Latest

2025-05-08

Week 226: Journey to the Basque Country

I’m writing late this week because we’ve been on holiday by train to Bordeaux, Donostia (aka San Sebastián) and Bilbao.

Our itinerary for the week (organised by Byway) was:

• Tuesday
  • Train (Eurostar) from London to Paris Gare du Nord
  • Train (TGV inOui) from Paris Montparnasse to Bordeaux
• Thursday
  • Train (SNCF Voyageurs) to Hendaye on the French/Spanish border
  • Train (Euskotren) to Donostia
  • Bus to Bilbao
• Sunday
  • Bus back to Donostia

A journey of a thousand miles always starts with getting up at stupid o’clock. Tuesday was such a case, with an unreasonably early train plus the additional time required for the Eurostar border theatrics. Having to get up early with significant consequences to not doing so meant that I got to spend the entire night in a fitful state between awake and slightly less awake.

The inOui trains are very pleasant. It’s an airline-style service with mandatory bookings and limited places. On the upside, if you have booked, you’re guaranteed a comfortable seat, power, space for baggage, and a calm environment on board. The seats recline, and I profited from a restorative nap as we sped south at speeds a British rail traveller cannot comprehend.

Bordeaux is much more varied and counter-cultural than I’d have expected from a place that’s a UNESCO world heritage site for its 18th century architecture. It also benefits from an extensive and regular tram network.

We arrived a little after four o’clock to blazing sun and what felt like midday. Our first stop after dropping off our luggage at the hotel was Café Pompier, an anarchistic and slightly chaotic café in an old fire station. We had a beer in a shady courtyard, and that was the point at which I felt I was actually on holiday.

We didn’t visit:

• Musée d’Aquitaine: closed for redevelopment.
• Musée National des Douanes): also closed for redevelopment.

We did visit:

• Capc Musée d’Art Contemporain: interesting and varied installations and a Keith Haring mural behind a window in the lift.
• Cité du Vin wine museum: underwhelming. Too much technology made it work to walk around – you had to scan every exhibit and listen – and I was repelled by a couple of obvious generative AI slop images. The view from the top was good, however, as was the included glass of wine (I had a sparkling local rosé).
• The cathedral: free, and unusually light and airy inside.
• The antiques market in the Esplanade de Quinconces.

Food and drink:

• Café Pompier: the aforementioned anarchic and chaotic café.
• Monkey Mood: excellent vegan restaurant with a changing theme. It was Indonesian when we visited.
• Dis Leur: vegan bistrot, mostly locally sourced. All delicious, especially the “cheese” board from Maison Boucand in Brittany.

Bilbao, Donostia, and Bordeaux are all west of London but both countries are an hour ahead, due to slightly different but Nazi-related historical reasons. It’s not just that people eat late in Spain: their time zone is an hour later than it used to be in the 1930s. However, I’m all in favour. More of the daylight falls in the evening when it’s actually useful. (And this is why England should move to UTC+2 all year round, and stop wasting daylight on boring things like work.)

We had to get up early again on Thursday to catch the 07:44 train to Hendaye and the Spanish border. Apart from a brief moment of panic when the lights went out, they announced a “technical issue”, and we were stopped at the station for five minutes (through which L— napped unaware), we arrived close enough to on time to make no difference.

We took the Euskotren local train service over the border from Hendaye to Donostia, where I failed to exit the station because I didn’t notice that the orientation of the ticket mattered. The person at the station came over, rolled his eyes, pointed at the ticket, and said, in French, « la flèche » (“the arrow”), correctly identifying me as an ignorant foreigner, albeit the wrong kind of foreigner. In my defence, the side of the ticket that is printed with a colourful design looks like it should be the top.

We watched a May Day worker’s march in Donostia as we ate lunch while waiting for the bus to Bilbao.

The bus passed through some spectacular mountain scenery on some of the smoothest roads I’ve ever experienced (certainly much better than the heavily rutted cart tracks I’m accustomed to in England).

I loved Bilbao. It’s easy to walk around. There’s a lot to see and do. It feels relaxed and politically radical: I saw posters and slogans everywhere promoting workers’ rights and Palestinian liberation. (I suspect that the memory of the bombing of Gernika makes Israel’s rain of death from above on Gaza particularly poignant.) Over and over again I saw the phrases Palestina askatu! (“Free Palestine!”) and Israel genozidari boikota! (you can guess that one) written on posters, walls, and hoardings.

We arrived on the day of a big football match (Athletic Bilbao vs Manchester United) and found the old town rather lively. It seemed that every bar had cheerful and good-tempered local supporters in their red and white striped kit spilling out into the street. The Man U supporters must have been sequestered somewhere else.

However, there are plenty of bars in the city, even just in and around the old town, and we easily found somewhere for a quieter drink.

Biscayan weather is unpredictable. Some days started cold and rainy only to turn into roasting heat later, and leave me regretting having left my sunglasses at the hotel.

We saw:

• San Antón church and the cathedral: moderately interesting
• Azkuna Zentroa: worth a peek inside for the interior designed by Philippe Starck.
• Fine Arts Museum: currently just one wing while the rest is being redeveloped, but free as a consequence, and they’ve packed in a lot.
• Guggenheim Bilbao: inevitably. Very manageable. The permanent collection is fairly small, and there’s plenty of space to walk around.
• Funicular up to Artxanda: not much to do up there, but the view is good.
• Museum of the Sea in Santurtzi: don’t bother, but that meant we were only a short walk from …
• Puente Colgante transporter bridge between Portugalete and Getxo. It’s worth paying to go up and walk across the top.

We ate and drank:

• Coffee and lunch at Bølge and Dupla.
• Craft beer (including a local marijuana-flavoured NEIPA) and a preternaturally delicious hummus at Bihotz.
• More local craft beer at Craft Tabeerna.
• Tasty and surprisingly cheap vegan pintxos at La Piparra where the waiter turned out to be Japanese, making it very easy to communicate.
• A mountain of food at “antispeciesist tavern” Veggira.
• A five-course vegan menu at Dando la Brasa.

Bilbao is definitely on the list of places to consider moving to if the UK falls completely to fascism.

On Sunday, we took a bus to Donostia, but I’ll write about the rest of our trip next week.

Incidentally, you can take a Euskotren rail service between Bilbao and Donostia, but it’s a circuitous stopping train that takes 2½ hours, whereas the bus is about half that.

I remembered to pack my camera only to find that I hadn’t actually done so. When we got home, I unpacked my rucksack, and found my camera in there after all, hidden safely in an interior pocket. D’oh.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how well I can get by in Spanish. I’ve never formally learned it, but I’m helped by the similarities to French and by how easy it is to pick up as a spoken language. I don’t know any Basque, and a lot of people know English, but there were a few places where they didn’t, where being able to communicate in Spanish was helpful.

I still don’t know much Basque but I do know a bit more than I did. I arrived knowing only that it’s a language isolate with an ergative-absolutive case alignment. After seeing it everywhere, I was able to infer some more grammar, and determine some of the cases and their suffix markers and a bit of the word order. I’d love to learn more.

European Coffee Trip never let me down. I can’t remember who recommended it to me, but thank you, whoever you were. In every city I found excellent coffee, often with food to match.