack for the following days. Around 2.00 am we walk out to find the square still pumping, and a police van crawling slowly down a lane way. Three cops come out and start walking towards the crowd. As if by force of some repellent scent, they make the kids disperse leaving an empty square but for a carpet of empty bottles, plastic bags and take away food containers that make the aftermath of a Big Day Out look civilised.

The following morning we meet to explore the city that at one time was repository of the loot brought back from the Americas and is now home to the third largest cathedral in the world, the bones of Christopher Columbus, the Royal Residence, the Sevilla Football Club, bullfighting and flamenco.

In search for something that will feed my curiosity and maybe understand what bullfighting is about, we go to the Plaza de Toros museum, where we get the lowdown on who sits where depending on social status, how the game has evolved since the 17th century and what you’d expect to see every Sunday at the bullring. Basically six bulls are killed by alternating teams, one every 20 minutes, and the winner is decided by a guy who follows certain unclear rules of what good matadoring style should be. Sounds to me as boring and incomprehensible as cricket, except the main instrument of the game ends up as ox tail stew (hey, at least they eat it).

We cross the river Guadalquivir to wander up the suburb of Triana, named after Rodrigo de Triana, the guy who happened to be at the Crow’s Nest of a Spanish ship called Santa Maria that fateful morning of 12 October 1492 and became the first westerner to see what we now know as the West Indies.

That night, after a tip off from Michie and Jay’s hotelier, we head over to see some flamenco at the Carboneria, the premier and most authentic tablao perhaps in all of the country, and the most raw of them all. Out the back, in a garage like addition to the bar, are three musicians with no sound equipment whatsoever, playing to a crowd of about 200 people if not more, their music blending with the fans whirring overhead and the sounds of people getting beers at the bar.

What we see is mind blowing: Rocio de Carmen “La Turronera”, dancing and palms, Jordy Flores on guitar and Jose Moreno “El Cano” singing. No fancy dresses, fans, castanets or choreography (the guitarist for example wore a t-shirt, jeans and sneakers). Just the pure emotions of the performers poured out on stage, songs of forbidden loves, life with the gypsies and breakups.

If anything, this is what we learnt from the Spanish – this pure emotion put into music that now has resonances in everything from rancheras to boleros and tangos.

Salamanca and Segovia

We leave Madrid in a westward direction to Salamanca and Segovia, two fairytale walled towns, all castles and gothic cathedrals. Salamanca, well known for its University, one of the oldest in the world, still has traces of signs written in Latin to indicate classrooms. Segovia is another walled city with a castle that dates back to the 11th Century, but was almost burned down in a fire and was rebuilt around the 18th Century. After the royalty saw no use for it, they gave it to the military academy. Up the very top of the tower you can find graffiti made by fascist soldiers in the late 30s and early 40s. Another feature of the town is the aqueduct that dates back to Roman times. However, for us the most surprising thing about arriving in Segovia was bumping into Laura and Adrian, two friends from Melbourne...

What we ate: in Salamanca, carrilleros (pig’s cheek) with Ribera del Duero Crianza as part of the whole free whatever-you-want tapas attitude at Paca. In Segovia, the local specialty: cochinillo (suckling pig), literally a little leg of tender pork with crunchy crackling, no bones about the fact that this was a piglet - the leg comes on a plate, trotter and all.

Food, food, food

A few facts and figures on the amount of pigs slaughtered in this country, the rate of bowel and cholesterol related deaths, not to mention lung cancer, will be the subject of a future post.

This shouldn’t be taken as a disliking for the food, quite the contrary. First stop Madrid for a series of happy accidents in orders that would set the tone for a checklist before saying ponmelo.

Two chains I daresay compete with the international junk food outlets are El Paraíso del Jamón (Ham Paradise) and El Museo del Jamón (Ham Museum). A sign on the front door assures us we are allowed to smoke in Paradise despite the massive legs of ham that cover the walls from half height to ceiling. We proceed to order a sampler with íberico, cured ham from acorn fed pigs; morcilla and cecina, both blood pudding style meats, very smoky and strong; chorizo; and manchego cheese on top, a jug of sangría and a salad to bring back some sort of health to the order. We munch down with bread while locals stand at the bar for a caña (beer), montadito (mini roll) and cigarette. An old man plays a pokie machine and the TV broadcasts a live speech by the questionable yet popular Galician PP leader (Partido Popular, right wing).

A Bolivian lady comes up to trade us some jamón for olives as she had mistakenly ordered a ración, pretty much a bowl full. You’d think other Spanish speakers would have no trouble getting their orders right but that’s not the case – figuring out what size and exactly what bit of the pig/cow/fish you’re getting takes some time. Waiters are quite happy to ignore you while you figure it out and decide yeah I’ll go the pig’s cheek and sometimes leads to the happy accidents I was talking about.

At El Boñar de León, an al fresco diner on a grubby, graffiti-scrawled laneway in Malasaña we decide to try Madrid’s typical dish, cocido. The waiter explains you don’t get a starter as you do with any other option on the menu because the cocido has its own soup. The other half of the dish is a mixed meat plate that should have a bit of chicken, beef and pork on a bed of chickpeas and vegetables. What comes out is a pot full of a meaty broth with noodles, followed by a platter with a quarter of chicken, two big osso bucco medallions, a turkey neck, a chorizo, pork, two potatoes, three carrots, and cabbage all on a bed of chickpeas. It was great, but of course, no human can eat so much.

When the waiter takes away the three quarters of the dish we were unable to eat, the owner goes on to describe their Monday special – the cocido is bigger(!) and if you manage to eat it all they give you a ticket to the Canary Islands. Has anyone managed to do it? They try, they try, he says.

The humble Spanish cafe/diner is a beautiful thing though. Every place has a bar where stools are optional, and there’s usually two middle-aged men behind the counter, churning out coffees while they yell out your order to the anonymous chef that makes churros with equal ease and speed as toasties, bocadillos (baguettes) and burgers. Some pre-made sandwiches, cakes or tapas are already there for you to choose from, and on one side of the bar, an ever-present feature: a leg of jamón on a wooden bracket, to be hand-sliced on request.

An absolute standout was the conejo guisado (stewed rabbit) from a hole-in-the-wall, plastic –tablecloth, poker-machine-on-the-corner lunch place around the corner from the Reina Sofía Museum. Melt in your mouth bunny, slow cooked in a thick garlic pepper sauce washed down with a couple of beers.

The most recognisable of Spanish literary characters is a rich landowner who, obsessed by tales of knights and crusaders, sold all his properties bit by bit for books. When he had nothing left, he set out riding on an old skinny horse with a crass, foul mouthed servant as his aid, looking for a dame who turns out to be a fat ugly lady. Instead of calling him a nut, the author of the book called him ingenioso, ingenious. Fast forward to present day Madrid to find major statues of an imagined Quijote y Sancho, places named Dulcinea, streets named Cervantes. It’s the symbol of ideals so big you’d be willing to give everything to attain them, and no cause too small.

Walking around the network of laneways that make up the centre of Madrid you find snippets of how these ideals have evolved. People are quite happy to wear their colours: stickers for ‘freedom to the socialist unionists’ on garage doors; t-shirts that say ‘torture is not art or culture’ (a reference to bullfighting); the old man who picks a different site every day of the week to hold a placard denouncing major supermarket chains as terrorists; a mob of punks and radicals that meet every Sunday to sell everything from pins and stickers by obscure anti-neo-nazi groups to books on radical politics.

I walk into a second hand bookshop to find a mess of bookshelves covering mainly history and specializing in the Civil War, on one wall an old resistance poster. The owner of the shop is happy to help me browse for what she thinks will be a book that gives a balanced account of the war. She explains there are books that lean to either the fascist or the socialist views of history, and says she ‘has to’ stock both, with a tone of ‘I wouldn’t give the fascists an inch of shelf space but that’s modern life’. I walk out with a collection of chronicles by an Argentine journalist who joined the international (resistance) brigades. The owner wasn’t exactly sure it would be the most balanced account of the war, but she didn’t tell me to not buy it either...

Go back further to Goya’s 19th century. The Spanish were under occupation by Napoleon’s forces until 1812 – the year they won independence from the French (funny that a nation that still had colonies had to fight for independence!). After the victory, the lord of Madrid invited artists to portray heroic moments of the uprising. Goya comes up with two works that have been considered among his masterpieces since then: 2 de mayo and 3 de mayo de 1812, in the 3 de mayo the uprising of the people against the Moroccan soldiers the French had hired seems like a mob assault, hardly any traces of heroism there. Goya at this stage was by this time increasingly cynical about the nature of war, yet the lords of Madrid saw the painting for what it was, and hung it on their walls until eventually it was moved to the Prado Museum.

A very different story played out for the works that now make up the Civil War Art pavilion in the Reina Sofia Museum, an impressive collection of war photography, resistance posters, fascist propaganda and the darling of the Museum, Picasso’s Guernica.

Almost two hundred years later revellers congregate around Plaza 2 de mayo in the Malasaña barrio well into the small hours. When police try and get people to circulate, a riot breaks out that goes on for two days. From a Saturday in that district I can tell why: the streets are flooded with people until early Sunday morning, yet nobody complains, residents just soundproof their houses. You wouldn’t dream of it inner city Melbourne.

First impressions of Spain from three days in Madrid: a country that respects and even admires someone who fights for a cause; despite that, a nation that was quite comfortable with crushing their opponents at whatever cost, be it the French, the Indians in the colonies, or the socialist republicans; a place that likes to live on the edge between party and riot. This is where Amelia and I will be for the next month, please follow us.