25th September - From Mainz to Getaria

We're leaving home today at a reasonably comfortable hour – 7.30am, rather than 3.30am for last year's trip to the Azores … Also we dropped off our suitcases at the airport yesterday afternoon on our way to the dancing in Frankfurt, so we're taking the S-Bahn to the airport today with only our hand luggage to haul around. Bliss! There are apparently some delays in the train system but we manage to catch a late S-Bahn in Mainz central station and reach the airport at 8.35am or so, which is playing it very safe for an 11.10am flight, but that's how we roll … Security is a breeze, and having trekked through half the terminal to the A24 gate and settled down for breakfast, we find that our flight has been moved to gate A1, so we need to go all the way back and then some in the opposite direction to get to where our aircraft will be.

The flight to Bilbao is fully booked (we wonder what all these people want there), but we manage to get away almost on time – apparently someone didn't show up, and they had to find and unload their suitcase – for a mostly uneventful 2-hour flight to Bilbao. Lufthansa economy class in 2024 means a small piece of chocolate and an equally small bottle of water; if you want anything more you get to order it from the optional in-flight menu (only credit cards are accepted). Alas for the heady days where you could get an orange juice or tiny can of Coke plus a cup of coffee or tea to wash down your cheese sandwich! The only moment of excitement comes when on the final approach to the runway in Bilbao the aircraft, with a sudden roar of the engines, speeds up and gains altitude. The pilot tells us later that they had to go around because the plane had given them a wind-shear warning and regulations require them to break off the landing if this happens. No matter; they try again and get us safely to the ground a few minutes later. At the baggage reclaim, Marie's suitcase appears almost instantly and Anselm's only ten suspenseful minutes later (it's not as if we checked these in practically simultaneously), and then we try to locate the courtesy bus from our car rental company; after a few more moments full of anxiety this turns up, too, and a little later we have the keys, or rather, non-key remote control, for our rental car for the next two weeks, a nice, clean, almost brand-new Toyota Yaris. When Anselm pulls out of the parking bay he is at first surprised about the complete lack of combustion-engine noise until he realises that this car is obviously a hybrid which starts rolling on battery power! Never having driven a hybrid car before, this will be an interesting (but educational) challenge. The fact that this car has an instrument panel that would not look out of place on the Starship Enterprise should tell us something, too – Anselm has no idea what half the buttons, levers, and gauges are good for, and of course, like all rental cars this one does not come with the owner's manual.

We spend the next hour or so navigating the various roads and highways around Bilbao and east towards Donostia-San Sebastián (including dealing with the extortionate tolls the Spanish charge for the use of their motorways) until we reach our hotel, the San Prudentzio in the eponymous hamlet in the hills above the small coastal town of Getaria. In our (very nice) room overlooking the coastal mountains towards the east we collapse on the bed for a well-deserved rest.

Some time later, feeling suitably refreshed, we decide to explore the town of Getaria. It's a fairly short drive and we manage to park the car near the harbour, from where it is only a few steps to the old part of the town. Getaria's most famous son is Juan Sebastián Elcano, the first circumnavigator of the world – he was on Ferdinand Magellan's expedition in 1519–1522, and (Magellan having managed to get himself killed in the Philippines) returned to Spain as the captain of the Victoria, the only one of originally five ships making up the expedition – a voyage of around 70,000 kilometres. Apart from Elcano, the expedition included 34 other Basque nationals, nine of which started out with him on the Concepción, another one of Magellan's five ships. The Getarians are justifiably proud of their local hero, to a point where they have dedicated three different monuments to him (two of which are shown in today's pictures below). Getaria's second-most famous son, incidentally, is Cristobal Balenciaga, the fashion designer, and Getaria has a museum dedicated to his creations (which we don't visit).

After a stroll through the old town, including a visit to a small supermarket for some necessities, we end up in the Maruka Gastro restaurant for dinner. At 7.30pm it's still fairly early (this being Spain), and we manage to snag a table for two which we can use until 9pm. We have little casseroles – one with chorizo sausage and melted cheese, and another one with pork and red onions in a spicy sauce. These apparently Mexican-inspired dishes come with little tortillas and are very tasty indeed. We do manage to finish our food in time and return to the hotel to share a bottle of the local txakolí white wine which we bought earlier, and to retire early after a somewhat tiring day.

26th September - Fishes and Pintxos in Donostia-San Sebastián

The weather this morning is fairly terrible – sheets of rain make the mountains in the distance virtually invisible. It's supposed to get better in the afternoon, so we decide – after a leisurely breakfast – to visit the city of Donostia-San Sebastián, which offers various indoor attractions as well as things to do outside.

“San Sebastián” is the Spanish name and “Donostia” the Basque one, so the place is now called “Donostia-San Sebastián” to annoy everyone equally. We'll be calling it “DSS” from now on to save wear and tear on the computer keyboard. It's a little less than an hour from San Prudentzio on the main road which avoids the expensive but faster autopista, and a little more if, like Anselm, you get confused by the very intricate system of freeways, overpasses and exits around DSS and need to go around twice in order to arrive where you want to go. Eventually we do manage to end up near the aquarium, in an official paid-for parking space, and that leaves us some hours to explore. (The pay-and-display machines here can be a bit tricky; the one we're dealing with greets you in Basque and if you're lucky and the screen isn't too wet from the rain, you can find a touch-screen button labelled “Castellan” that if you press it several times in a row will eventually switch everything to English. On the upside, it is usually no problem to pay “contactless” with a credit card rather than having to rummage around in our collective wallets for the correct coins.)

The aquarium – regular readers of these pages will know that we're suckers for aquariums – doubles up as a museum of the shipping/fishing/whaling industry around DSS, which makes us wonder what the Basque Maritime Museum next door has which the aquarium hasn't. (We don't really have time for both, so won't be finding out.) The aquarium certainly does have an interesting collection of stuff ranging from fish hooks in all shapes and sizes to whaling paraphernalia to pirates' weaponry to a collection of jerseys of the winning teams in the annual DSS trainera rowing-boat competition held in the Bahia de la Concha outside the aquarium. Oh, and of course, fish – there is a ginormous tank in the middle which holds an impressive collection of aquatic animals including two large sand tiger sharks (apparently the ones which tolerate captivity best). We remember from our visit to the oceanarium in Lisbon that the secret behind the sharks not eating everything else in the tank is to keep them well-fed to begin with so they don't get ideas. And of course there are other smaller tanks with various types of fish and other aquatic critters and – perhaps most remarkably – an “auditorium” which looks exactly like a cinema except that where there would otherwise be the projection screen there is a huge fish tank instead. (We forgive ourselves for wondering whether this is just a very-high-resolution version of a Windows screen saver; these fish are apparently genuine. We also wonder that if there is a lecture on sharks they clear out all the other fish to make room and ensure none of them are eaten.) Watching the fish is very entertaining and certainly beats some of the movies we've seen.

After the aquarium we have some time left to investigate the old town of DSS with its lively assortments of little shops and pintxo bars. A pintxo (pronounced “pin-tsho”, from the Spanish word for “spike”) is basically something interesting and tasty on (usually) a small piece of bread, held together by a toothpick (hence “spike”). Pintxos are related to tapas, and pintxo bars have a huge array of different ones in a glass display on the counter, from which you can pick and choose. The usual procedure is to go from one pintxo bar to the next and have a pintxo or two and a (small) glass of beer or wine in each; we appreciate that this is very social and entertaining, but we're there for a quick lunch and therefore confine ourselves to just one pintxo place and two of the yummy goodies each for the two of us. When we step out of the pintxo bar again, the floodgates open and it is raining cats and dogs for a few minutes. We try to keep dry in a nearby doorway and afterwards make our way back to the car to arrive exactly the minute the parking permit runs out (not that it looks as if anyone would check anytime soon, but it's nice to be on the right side of the law).

Our next destination is Monte Igueldo, on the far side of the Bahia de la Concha, which is supposed to offer a spectacular view of the bay and the city. It proves to be surprisingly pesky to reach – following the satnav directions leaves us stranded in front of a huge metal fence which blocks the road (unless you're a pedestrian and can walk around). We try a different approach and finally make it to a toll barrier which claims it is €2.50 per person to continue but does not seem to offer an obvious way to pay. Finally after a few moments a door opens in the nearby shed and a guy emerges with a wallet and a credit-card reading machine in order to collect our €5, after which we get to proceed to the parking lot near the top of the hill.

The actual top of the hill is taken up by an amusement park offering a wide variety of entertaining amenities including a roller coaster, various merry-go-rounds, a “mystery river” which appears to be some sort of automated canoe ride, and a “penguins vs. polar bears“ ice-hockey game, virtually all of which seem to be closed for the season. We still get to walk around and enjoy the views, which are indeed spectacular. The one thing that appears to be open is the restaurant, which offers “pintxos with a view”; we don't mind the tasty morsels but we just had some and aren't keen on (probably) paying double because of the view, so the place gets no business from us.

On the way home we experience something of an odyssey searching for a proper supermarket – we wonder where all these Basques get their food because there seem to be no big supermarkets anywhere at all. Eventually we end up in Zumaia, where we spotted a supermarket but there are apparently no parking spaces around which are allowed for people who are not residentes. In the end, Anselm stays with the car just in case while Marie dashes into the supermarket to pick up bread, cheese, turkey breast slices, and a bottle of wine for dinner at the hotel (which very kindly features a communal area with a microwave, a fridge stocked with various – payable – goodies, and cutlery and crockery for use by the guests; this is apparently in atonement for the absence of the restaurant which our guidebook mentions but which seems to be no longer in operation). After that it's back home to put our feet up! The wine tonight actually turns out to be sidra, the local variety of apple cider, which is also very nice, even if you don't pour it in the traditional manner (from a great height, to aerate it; we decline to have a go out of deference to the cleaning staff).

27th September – St. Ignatius and the cavemen

Today's weather is similar to yesterday's (possibly a bit friendlier). We're driving south to the town of Azpeitia, whose suburb, Loiola (with an “i”), is the birthplace of St. Ignatius of Loyola (with a “y”), the founder of the Jesuit order. The house he was born in is still there, albeit surrounded by a huge church and assorted outbuildings.

St. Ignatius was born Íñigo López de Oñaz y Loyola in 1491, as the thirteenth (and youngest) child of the local potentate, Don Beltrán Ibáñez de Oñaz y Loyola and his wife, Doña María Sáenz de Licona y Balda (one must love those Spanish names). He was originally destined for a career in the Church, but instead became a page to Don Juan Velázquez de Cuéllar, with a view to becoming a knight. According to Wikipedia, he “took up dancing, fencing, gambling, the pursuit of the young ladies, and duelling.” He joined the army and ended up, at age 18, in the service of Antonio Manrique de Lara, the 2nd Duke of Nájera. Íñigo's luck ran out in May 1521, when at the siege of Pamplona a ricocheting cannonball hit his right leg. This took a long time to fix and put an untimely end to his military career.

Íñigo was moved from Pamplona to his ancestral home in Loyola – a two-week journey which must have been excruciating – to recuperate, and, being bored by his convalescence, asked to be able to read his favourite romances of chivalry, but these were not available, so he had to make do with the lives of Christ and the saints. This influenced him to a point where he decided he would devote the rest of his life to God as a monk. His plan was to move to the Holy Land to live, and when he was sufficiently well again to walk (or, rather, limp, one of his legs having been left shorter than the other by his injuries), he went to the Benedictine monastery of Santa Maria de Montserrat (in Catalonia – there is now a long-distance footpath following Íñigo's trip from Loyola) to pray, confess his past sins, give his fancy clothes to the poor, and leave his sword and dagger at the Virgin's altar. He became a beggar and ascetic for a year before he eventually, in 1523, went to the Holy Land as he had planned, but was not allowed to remain there by the Franciscans. Instead, he returned to Barcelona and went to school to learn Latin in order to be allowed to enter university, which he did in Alcalá and finally in Paris. Having changed his name to Ignatius – presumably to make it easier to pronounce to non-Basques – and adopted “of Loyola” as his surname, he got together with six other students to form what eventually became the future Jesuit order, before obtaining a master's degree in 1535 (at the age of 43). The Society of Jesus was officially founded in 1539 and approved by Pope Paul III in 1540, with Ignatius as its first “Superior General”. Jesuit monks went out across Europe to educate people in newly-formed schools, seminaries, and colleges. They also went off as missionaries to places like India, China, and the Americas. Ignatius' Constitutions of the order demanded total self-denial as well as obedience to the Pope and the hierarchy of the order. On 31 July 1556, Ignatius died in Rome, presumably of malaria; he was beatified in 1609 and pronounced a saint by Pope Gregory XV in 1622. St. Ignatius is considered the patron saint of Catholic soldiers as well as the Basque country (among other places), and gives his name to a large number of (often educational) institutions around the world.

We take a look at the church (whose lavishly decorated interior seems to clash with the Jesuit idea of asceticism, but what do we know) and then manage to slip into the Oñaz y Loyola family home in advance of a large number of Asian-looking visitors who enjoy a dramatised version of the life of Íñigo/Ignatius by loudspeaker. Inside is a sparsely-furnished but well-kept three-story building including important notices such as HERE HE WAS BORN and HERE HE CONVERTED (his old bedroom is now a special chapel celebrating this life-changing, if not world-changing, event). There is also a small museum giving a biography of the man in little dioramas and a capsule history of the Jesuit order over the centuries since, and a shop selling LOYOLA t-shirts, postcards, and St. Ignatius's writings in various languages. Irrespective of his theological views, one must give props to the guy; unlike many other people he not just talked the talk, but also walked the walk, and that surely deserves some respect.

From the Loyola sanctuary we drive across Azpeitia to look at the Basque Railway Museum, which is supposed to be quite good – unfortunately when we get there at 12.45pm, the lady at the entrance desk tells us that the museum closes for lunch/siesta at 13.15pm, and since it takes an hour to visit there is no point to going in. She tells us to come back at 3pm, when the museum will reopen.

Unfortunately, at 3pm we're supposed to be at the entrance to the Ekainberri cave visitor centre a few kilometres north near the village of Zestoa. The Ekain cave, situated in the Sastarrain valley approximately 1.5 kilometres outside of Zestoa, was discovered in 1969 and immediately closed off to the public; it extends for approximately 150 metres from the entrance and contains about 70 depictions of various animals (mostly horses) made in the Magdalenian period of the Upper Paleolithic (i.e., fairly recently, around 17,000 to 12,000 years ago). It is said to feature some of the finest specimens of cave art found anywhere. The actual cave cannot be visited (certainly not by laypeople like us), but a replica was constructed in 2008 about 600 m from the original cave, and that is open to visitors. Rather than a faithful imitation of the cave itself, this “replica” is a large hall containing copies of the cave walls with the pictures, easily reached via an accessible concrete walkway with safety railings, so there are no problems with wheelchairs or claustrophobia. (It is still pitch-dark, so some of the “cave” feeling remains.) We're on a Spanish guided tour, but the guide's explanations mostly confine themselves to “Now press ‘5’ on your audio guides”, which are luckily available not just in Basque and Spanish, but also in French and English, so we're not left out completely. Even in this unusual environment there is a magic to this prehistoric art that defies the popular notion of “cave men” as club-wielding brutes who communicate by grunting. It is fascinating to see the detail in the paintings and how, in various places, the artists have exploited the shapes of the rock to give the animals almost a 3-D appearance, and it is hard to imagine the impression that these paintings must have made not just on its creators and their immediate successors, but also the modern discoverers of the cave. We're looking forward to the cave of Altamira (or indeed its replica), which we hope to visit later on this trip. Altamira, Ekain, and 16 other caves in Northern Spain were declared part of the UNESCO world heritage in 2008.

After the replica-cave visit we go back to the supermarket in Zumaia for our dinner (there seems to be a nice restaurant near the parking lot in Zumaia, but they don't open before 8pm for evening meals, and we're hungry now at 5pm) and pick up some microwaveable Asian treats – rice and noodles with vegetables –, plus chorizo, sheep's cheese, bread, and olives with anchovies. Having dropped off our stuff in our room we enjoy the evening in the hotel's common area with food, another bottle of txakoli, and this blog to be written. Occasionally a rain shower comes by, and at one point there's even a rainbow – but the camera is up in the room, so there are no photographs.

28th September – Along the Coast, and Guernica

We have one day more to fill with excitement before we leave Getaria for Burgos (in Castile), and so we decide to explore the Basque coast (costa Vasca) towards the west of Zumaia. This takes us first to the town of Deba, at the mouth of the eponymous river; this is supposed to feature a pretty church, Nuestra Señora de la Asunción, with an impressive portal and a vaulted ceiling, but driving through the town we notice no indication of where that church might be located, or indeed see anything like an obvious steeple, so we pass this by. The next town along the coast, Mutriku, is described by the guide book as “perhaps worth a visit if you're a camper”, which doesn't apply to us; there seem to be four different camp sites around the place, and the historic core round the fishery port is said to contain “several nice fish restaurants”.

We pass Ondarroa with its Santiago Calatrava bridge on the way to Lekeito, which is yet another former fishery town which now seems to subsist mostly on tourism – to a point where the town itself seems to be completely devoid of available parking spots. We finally manage to find a place to leave the car at a nice beach about twenty minutes on foot from the town centre, and march back to the actual town because we want to be able to get into the Santa María de la Asunción church (yes, another one of those – it seems to be a popular name for churches hereabouts) before it closes at 2pm. This is a late Gothic edifice and is considered one of the most beautiful churches on the coast, not least because it features a humongous Flemish retable, according to the guide book “certainly the most ornate in the Basque country and one of the most beautiful in Spain” (also the third largest, after Sevilla and Toledo). Unfortunately it turns out that the church no longer operates on the “July to September“ schedule stipulated by our guide book, so this highlight of sacred art will need to remain unvisited by us. Instead, we spend some time sitting on a bench in the shade and watching people go by near the marina, which is also a nice change. After that, we go back to the car and have an impromptu picnic with the remainder of yesterday evening's bread, cheese, and sausage on the low beach wall near the car park, where the entertainment is provided by surfers trying to make the most of the so-so waves rolling in to the shore.

From Lekeito we continue inland on a curvy back road to the double town of Gernika-Lumo, a trip which (the guide book claims) takes 45 minutes according to locals even though it is only 22 kilometres; we do manage this quite a lot faster, so either we're outdoing the natives in the reckless-driving department (unlikely) or else the locals have told the guide book author yet another tall story.

On 26 April 1937, during the Spanish civil war, the German “Legion Condor” air force detachment, together with Italian fascist air forces, completely annihilated the town of Gernika in a three-hour bombing attack – one of the first times a civilian settlement had been carpet-bombed into oblivion. Gernika was seen as a centre of Basque culture and an important bastion of the Republican resistance movement. Between 170 and 300 people died in the raid (this had been widely disputed, with a much larger number claimed by Basque historians, but the matter seems to be settled now) and many more were injured – exact numbers are difficult to come by because the Franco government in Spain, at whose behest this attack took place and which claimed that communists and Republican troops had burned the town as they fled, suppressed the data – and within the square-kilometre centre of the town, 80% of buildings were completely destroyed while the rest was severely damaged. The raid also inspired Pablo Picasso's monstrous – 3.5 by 7.7 metres – painting, Guernica, a tile version of which can be seen in the town (a caption below it demands, in Basque, that the actual painting be displayed in Gernika – it is currently housed in a special gallery at the Reina Sofía museum in Madrid, and the people there claim that the canvas is now too fragile to be moved). It took Germany until 1997 to issue an official apology for its role in the Spanish civil war in general and the destruction of Gernika in particular.

The town commemorates the bombing through its “Peace Museum”, but when we go there at 3.45pm the friendly staff point out to us that this afternoon the museum will be free to visit from 4pm, and wouldn't we, in the meantime, like to see the museum of Basque Culture, which is just around the corner and free the whole day? We do that, which is a bit tedious because all the exhibits are labelled only in Basque and Spanish (with laminated cards giving partial English translations that you need to pick up and return from boxes in the exhibit halls), but they do have impressive collections of maps and documents which cover the history of the Basque country and its constituent provinces. We even manage to find a painting of a dashing white-clad Basque dancer performing what, with some squinting and considerable good-will, might be considered vaguely similar to the Scottish pas de basque that we're all so familiar with.

Next door to the museum of Basque Culture is the batzarretxea, or former Basque parliament building (now the seat of the Bizkaia province regional assembly), and the location of the Gernikako arbola or “Tree of Gernika”, a traditional symbol of the freedoms of the people of Bizkaia, and by extension all of the Basque people. Assemblies used to be held under the tree, and the Lords of Biscay (including kings of Castile) had to visit Gernika in order to swear to respect the traditional liberties under its canopy. Even now, the lehendakari or president of the autonomous Basque government, does it when taking office. The tree – an oak – has been replaced several times with younger instances of itself, and the known specimens reach back to the 14th century. In the grounds of the batzarretxea, enclosed within a small temple-like structure, is a piece of the trunk of the “old tree”, which officiated from 1742 to 1892 as the second in the line; the third tree and survived the bombing raid of 1937 but had to be replaced in 2004 because of a fungus. The current tree is the fifth and was planted in 2015 (at age 14); the future of the dynasty is assured as the official gardeners of the Biscayan government keep several trees grown from the third tree's acorns on hand in case they're needed.

After visiting the “old tree”, we return to the Peace Museum, which has by now become fairly busy with visitors. It is a stunning presentation (again mostly in Basque and Spanish) including various documents and artifacts which illustrate life in Gernika and the destruction brought by the raid as well as video statements by survivors (with subtitles in various languages). It is perhaps reassuring that the people here see this event as an incentive to foster understanding and peace rather than vengeance and retribution; even though of course we personally had nothing to do with the bombing, visiting places like these as a German can still leave one with mixed feelings.

Having left the museum, we find a supermarket to shop for another one of our impromptu microwave dinners – this time a pre-made omelet with potatoes and onions, together with a Cesar salad which actually turns out to be quite nice. We're looking forward to Burgos, where we will be located in the middle of the town with easier access (by foot) to actual restaurants, so we may be able to partake of more upmarket fare while we're there. But for now we enjoy what we have and spend the rest of the evening reading, looking at the pictures taken so far on this trip, and – of course – blogging!

29th September – To Burgos

Today it's time to pack up, leave San Prudentzio, and go on a long drive to Burgos, the former capital of Castile. Anselm has planned a route avoiding the usurious toll motorways of northern Spain, which includes a supposedly very scenic back road that crosses the mountains between Azkoitia (just down the road from Azpeitia, of St Ignatius fame) and Bergara, but when we get to the turnoff it looks just like somebody's driveway – and by the time we realise that we should have taken this very steep and narrow road directly up the hill we're long past it with no way to turn the car around. In any case the road itself didn't appear that inviting, or indeed feasible in reality, so we continue on the – also quite scenic – not-quite-so-back-road to Urretxu, and from there on the national road all the way to Vitoria-Gasteiz, the capital of the Basque country. We pass a place called Ziortza-Bolibar, where a sign by the road advertises a “Simón Bolívar museum”, and we wonder what the South American revolutionary has to do with an out-of-the-way village in the Basque country – when we get a chance to look into this later in the hotel, it turns out that Simón's great-great-great-great-grandfather came from there, which is apparently grounds enough to establish a museum of both Bizcayan life in the Middle Ages and the life and career of Simón Bolívar. Alas, we have no time to check it out in detail.

From Vitoria-Gasteiz, the motorway is toll-free, so the rest of the three-hour drive passes fairly smoothly, and Anselm finally gets a chance to play around with some of the goodies our car has to offer. It features “adaptive cruise control”, which apparently means that it will not only maintain a given speed (very convenient when the speed limit is 120 kilometres per hour), but if we catch up to a slower car ahead in the same lane it will carefully match our speed to that of the other car while of course maintaining a respectful and safe distance. If we change lanes to one which is free, it will accelerate again to the pre-set speed – very convenient! What is missing, though, is that while the car will nag Anselm incessantly with a loud beep whenever the speed limit changes (which on Basque cross-country roads means very frequently), it does not seem to use the speed-limit information for the cruise control, so if we're coasting along at 120 kph and a “100” sign appears, Anselm still needs to hit the brake in order to conform. (EU regulations now require the speed-limit warning for new cars, including more loud beeps if you drive even just a little faster than the car thinks is allowable, and that frankly sucks, because the car fairly often seems to be mistaken about what the actual speed limit is. For example, it appears to be unable to figure out “SCHOOL – 20 kph for the next 100 metres” signs and will insist that 20 kph is the correct speed until some considerable distance on there is finally another speed-limit sign that it does understand. Thank you, EU – especially for the regulation which says that it must be impossible to turn these very exasperating “warnings” off altogether. Sometimes an old car does have its advantages.) We stop for a potty break at a service station past Miranda de Ebro, and then a little later for lunch (the usual bread, cheese, and ham, bought in the Gernika supermarket yesterday and stashed overnight in the San Prudentzio hotel “goodie fridge”) at another service station that has outdoor seating – the rest area we passed earlier didn't look too inviting and was full of semi drivers spending their Sunday off.

Once we arrive in Burgos, find the hotel, María Luisa on the Avenida del Cid Campeador, move into our nice-but-a-little-quaint room and park the car in the hotel's underground car park (reached through a ramp in the middle of the street), we have earned ourselves a little rest. Burgos has been around for a very long time – it was founded in 884 as a stronghold in the fight against the Moors, and became the capital first of the county of Castile and later (in 1037) of the united kingdom of Castile-León. It became an important way station on the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela and for a long time enjoyed prosperity and various royal privileges before it went into a slow decline as the wool trade moved north to the sea. During the civil war in the 1930s, Burgos was the main seat of the Francist nationalist government, and it still seems to have a certain reactionary reputation. On the other hand, it claims that the purest Castilian Spanish is spoken here.

And of course it must be mentioned that Burgos (or more precisely the nearby village of Vivar) is also the purported birthplace of the Spanish national hero, Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, later known as El Cid. We don't know exactly when he was born (probably in 1043) but he belonged to the minor nobility and served the son of the king Fernando the Great, Sancho II of León and Castile. When Sancho became king of Castile in 1065, Rodrigo became the military commander of Castile, and in this capacity he led military campaigns both against Sancho's brothers Alfonso VI of León and García II of Galicia and against the Muslims in al-Andalus (Islamic southern Spain) with a great deal of success. Sancho was assassinated in 1072, and that was a problem for Rodrigo because the crown passed Sancho's brother Alfonso, whom Rodrigo had fought earlier. This meant that he was first demoted and then later (in 1081) exiled.

Rodrigo then accepted a job with the Muslim king of Zaragoza, Yusuf al-Mu'taman ibn Hud, to lead a mixed Moorish force against the Christian kingdom of Aragon. In 1086, Alfonso of Castile's army was defeated by a large Almoravid Muslim force from North Africa, and that caused Alfonso to try to make peace with Rodrigo, who by that time had become known as El Cid, from the Arabian term “as-Sayyid”, or “the lord”. Alfonso endowed him lavishly with titles and land and sent him to negotiate with the Muslims. However, El Cid was happy not to get directly involved with the fight between Alfonso's army and the Almoravids because he had his own agenda – he led a combined Christian and Muslim army to establish his own fief in Valencia. By 1094, El Cid had defeated both the ruler of nearby Barcelona, Berenguer Ramon II (his nephew Ramon Berenguer III later married El Cid's youngest daughter) and ousted the Berber rulers of Valencia: While theoretically subordinate to Alfonso of Castile, El Cid now ruled Valencia as an independent lordship, even though he still had to fend off Muslim attacks every so often. He died in 1099, and in 1101 his wife, Doña Jimena, fled from Valencia to Burgos with her retinue and the body of El Cid. He was originally buried in the monastery of San Pedro de Cardeña, but is now interred, together with Jimena, in the centre of Burgos Cathedral. A famous legend claims that after El Cid had died during a siege of Valencia, Jimena ordered that his corpse be dressed in his armour and tied to his horse, Babieca; this sight scared the Moors so much that they fled in abject terror, and gave the Spanish defenders a huge morale boost. Tales of the exploits of El Cid were collected later in the 12th century as El Cantar de mio Cid, the oldest preserved Castilian epic poem.

The main attraction in Burgos is the ginormous cathedral, the third-largest in Spain (after the ones in Sevilla and Toledo) and the only one to be classed as a UNESCO world heritage site in its own right, rather than as part of a larger ensemble. We decide to cross this off our bucket list ASAP and walk from the hotel via the Plaza Mayor to the cathedral's ticket office (normal visitors like us pay €10 but there are various discounts, including one for certified Santiago pilgrims who only need to pay €5 to visit). A flight of stairs then leads to the entrance portal, which leaves us in the south transept; there is a signposted tourist route which goes past most of the important sights in the building (some chapels are off limits unless you are an actual pilgrim or other person wanting to pray or, by prior appointment, confess your sins – which we think is fair enough).

Burgos cathedral is a gigantic and lavishly decorated building whose sheer size, pomp, and relentless repetition of religious imagery leaves the mind reeling. It makes one wonder about the amount of control the Church must have been able to exert to get people to drop whatever else it was that they were doing to spend basically their whole lives building such a thing: The cathedral was started in 1221, used for ecclesiastical services from 1230, and consecrated in 1260, with the choir, the naves, the front and much of the transept mostly finished. It took until the 14th century to get all the ancillary chapels done, and the open spires were added in the 15th century by Juan de Colonia, otherwise known as Johann of Cologne, who designed them based on the plans for Cologne Cathedral (where the spires would not actually be built until the 19th century, but the plans were already there and very likely known to Juan). Juan settled in Burgos and his son Simon and grandson were active there as master builders for the cathedral.

We spend several hours marvelling at the architecture, stonework details, altars, sepulchres, vaulted ceilings, the side organs with their stunning sets of horizontal “Spanish trumpets”, the tomb of El Cid and Doña Jimena (which is marked by a strangely plain slab of stone right in the middle of the crossing, so perhaps in a sense the whole cathedral is their mausoleum), the two-story cloister and the cathedral museum with its collection of religious pictures and paraphernalia (a long row of gilt communion goblets looks especially fascinating). Afterwards we walk around to view the exterior of the building from different sides and angles. Finally we are so overwhelmed and exhausted that we figure it is time to get something to eat (even though it is still quite early for dinner on the Spanish schedule).

After a short search we end up in a small restaurant called Los Espuelas del Cid (“The Spurs of the Cid”) which has a bit of a touristy mock-medieval tinge but offers a reasonably-priced three-course dinner with water and bread included (!). Marie has a salad followed by steak and fried potato cubes, while Anselm enjoys rice with mushrooms and shrimps and a piece of bacalao – dried cod – in a red sauce. Dessert is a slice of cheese cake for Marie and a piece of apple cake for Anselm. All of this is quite delicious and refreshingly not-microwaved, and the waitress, to her credit, is the first person on this trip who does not immediately reply in English when Anselm talks to her in his Duolingo Spanish. In fairness, she sounds a bit like how one might otherwise talk to kindergarden-aged kids, but it's a start. We walk back to the hotel (thankfully not a long way to go) and manage to get some administrative stuff done, like booking tickets to visit the Altamira museum/fake cave on Thursday when we're in Santillana del Mar, before dropping off to sleep after a long and eventful day.

30th September – The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

In Spain, as in Germany, many if not most cultural attractions seem to be closed on Mondays. This means that for us tourists, the challenge is to find things to do that don't care what day of the week it is (or don't care that it is Monday). Cue the Boomtown Rats.

In 1966, Italian film director Sergio Leone shot what is maybe the most iconic “spaghetti western” of all – The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly starring Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach, and Lee van Cleef. Usually with that sort of film, the region of Almeria in the south of Spain stands in for the American West, but for some reason, parts of this particular film were shot in the hills south-east of Burgos. The final scenes of the film are set in a military cemetery where Eastwood's, Wallach's and van Cleef's characters engage in an epic three-way duel to Ennio Morricone's rousing soundtrack (spoiler: Eastwood's character wins) – a definite contender for the top ten “best twenty minutes” in the history of cinematography. In 1966, the cemetery, with 5000 “graves”, had been constructed in a valley between the villages of Contreras and Santo Domingo de Silos, over a period of only three days, by a detachment of 250 soldiers from the Spanish army. By the 2010s it had virtually disappeared again – nature had reclaimed the area. In 2015, a group of film fans from Burgos started digging and found the original paved stone circle under a layer of three inches of soil. A volunteer project was started and people from all over Europe helped restore the “Sad Hill” cemetery to the state it was in when the film was shot. They raised funds by letting people buy the right to have their names written on the crosses of the graveyard (these are now all occupied but people may still donate). The site is now open to the public and something of an open secret among cineasts – we found out about it in an article in The Guardian when we were preparing our trip.

The “Sad Hill” cemetery can be reached by an unpaved road from either Contreras in the north or Santo Domingo de Silos from the south-west. At first Anselm wasn't sure whether it would be possible to do this in a standard rental car, but his research suggested that attempting the 3-kilometre drive from Contreras would be at least worth a try. As it turns out, though, the Burgos provincial government seems to have caught on to the importance of this new unofficial sight, and the road, while still unpaved, has apparently been significantly improved compared to some of the descriptions making the rounds on the Internet (“Don't drive there if you value your shock absorbers”). We do drive very slowly in order to avoid throwing up pebbles and bouncing into the drainage channels crossing the road every few dozens of metres, but getting to the cemetery parking lot is really no problem at all – other than the car getting rather dusty, but we're quite confident that sooner or later it will rain and that will be sorted out.

From the parking lot it's a few hundred metres' walk to a metal silhouette of Clint Eastwood overlooking the restored cemetery. We're sharing the place with a couple of cars' worth of other film fans who apparently try to re-enact part of the script in the centre of the cemetery, and we're not in a great hurry to meet them down there. But it must be said that there is a certain resemblance between this area and some places we have seen in the south-western USA. What is bothering us is the amount of garbage that is lying around between the mock graves – this place is really so far out of the way that only determined fans are likely to end up there, and one could be forgiven for thinking that determined fans would have enough respect for this iconic site to take their trash home with them. Alas, apparently not. We take some time to absorb the atmosphere (the flies are a bit of a bother, but this is supposed to be a cemetery after all) and take photographs before we climb back up to the car. Emboldened by the easy drive from Contreras and by the fact that people seem to arrive from Santo Domingo de Silos, too (when that road was definitely recommended against on the 'Net), we decide to take another risk and see whether we could leave that way, and in fact this, too, turns out to be no problem at all. The main difference between the Contreras road and the Santo Domingo de Silos road is that the former is pretty much level while the latter goes up a very steep hillside and then down again on the other side, so if you're hiking or riding a bike we would definitely recommend going via Contreras, except that Contreras is already right in the middle of nowhere (and then some). Santo Domingo, on the other hand, has direct buses from Burgos – one per day, with a schedule implying that if you wanted to visit Sad Hill from Burgos by public transport you would have to spend two nights in Santo Domingo de Silos, but still. You could, though, probably work things such that you'd be able to also visit the very famous monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos, which is apparently so outstandingly interesting and beautiful that many Santiago pilgrims are prepared to take a long detour to check it out, but of course it is closed on Mondays.

In Santo Domingo, we turn Anselm's desperate need for a lavatory into a leisurely break in the outside seating area of the “Villa da Silos” bar/restaurant and enjoy a cool drink while watching the goings-on in this out-of-the-way yet quaintly touristy village. On our way back to the car we manage to sneak into the monastery church and catch the tail end of the monks' celebration of Sext (not what you think but the traditional observance of the “Liturgy of the Hours”). A little farther on, a shop sells “Sad Hill” beer – la cerveza más western –, advertised by an Eastwood-like silhouette with a beer bottle next to the door, and we can't resist buying one just for kicks (it is sitting in the, otherwise empty, minibar fridge in the hotel now and we may drink it tomorrow).

From Santo Domingo de Silos, we spontaneously follow a suggestion in the guide book to the “Desfiladero de la Yecla” gorge not far away to the south. This is a very narrow crack between two rock faces which can be explored by means of an also very narrow concrete walkway with railings. In places, protruding rocks require a certain amount of contortionism to get past (at least if you're as tall as Anselm is, and also carry a camera and a bagful of camera stuff) but it is quite scenic. The area is also notable for its birds of prey – we can see a large number of vultures either circling above us (a very reassuring sight if you're just coming from a Western cemetery) or perching on rocky outcrops far above. Anselm is mentally kicking himself for not bringing the big telephoto lens, which is sitting comfortably in his rucksack in the hotel room, because it would probably have made an appreciable difference as far as his vulture photography is concerned (certainly a step up from “that dark smudge there is supposed to be a vulture”), but that's what happens if you take spontaneous side trips. Perhaps there will be another chance in a few days in the Picos de Europa.

Our next stop, back to civilisation, is the town of Covarrubias, which has been around for a very long time and houses a famous collegiate church dating from the 10th century CE. This contains various tombs including that of the first count of Castile, Fernán Gonzalez, who died in 970, and his wife. Fernán was an avid fighter during the reconquista, and the story goes that even centuries later, during important battles against the Muslims a loud rattling of bones would be audible from his sarcophagus – such was his dedication to the cause of Christianity even after his death. The church also has a famous organ with another splendid set of Spanish trumpets.

From Covarrubias we drive to Lerma, which features a well-kept historic town centre dating mostly from the 17th century, and then back to Burgos, where we manage to find our hotel even without satnav (Anselm having forgotten the charging cable for his mobile phone in the hotel). We take a well-deserved rest before heading out to the Méson Los Herreros restaurant for dinner. Los Herreros means “the blacksmiths”, and indeed our waitress is wearing a t-shirt featuring a picture of a huge anvil and a suitably brawny arm on the back. Being Central Europeans, we're early enough to snag a table even without a reservation before the place fills up, and the food is both delicious and reasonably priced – according to the guide book, the restaurant is in an area where the locals go to eat, rather than the main tourist trap around the cathedral, and it does look as if the people at the tables around us are either from here or else Spanish-speaking tourists. Marie has a piece of lasagna as a starter (the house seafood paëlla is unfortunately no longer available) and then a platter with fried eggs, ham, and the blood sausage typical for this area, while Anselm enjoys a salad with chicken, pineapple, and cheese cubes followed by secretos of pork with fried potatoes and mild green chilies. Very yummy. (We had encountered the pork secretos last year in the Azores – they're a little-known cut of meat, hence “secrets”, which is very nice, and Anselm is proud of himself for remembering this.) Once more, dessert is included in the menu del día, and we enjoy slices of chocolate and cheese cake to finish our meal before walking home to the hotel at the end of a fascinating and eclectic day.

1st October – Museums of Burgos

Today we're leaving the car in the hotel garage because we're going to explore Burgos some more. At first the weather looks a bit grey, and while as far as we're concerned the temperature is still at “shirt sleeves” level, various locals are seen wearing sweaters under sleeveless down jackets, or comfy-looking coats. We suspect that in summer, Burgos might get really hot. There are also Santiago pilgrims all over the place, many of whom are easily recognised by the large mussel shells tied to their jackets or rucksacks. It is fun to try to guess what country they might be from: The Germans, for example, seem to prefer new high-tech walking gear from well-known brands, while people from other countries tend to use stuff that looks as if it had made the trip a few times already, including possibly with Napoleon's army.

Our plan is to visit the Museo de Burgos first, which contains archeological finds from the Paleolithic up to the Roman era, plus fine arts from the Middle Ages until today. All of this is housed in the Casa de Miranda, an ancient but unassuming-looking residence in the middle of the city, only a stone's throw from the Arlanzón river which bisects Burgos – cross the bridge going south from the plaza with the statue of the Cid on horseback, take the second right for 100 metres or so, and you're there. (Of course we're trying to take a clever shortcut and end up at the – locked – back entrance, so need to go all the way over to the main road and then back down the next side street to find the front entrance.) Tickets for the museum are refreshingly cheap at €1/person, and the collections – both on the archeological and fine-arts sides – don't disappoint. There is quite a bit of stuff from the Atapuerca excavations, which contain the oldest remains of hominids (human-like beings) found in Europe so far, and which we will come back to later today. Also, the Roman administrative centre for much of Spain was in the area, and there are various leftovers from that time, too. We're looking with great interest at a model of a Roman theatre, especially since at home we just enjoyed a guided tour to the ruins of the one in Mainz, said to be, at 10,000 seats, the largest of its kind north of the Alps (and not just in Germany, either). The fine-arts section includes lots of religious artefacts and paintings, including some from the monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos which we didn't get to see yesterday. Some of the stuff is pretty gruesome when it depicts various saints being martyred in creative and graphic ways, and some of the more modern non-religious paintings are quite weird, too. We do enjoy one painting by José María González Cuasante, an award-winning artist born near Burgos in 1945, which is so hyper-realistic that you need to look at it twice to notice it isn't actually a photograph.

After the Museo de Burgos we sit on a park bench in the shade for a while to recover before we tackle the Museo de la Evolución Humana, a new, huge complex whose main purpose is to display the finds from Atapuerca in a suitably grand environment and put them in the proper context of human evolutionary history. We're not convinced that it is a great idea for the museum to abbreviate itself to “MEH” and to put that abbreviation on every single sign outside and inside – and we leave the place with a distinct “meh” feeling when we notice that, contrary to what it says in the guide book, this museum (like the Museo de Burgos) subscribes to the Spanish tradition of having an extended break in the middle of the afternoon for the siesta: We arrive a little before 2pm in the anticipation of a long and uninterrupted visit, only to find out that the place closes at 2.30pm and doesn't open again until 4.30pm. We decide that rather than hanging around the museum doors for more than two hours we should follow Spanish tradition, go back to the hotel to rest for a bit and come back later. The MEH is quite near the Museo de Burgos and it is only a 15-minute walk to our hotel, so that's not a problem, especially since we stop to pick up some bread and two very nice pastries from an “El Horno” pasteleria next to the hotel entrance for lunch.

We're back at the MEH shortly past 4.30pm and spend the next 2½ hours being overwhelmed with the long-format history of humanity in evolutionary terms. The Atapuerca area was apparently settled by archaic humans of the homo antecessor species around a million years ago. Researchers at the Atapuerca excavations originally touted H. antecessor as the last common ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans (H. sapiens), replacing H. heidelbergensis in that role, but scientific consensus now seems to be that H. antecessor was an offshoot of the main human evolutionary line which emerged before the human/Neanderthal split. “Antecessor”, incidentally, means “explorer”, based on the original notion that H. antecessor was the first hominid species to expand into Europe. All of this is explained in very great detail and – refreshingly for us – in English as well as Spanish, which is something that in museums hereabouts one should not take for granted (we find that, given our shared knowledge of languages like French, Latin, Italian, and Duolingo Spanish, it is possible to painstakingly decipher many of the museum-Spanish signs, but there's still a huge difference between that and quickly scanning a sign in English). We get to see a considerable number of miscellaneous H. antecessor remains, including a complete pelvis which the researchers, in a manner that is as unsurprising as it is “cringe”, nicknamed “Elvis”, and also find out that our not-quite-ancestors apparently didn't mind a bit of cannibalism. Yuck. There are also exhibits on how archeological field work is done.

Apart from the Atapuerca stuff, there are floors dedicated to what evolution by natural selection is in the first place (complete with a partial replica of Charles Darwin's Beagle, the ship not the dog), the overall development of humans from way back where the evolutionary tree split between hominids and chimpanzees all the way to modern H. sapiens, and comparisons between the lives of H. sapiens and Neanderthals. The exhibits are well-designed, often with interactive elements, and it is obvious that no expense was spared in making the museum attractive. (One might wonder what such a museum is even doing in a place that is as stoutly conservative as Burgos, but on the one hand, Atapuerca is not far from here, and on the other, unlike various Christian denominations, the Roman Catholic church officially has no problem with the modern notion of evolution.) One is not supposed to take photographs of the exhibits, which doesn't seem to fit with the otherwise very modern presentation, but of course we respect this, so there are no pictures of the inside of the … MEH. Leaving the museum we note that your MEH ticket will get you into the Museo de Burgos for free, but we don't begrudge the other museum their two euros.

After this, we need another break on a park bench (of which there are quite a number right outside the museum, alongside the Arlanzón river) to recover and figure out what to do for dinner. We're looking at ethnic food for a change, and find that there are both a Chinese and an Indian restaurant on Avenida del Cid Campeador, not far beyond our hotel. When we reach the Chinese place, it still seems to be closed, so we continue to the Indian restaurant, where we are the first – and for some time, only – guests. Marie has samosas, garlic naan, and prawns Jalfrezi, while Anselm starts with a more than generous helping of vegetable pakoras followed by a “biryani especial” which is delicious but so huge a portion that he can't finish it all. This is obviously the “dodgy end” of the avenida, but we have no problem getting back to the hotel, past the Chinese restaurant which now seems to be open for business after all. Back in our room we do some packing for tomorrow (Marie does, at any rate) and look at photos from the last few days before retiring to bed.

2nd October – Cantabria, here we are!

The weather today is so-so – “Scottish”, we would say, with low-hanging clouds and light rain. We re-pack our suitcases and, after breakfast at the hotel, load the car and start our trip towards the coast again, to the village of Oreña in the province of Cantabria. To make things more interesting we eschew the fast motorway (even though it's free) and drive on the trunk road from Burgos to Aguilar de Campoo, where we do join the Burgos-Santander motorway again for some kilometres until we reach the town of Reinosa, where we turn west and make a brief stop in Fontibre, an otherwise unremarkable village whose claim to fame is that near it is the source of the mighty river Ebro – at 930 kilometres it is the longest entirely within Spain and the second-longest (after the Tagus) in the Iberian peninsula. It flows roughly in a east-southeast direction and discharges into the Mediterranean in southern Catalonia, which incidentally makes it the second-longest river to flow into the Mediterranean (the longest being, of course, the Nile). It is funny that, as the crow flies, it is only 50 km or so from the source of the Ebro to the Atlantic ocean, but of course the Cantabrian mountains are in the way. There is also a long-distance hiking path, GR99, which follows the Ebro from its source all the way to its delta in Catalonia.

From Fontibre (whose name, incidentally, derives from the Latin fontes Iberis, which, perhaps unsurprisingly, means “source of the Ebro”) we continue west and then, in the village of Espinilla, north into the Cantabrian mountains. The road rises quickly until it reaches its highest point at the Puerto de Palombera pass (1260 m above sea level) and then descends through the Saja-Besaya Natural Park, taking 32 kilometres to finish in the town of Ruente at 195 m above sea level. Along the way there are a few scenic viewpoints, including the Balcón de La Cardosa with its deer sculpture – we're a little confused because in the guide book there is a photograph of a very similar deer sculpture at a viewpoint in the Picos de Europa, something that we will be sure to look into when the time comes. It is very easy to recognise the deer because it gives a very strong impression of wanting to go to the bathroom but not being sure whether it is allowed. The weather still isn't great, but the rain has let up to a point where it is OK to pop out of the car for a few photographs without getting soaked, and of course the clouds make everything look extra dramatic. Some kilometres on, and having passed a few groups of cows gallivanting down the road, we make another brief stop at the Pozo del Amo waterfall, which is an interesting sight from the road bridge crossing its narrow valley. From then on it's an easy run, mostly on the car's electric drive and charging the battery in the process, down to Ruente and then on to Cabezón de la Sal, Helguera and, via Santillana del Mar, to our destination, the Posada El Pescador in Oreña (a hamlet that is technically part of Santillana del Mar). We're greeted by our landlord and once more Anselm has a chance to practice his language skills. “I'm sorry but I speak only a little Spanish”, he says. “I don't speak German at all”, counters the landlord, and for once we don't settle on English as the lingua franca of tourism in Spain. Perhaps the fact that he is something of an elderly gentleman has something to do with it – let's see how our relationship develops, and we're keeping our fingers crossed that we won't have anything too complicated to discuss with him.

On top of the rain, Marie seems to have caught some sort of stomach bug, so we spend the afternoon resting and not doing much at all – not a problem, the drive was a bit exhausting and after all we're on holiday! The weather is supposed to be better tomorrow, and there'll be enough time to explore.

3rd October – The Hall of Bisons

Marie is still a bit under the weather today, so we're not planning a huge programme. What is on our schedule, though, is a visit to the Altamira museum and “neo-cave” – as with the Ekain cave (see the entry for the 27th of September), the very famous cave paintings in the real Altamira cave are much too delicate and valuable to let everyone visit them for real, so they have been replicated in a museum near the original site. We bought the tickets a few days ago and so we're supposed to turn up at the museum at 12.30pm today.

This is not a huge problem given that the museum is only a 10-minute drive from our hotel. There's a huge parking lot and it is notably fairly full – most other attractions on this trip have not been very busy, but Altamira is, of course, one of the main sights in the area. In the museum we manage to trade our Internet-based reservation code into two actual tickets for a visit to the museum and replicated cave, and have three quarters of an hour to spend exploring the museum before the guided tour of the cave starts. The museum is notable in that most of the exhibits are explained in Spanish and English, but the guided tour is Spanish-only, and the rapid-fire delivery of our guide adds a little extra challenge – but on the other hand, many of the paintings speak for themselves.

The Altamira cave was originally occupied by humans – according to archeological evidence – during two periods in the Upper Solutrean (approximately 18,500 years ago) and Lower Magdalenian (around 15,000 years ago). Around 13,000 years ago, the cave entrance fell in and its content was thereby preserved until the cave was rediscovered in 1868. Starting in 1879, the local amateur archeologist, Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, who had visited the cave with his eight-year-old daughter María and noted that there were paintings of bison on the ceilings, studied the cave together with the archeologist Juan Vilanova y Piera from the University of Madrid. They excavated the cave and published a paper conjecturing that the paintings were of Paleolithic origin. At the time this was widely ridiculed, especially by French archeologists around Émile Cartailhac. Sautuola and Piera were even accused of having the paintings forged because they were so good and well-preserved, and of course primitive “cave men” would have lacked the required talent and ability to produce them in the first place; an additional problem was that Sautuola was unable to explain why there were no soot markings on the cave ceilings and walls (it took Sautuola some time to realise that the artists could have used bone marrow fat as a lamp fuel, which produces very little soot).

Only decades later, after other prehistoric paintings had been found elsewhere and the evidence could no longer be rejected, did the opposition to Sautuola and Piera's hypotheses die down. To his credit, Cartailhac published a conspicuous article admitting his mistake, and later wrote two books about the Altamira cave. (Sadly, Sautuola had died in the meantime and so did not get to witness his own scientific rehabilitation.) The cave quickly became a tourist attraction, and so many people came to see the famous paintings that the carbon dioxide and water vapour exhaled by the crowds of visitors started to damage them. The cave was closed completely in 1977, and starting from 1982 only very limited numbers of visitors were admitted (this led to a multi-year waiting list). In 1985, the Altamira cave was added to the list of UNESCO world heritage sites. The cave was closed again in 2002 because green mould had appeared on some of the paintings. By 2010, conditions inside the cave had improved to a point where reopening it was considered, but the Spanish government decided that it would remain closed in order to protect the paintings.

The museum with its replica cave was opened in 2001 and now offers visitors a convenient way of appreciating the cave art. As in Ekainberri, the “neo-cave” is easily accessible (again, one of the members of our tour group was sitting in a wheelchair) and can efficiently accommodate a large number of visitors. Its main attraction is the reproduction of the famous paintings of bison (and a few other animals) on the “Polychrome Ceiling”, which was produced using the same materials and techniques – charcoal, ochre and hematite, sometimes in dilution to produce different intensities – available to the Paleolithic painters. In fact, during the study of the original paintings with a view to making the reproductions, further details and additional paintings were discovered in the cave. As in Ekain, the original artists used the bumps and protrusions in the rocks to add to the animal shapes, and this creates a very impressive effect. (Some people call this cave the “Sistine Chapel of the Stone Age”.)

Apart from the “neo-cave”, the museum features various exhibits about the history of the cave (both in the Paleolithic and since its modern (re-)discovery), the evolution of humans (which we know everything about since our visit to the MEH in Burgos), and life in the Paleolithic. It also contains some specimens of art from other caves in the area. We take a short break in the museum cafeteria, with peppermint tea for Marie and OJ for Anselm, before exploring the museum grounds some more – it is possible to take a look at the original cave entrance (or what is left of it), and in a detached building there is a special exhibition of the art of Bilbao-born (in 1961) painter/illustrator and paleontologist, Mauricio Antón, which is quite fascinating - his sketches and paintings really make prehistoric life, from dinosaurs to sabre-toothed cats to humans, come alive.

From the Altamira museum we take a drive to the coast (not that far) and relax for a while listening to the waves. Then we go back to the hotel with a detour to the supermarket (yes, in Cantabria they seem to have big supermarkets where they belong, along the main road at the edge of the town and with lots of free parking) for some supper – tummy-pleasing bread and orange juice for Marie and a selection of ready-made empanadas for Anselm – and take it easy for the rest of the day.

4th October – Picos de Europa

We're trying to get an early start today because we have a long trip planned – and it is just as well that Marie seems to be virtually back to her old self (you can tell because she has coffee in the morning instead of peppermint tea). After a brief stop at a petrol station to top up the tank – the Yaris, being a hybrid, only has a 25-litre tank but it still seems to last for 700 km or so; we had to get petrol in Burgos before the “Sad Hill” excursion because we were running empty, but now it's still half full – and inflate the tyres (the automatic tyre pressure monitor had been complaining about the left front wheel), we're heading west on the motorway and then south from the Cabezón de la Sal exit – mostly the way we came from Burgos – to the village of Valle, where a scenic mountain road turns off to the west again. This runs for 45 kilometres across the Collada de Carmona pass into the valley of the river Nansa, past the village of Puentenansa, and then across the Collado de Hoz pass down to the village of La Hermida, past spectacular mountain scenery and many roadside viewpoints. This is a narrow road with many bends, turns, and slopes and it is just as well that there is virtually no traffic.

La Hermida sits in the middle of the eponymous gorge formed by the river Deva, which at 22 kilometres is the longest ravine in Spain. It is bounded by sheer, almost vertical rock faces which (we're told) are popular with climbers. From the car we see that parts of the road are secured with very stout-looking metal nets that are supposed to catch falling rocks; what is perhaps more disconcerting that every so often the net contains a sizeable boulder which, if it hit our car, would at the very least make the rental company very unhappy, if not do worse to the driver and/or passenger. We drive south and make a brief stop at the church of Santa María de Lebeña, which is a pre-Romanesque building that is dated to between 924 and 959 CE (except for the free-standing clock tower, which was added in the 20th century). The interior is said to be interesting and we hang around for a while to wait for a tour that, according to a small laminated note at the door, is supposed to start “in a few minutes”. But nobody seems to show up and in the end we leave because we don't want to lose too much time.

In the village of Tama there is another mountain road that leads up the west slope of the Deva valley, past a hamlet called Pendes, to a recreation area with a number of ancient chestnut trees (the place is called “the thousand-year-old chestnuts”, and the trees certainly look the part). From there it is a 1.5-km walk to the ruins of a fortification called El Corral de los Moros. What the guide book doesn't say is that half of that distance seems to be straight uphill, but the climb is worth the effort because the views from the top are fantastic. The fortifications, of which there is virtually nothing left, date back to the 11th century – this was long after the reconquista, and so there would have been very little call for a “moors' pen”, and certainly not on top of a mountain. The going theory is that this fortification was more about a show of strength than anything practical.

We drive through the tourist town of Potes (which is very busy, with lots of touristy shops and restaurants, and reminds us of Alpine villages in Switzerland) and turn off to the west towards the village of Fuente Dé, which is at the end of a 22-kilometre side road – the guide book warns about cattle and horses getting in one's way but frankly this road looks like a motorway compared to some others we've used on this trip. (As a matter of fact the road seems to continue past Fuente Dé and should in theory lead to the next valley, but neither Google Maps nor OpenStreetmap appear to have it, and that makes us deeply suspicious.) The main attraction in Fuente Dé is the cable car, which starts at an altitude of 1070 m above sea level and takes a little over 3½ minutes to ascend to the top station at an altitude of 1823 m. We're trusting “Siemens Alpine Systems” with our lives and, for €17 per person round-trip, have ourselves whisked up the mountain – a journey that is well worth the price for the spectacular views from the top, plus the antics of the Alpine choughs and the majestic vultures and eagles that soar past every so often. Anselm is satisfied with himself for bringing the big telephoto lens this time around but grumbles a little about not bringing the red-dot sight that would make tracking the birds a lot easier (it is sitting in his rucksack in the hotel). Even with just the camera viewfinder, however, he manages a few decent pictures.

Back down in the car park we enjoy a brief snack and then head back towards Potes. On the way there we take a spontaneous side trip to visit the monastery of St Toribius of Liébana (Santo Toribio to his Cantabrian friends), which we have never heard of before but which claims to be the fourth most holy site for (Roman Catholic) Christians, after Jerusalem, Rome, and Santiago de Compostela. (It is certainly nice that Santiago pilgrims can reasonably straightforwardly arrange to take this one in as well, because depending on which route you take it is more or less on the way.) This is because these four places have arrangements in place where, in a “jubilee year” – in St Toribio, whenever April 16 falls on a Sunday – you can get all your past sins forgiven by passing through a magic “door of redemption”. This was an obvious enticement to visit between April 2023 and 2024, so we're just six months late or so, too bad. The history of the place is somewhat confusing because there is not just one St Toribius, there are two. The original St. Toribius had nothing to do with the monastery; he was a 5th-century bishop of Astorga, southwest of Léon, who brought (what he was led to believe to be) a significant piece of the cross of Jesus back from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The second St. Toribius was an early Benedictine monk, who, around 100 years later, founded the monastery in Liébana together with five colleagues and dedicated it to St Martin of Tours (the cloak divider). The relics of the first St Toribius (the one from Astorga) together with the purported piece of the Holy Cross were brought to the monastery in the mid-9th century, and the monastery was rededicated to St Toribius (it isn't exactly clear which one, possibly both) at some point before 1125. There's also a story which claims that St Toribius (the Benedictine monk, not the bishop from Astorga), when he was trying in vain to convert the Cantabrian country people to Christianity, and to found his monastery, came upon an ox and a bear fighting to the death. He managed to soothe and divide the two and to convince them that it would be much nicer if they lived in peace and co-operated. The two animals, out of gratitude, agreed to be harnessed to a yoke and to help build the monastery, and this impressed the locals so much that they, in turn, agreed to become Christians. The bear and the ox, though, have been immortalised in the capitals of two columns in the main chapel of the monastery church (although, to be frank, the ox looks much more like a ram to us).

We continue back up north through the gorge of La Hermida (which takes longer than it should due to roadworks with traffic lights that control long one-way stretches of the road) and follow the valley of the river Deva until we reach the Oviedo-to-Santander motorway near Unquera. From there it is an easy drive east, but instead of going straight home we decide to make a brief stop in the seaside town of Comillas. Comillas has been around for a very long time and became fashionable in the second half of the 19th century when it was the preferred summer destination for the Spanish royal family (and by extension a large part of the nobility). This means that it contains quite a lot of palaces and stately homes, including El Capricho, which was designed by the famous Catalan architect, Antoni Gaudí (back when he wasn't that famous yet). Unfortunately when we arrive, the Capricho is closing for the day, so all we can do is try to sneak a few peeks (and photographs) over the wall/hedge and through a metal gate at the top of the property. It looks suitably spectacular and is an example of Gaudí's “oriental” phase, but already includes many of the foundations of Catalan modernism, one of the roots of European “art nouveau”. The building had originally been commissioned by the wealthy Máximo Díaz de Quijano, who unfortunately died a year before the house was completed. The house was then used as a summer residence for rich people, fell into dereliction after the Spanish Civil War, and was finally sold in 1977 by the last descendant of Díaz de Quijano. Having been declared a national monument in 1969, it was restored and turned first into a restaurant and later (in 2009) a museum.

Speaking of restaurants, given that it is now going on 8pm we decide that it is time to find something to eat and, after a stroll through the historic town centre of Comillas, end up at a table in the Restaurante Gravalosa where we order a Cesar salad and patatas bravas Aioli for Marie (she really seems to want to put her tummy to the test) and a mixed salad and a fry-up of potatos, eggs, mushrooms, and shrimps for Anselm (who is looking forward to his first hot meal since Tuesday). All of this is very nice but, given the size of Spanish restaurant portions, we don't quite manage to finish it. We do manage to find the car and end up back at our posada twenty minutes later – after a very interesting, but also exhausting day.

5th October – Santander

On our last full day in Cantabria we want to visit the capital, Santander. This is probably known in Germany mostly through the eponymous bank – we wonder how many people would be able to point out Santander on a map of Europe. But unlike, say, Dresdner Bank of fond memory in Germany, the Banco Santander is actually legally headquartered in Santander, even if much of the operational business is now conducted in Madrid. We're getting ahead of ourselves, however.

After breakfast at the posada our first project is a quick peek into Santillana del Mar, the town next to the village where we're staying. Contrary to what its name suggests, Santillana del Mar is several kilometres away from the sea. It is also neither saintly (santo) nor flat (llana), hence some people refer to it as “the town of three lies”. In fact, the name “Santillana” comes from Santa Juliana, or Santa Illana (depending on who you ask). There are conflicting stories of who she was, where she came from, and what happened to her and where, to the point where some people conjecture that there may have been two Julianas. According to the Venerable Bede in his Martyrologium, Saint Juliana was born in Nicomedia (modern-day İzmit in Turkey) and martyred in 304, but there are other legends. Her remains were apparently moved to Naples in the 13th century, but how she ended up in the colegiata in Santillana del Mar (where her relics are supposedly stored today) remains unclear. Santillana del Mar is a tourist town of the worst kind and, on top of that, currently plagued by traffic jams due to ongoing road construction. Jean-Paul Sartre, in his first novel La Nausée, calls Santillana del Mar “the most beautiful village of Spain”, but that may be just a character in the novel speaking (it is not the sort of book that we would have read), and in any case if the best thing that can be said about a place is that Sartre liked it, that's not really a ringing endorsement.

From Santillana del Mar to Santander is approximately a 30-minute drive (as long as your satnav doesn't crash so you're forced to take weird detours while it is finding itself again; thankfully the Spanish are very fond of roundabouts), so eventually we leave the car in a big underground car park in the middle of the city (charges are surprisingly reasonable here at €1.85/hour). From there it is only a very short walk through a park to the Centro Botín, a big new exhibition space/cultural centre right on the water's edge. This was funded by the Botín Foundation (Fundación Botín), which was established in 1964 by Marcelino Botín Sanz de Sautuola and his wife, Carmen Yllera. If that name sounds vaguely familiar, yes, you're right, Marcelino Botín Sanz de Sautuola was the grandson of Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, the discoverer of the Altamira cave paintings. In fact, he was the son of Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola's daughter María, who was the real discoverer of the Altamira cave paintings (it's a small world). Marcelino Botín Sanz de Sautuola became the vice-president of the board of directors of Banco de Santander (back in the 1950s when it still had the de), among many other important positions, and he and his wife, having no children, endowed the Botín Foundation in order to promote the social development of Cantabria. The Botín Centre, which was inaugurated by the Spanish king and queen in 2017, is the foundation's most important project and apart from serving as a place where exhibitions are held, its goals include “using the potential of the arts to awaken creative capacity”, so education and participation are a big part of its activities.

The Botín centre building was designed by the award-winning Italian architect, Renzo Piano, and is quite interesting. It sits on stilts and consists of two separate “spaces” connected what Piano calls a “pachinko” (after the Japanese game), a network of interconnected stairs, bridges, and walkways. If you'd suddenly encounter somebody oriented sideways or upside down like in an M. C. Escher painting you would not be the least bit surprised. This is easily accessible from the street and we spend some time exploring it and enjoying the views from the roof (and, in Anselm's case, taking an incredibly large number of photographs). Afterwards we sit on a park bench in front of the building for a while to rest.

Our next stop is the Museo de Prehistoría y Arqueológia, which is temporarily housed in the basement of the Mercado del Este, a market hall/food court, while a new purpose-built building is being constructed (it is supposed to be ready in 2026). You may think that we have had enough of prehistory on our trip already, but this museum is (a) supposed to be very good, and (b) covers some aspects like the Roman sites in Cantabria which so far we haven't had a chance to explore. Also at €4/person this is positively a steal for what is on offer. The artefacts and explanations are very well presented, and while we give some of the prehistory exhibits only a cursory look, the quality of the Roman displays is also quite high.

The only problem with this and the other sights in Santander is, of course, the siesta – we managed to slot in the archeology museum before the big afternoon break, but we can't see the inside of the cathedral before it closes for the afternoon. Instead we take some time out to treat ourselves to a leisurely and very substantial late lunch at Restaurante la Casa del Indiano, which is part of the Mercado del Este establishment. They offer a “weekend menu”, and Marie picks a Cesar salad (again! This one, unlike yesterday's, actually resembles our conception of this popular delicacy) and the escalope milanesa (what we at home would call a “Viennese schnitzel”) while Anselm has an avocado/gambas/smoked-salmon salad (which is extremely yummy) and an entrecot (steak). Dessert is pineapple for Marie and coconut pudding for Anselm, and we leave the establishment very gingerly and stuffed.

One sight in Santander that does not shut down in the afternoon is the funicular which takes people from the top end of the calle Río de la Pila to the Paseo de General Dávila 78 metres above. This was built in 2008 as a means of public transport but is now also a popular tourist attraction, both because of the views it affords of Santander, the bay, and the mountains beyond and because riding on it is free of charge. The only problem is that calle Río de la Pila is a fairly steep street already and by the time you reach the bottom station of the funicular, you feel that you have done most of the work yourself already. Although to be fair, near the top end of the street there are moving walkways and escalators which take a bit of the sting out of the climb.

After riding the funicular down again (and walking all the way back to the city centre because the moving walkways and escalators only go up) we have another stab at the cathedral (Nuestra Señora de la Asuncíon to its friends) and manage to slip in at 4.50pm. Unfortunately what nobody at the ticket counter (it costs €2/person to visit the cathedral) told us is that on Saturday afternoons, mass starts at 5pm, and of course we don't want to disturb the proceedings by walking around the church. The Romanesque church was built from the late 12th to the 14th century on top of a lower-level church from the earlier 12th century, a Gothic cloister was subsequently added, and the church was expanded further in the 16th and 17th century. It became a cathedral in 1754, when the diocese of Santander was created by Pope Benedict XIV. The cathedral was seriously damaged in the 1893 explosion of the Cabo Machichaco, a steamship which carried more than 40 tons of dynamite when it caught fire in the harbour, and it sustained even more severe damage during the big fire of 1941, which devastated much of the old town centre of Santander. Reconstruction was finished in 1953, but it is still possible to tell the original parts of the church from the reconstructed ones. – We don't want to sit through all of the service, so we leave the church discreetly (fortunately we were sitting on a back bench to have a good look around the building when the proceedings got started) and explore the cloister, which includes various examples of masonry and inscriptions, before taking a look at the lower (earlier 12th century) church, which has a separate entrance from the street and can be visited for free.

It is now getting a bit late and the weather seems to close in. This leaves us a little time to sit on a bench near to the entry to the underground car park and rest before we retrieve the car and drive back to Oreña, with a stop at a supermarket to get some victuals for dinner. We're back at the posada around 7pm, which is as well because we just manage to carry all our stuff in from the car before it starts raining.

6th October – Back to Bilbao

It's time to repack the suitcases and get ready for the last move on this holiday – from the Posada el Pescador in Oreña to the Hotel Photo Zabalburu in Bilbao. Oreña to Bilbao would be a 90-minute drive (more or less) on the motorway, but since the weather is supposed to be reasonably nice today according to yesterday's breakfast TV forecast (as gracefully provided by our hosts in the posada), we decide to take another scenic detour through the mountains of eastern Cantabria. This unites the pleasant with the useful since we can't check in at the hotel in Bilbao before 2pm, anyway, so finding a creative and entertaining method to waste some time on the way is a good idea.

We do take the motorway, though, but only to get past Santander; at Hoznayo we turn off towards the south-east and the typical Cantabrian mountain road with lots of hairpin bends and inclines. At the Alto de Fuente las Varas pass we take a brief stop to walk around, enjoy the scenery, and take a few photographs. This place has clearly seen better days – there is a derelict building which apparently once housed a bar/pizzeria but is now for sale. We briefly debate the merits of trying to reconstruct this and operate it again, but decide that for a variety of reasons (not just money but also the issue of dealing with the Spanish red tape required to get a hospitality business up and running) this is not for us.

The mountain road continues and we spend a few minutes parked in a hillside lay-by while two shifty-looking characters behind us are peering down the slope and listening to the squawks of a walkie-talkie before getting in their separate cars and speeding off in different directions. As we drive down towards the village of Llueva ourselves, we notice that at intervals there are more guys standing by the road brandishing shotguns, and there's also a distinct barking of dogs audible in the distance. Lots of dogs. Vicious-sounding dogs. We suspect that there is some sort of hunt about to start and are eager to leave this area, hopefully before everybody starts shooting at everything that moves.

Our next stop is at the Santuario de la Bien Aparecida, a mountain resort that appears to combine a pilgrimage church with a restaurant. This seems to be convenient not just for religious tourism but also for posh weddings and similar events, and the locality appears to be prepared to cater to very large crowds, certainly from the number of available parking spaces. Also the parasols in front of the restaurant advertising Bollinger champagne suggests that the clientele may have deeper pockets than we do.

Some kilometres on at Alto de La Granja we're taking a quick lunch break with the remainder of yesterday's bread, cheese, and chorizo while some cows are ambling by, before coasting downhill to rejoin the motorway near the town of Castro Urdiales and, eventually, cross back into the Basque country. The run into Bilbao is reasonably straightforward, except that near the end Anselm misses the last right turn into the street where the hotel is, and we're forced to go through the next roundabout (useful things, roundabouts, even if they're a kilometre uphill from where one originally wanted to go) and then an intricate procedure of lane changes and left and right turns before we end up in the reserved parking area in front of our hotel, where patrons get “10 minutes” of time to check in or out. This works pretty well, as does the check-in process even though we converse with the receptionist in Spanish. We seem to be slowly getting the hang of this, now that we're about to go home. Perhaps she is one of the nice people here who will not immediately answer back in English when spoken to in tourist Spanish, or perhaps – since we're in Bilbao – her preferred language is Basque and she is already going out of her way to speak Spanish with us. Anyway, soon afterwards we're installed in our room (which is reasonably nice for a cheap tourist hotel) and the car is installed in the hotel's parking garage (which is not very big and accessed via a steep and curving ramp that seems to be just wide enough for a compact car like the Toyota Yaris – people with big SUVs might have a bit of a problem). Anselm hopes that he will somehow get the car out again when the time comes, but we'll see.

We take an extended siesta after the exertions of the day, and later on decide to go out for Chinese (since the Chinese place in Burgos the other day didn't work out). According to Google there are two Chinese restaurants in the immediate vicinity of the hotel – one commentator calls the area “the Chinatown of Zabalburu” –, and both come highly recommended (apparently the Chinese triads have the Google reviews well in hand). The first is a small place where we can't get a table; the second one is bigger and empty except for a large(ish) Chinese family-type group around a big round table with a lazy Susan in the middle (all the other guests who arrive while we're there also look Chinese). They offer a four-course “house menu” for only €16/person which we're happy to pick up on – we share vegetable spring rolls and dim sum as a starter, fried rice and fried noodles as the second course, Cantonese duck and shrimps gun-bao as the main course, and whipped cream with nuts and flan for dessert, washed down with white wine (Marie) and San Miguel beer (Anselm). The food is very good and the helpings are such that we're leaving the place comfortably filled but not overstuffed. Very nice.

7th October – Funny Bridges and Game of Thrones

We wake up to the sound of rain splashing against our window, and take our time getting ready for the day (we're on holiday after all). The breakfast at Hotel Photo Zabalburu didn't seem like a great value proposition when we made the booking (we're told the Spanish in general don't really bother with breakfast, so perhaps this does not come as a big surprise; it figures if you consider that they only sit down for dinner at 9pm, so perhaps having a big breakfast is not a matter of urgency for them), so we go to a café across the street for coffee, tea, and sandwiches. Then we check out the local “Carrefour” supermarket (without buying anything for the moment).

Anselm does manage to extricate the car from the hotel car park and we're off on what will probably be our last car excursion for this holiday. Fortunately in the meantime it has stopped raining, and we're going north to Getxo, a suburb of Bilbao which features the Puente de Vizkaya (Vizcaya Bridge), the world's oldest “transporter bridge”, a fascinating contraption which is basically a cross between a bridge and a ferry. The river is spanned by a very tall bridge, from which a gondola is suspended in the air by wires. The gondola moves back and forth across the river, so if you want to cross you wait for the gondola to reach the bank you're on, get on the gondola, and have yourself moved across to the other side. The advantage of this construction is that big ships can go under the bridge – which after all is very tall – without the need to pivot a roadway out of the way (think “Tower Bridge” in London). The concept was originally invented by Charles Smith (1844–1882) of Hartlepool but never actually accepted for construction before the Vizcaya Bridge was built – to a design from the Spanish engineer, Alberto Palacio (1856–1939) – in 1893. It inspired several other instances of transporter bridges, although the idea never became really popular; fewer than two dozen were constructed world-wide but only ten are still in use today, two of which are in Germany (in Rendsburg and in Osten). We manage to secure a parking space near the bridge and it occurs to us that there is much less of a queue of cars wanting to cross than we had assumed, so it would have been fun to drive to the other side of the bridge to begin with and cross over in the car. Tickets for this are sold from a vending machine at the foot of the bridge and are basically dirt cheap, unlike the tourist tickets one would need to ride an elevator to the top of the bridge to enjoy the views or walk over to the other side – these are an extortionate €10 and we say “thank you, but no, thank you” to that. We are happy to look at the bridge – incidentally part of UNESCO's world heritage – from the ground.

From the Vizcaya Bridge we drive at a sedate 30 kph (urban Bilbao is 30 kph throughout, which takes a lot of the stress out of driving even if it means getting wherever you want to go is somewhat slow) through shopping streets and leafy suburbs to the Fuerte de la Galea, the only remaining 18th-century military fort in Bizkaia. This was originally built to defend Bilbao harbour against the blockading British navy, but took part in the Carlist civil wars of the mid-19th century and is now in ruins. The weather is still dry but the wind has picked up and one needs to lean against it to stay upright. Marie has something of a run-in with the door of an automated public toilet – she follows the instructions given by a sign on the inside, presses the “open” button and pushes on the door, which catches the wind and explodes outwards, closely followed by herself! Hilarity ensues, and Anselm is glad that he stood well clear of the door. We feel that this place is much too uncomfortable for us and go back to the car.

We're leaving suburban Bilbao now and drive along the coast towards Bermeo, an old fishing/whaling town east of Bilbao (and north of Gernika, which we visited on 28 September). This is a picturesque place but, as usual, parking spots are few and far between. We finally leave the car in a lot that looks reasonably legal (we later notice a sign that says AUTORISADOS, but if it has “auto” in it, it should be for cars, right?) and take a short stroll along the marina promenade and back. Marie notices something wet and strange-looking on her trouser leg (Anselm suspects “seagull” as the possible origin) and Anselm's cap is swept away by the wind and requires a short sprint to recover, so we decide that this place is not for us, either, and continue on our way.

After some futile gallivanting across rural Bizkaia we eventually end up at an overlook near the tongue-twisting village of Gaztelugatxe. This affords splendid views of the sea, the coast and the distant mountains of Cantabria, but most famously of the hermitage of San Juan de Gaztelugatxe, which is on a tiny island just off the coast and whose claim to notoriety is that part of the Game of Thrones TV series was shot there. Having read the books by George R. R. Martin but never watched the TV show ourselves, we cannot for the life of us imagine what part of the epic is set by a little church on an island, but perhaps that's just us (Update: Marie says that according to the Internet the island stands in for Dragonstone, the ancestral home of the Targaryens). The place is certainly popular with lots of people who we assume to be Game of Thrones fans, even if it isn't possible to actually visit the hermitage itself – access to the island is strictly controlled and only a limited number of people get to go there in the summer months, subject to a long waiting list.

From Gaztelugatxe we drive back to Bilbao and the hotel, which works surprisingly well (incidentally we go past the hotel where Anselm stayed on his previous visit to Bilbao for work, in 2016; we wonder why we aren't staying there, but Anselm's conjectures are (a) the place seems to have been modernised in the meantime and may now be too expensive; (b) even in 2016 the place was too expensive for Anselm to stay there on his own time for a few extra days, which is why he went to a different hotel; (c) it wasn't clear whether they have somewhere to park the car). Our previous slot in the parking garage is still free and we take it again, based on the hypothesis that Anselm managed to get from there to the exit once already, so with a little luck he should be able to do it one more time on Wednesday morning when we go to the airport. Then we go to our room for a little siesta.

Dinner tonight is in a Greek restaurant, Kalí Órexi, which is a few minutes' walk from the hotel towards the city centre and offers great food – we have marinated feta cheese as a starter, as well as Greek sausages (something one never sees in Greek restaurants in Germany), then imam (a stuffed eggplant dish that we're more used to in Turkish restaurants, but it's great) and chicken skewers with pita bread, tzatziki, fried potatoes, onions, and tomatoes. Dessert is Greek apple pie and ekmek, which again seems more Turkish to us than Greek but is extremely yummy, plus Greek-style coffee. This is one place we can thoroughly recommend to anyone in Bilbao who is sick of pintxos (although yesterday's Chinese restaurant is certainly a runner-up). We're back at the hotel shortly after 10pm and ready for bed!

8th October – Guggenheim and Pintxos

Today we almost get to sleep in because we have to present ourselves at the entrance to the Guggenheim museum between 10.30am and 11am (they sell timed tickets – you have to arrive within the correct half hour but then you get to stay in the museum for the rest of the day if you like). This is only a 20-minute walk across town, so we leave at 9.30am and take a leisurely breakfast at Panaderia Bertiz, a nice café on the corner of Iparraguirre Kalea and Henao Kalea in Bilbao's New Town. After a slight detour (we got our bearings wrong coming out of the café) we're at the museum at 10.45am and ready to look at some art. This is the first museum we've seen where people's bags are X-rayed when they hand them to the cloakroom attendants, but, unfortunately/sadly, it seems to make sense given the nature and location of the place and the times we're living in. (They also inspect the quite small bags people are actually allowed to take into the museum; Marie's handbag and Anselm's camera bag fortunately pass muster).

It's early in the day – the museum officially opens at 10am – but the place is already abuzz with visitors. We sit on a bench in the foyer just to take in the stunning architecture: The museum was designed by the American architect Frank Gehry on behalf of the Basque government and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, finished on time and under budget, and inaugurated by then-Spanish king Juan Carlos I in 1997. In the second half of the 20th century, Bilbao was a dirty, run-down industrial town of no touristic (or otherwise) interest – with the possible exception of the legendary Athletic Bilbao football club, one of the strongest in Spain even though all players there must be Basque (from Spain or France) –, but the Guggenheim museum helped turn this around (the “Bilbao effect”). It is considered perhaps the most iconic building of the 1990s, and its architecture is still nothing short of fascinating.

That also applies to the art it contains (although we agree that if the Guggenheim Foundation never bothered with actually displaying any art at all, the place would still be worth visiting just for the beauty of the building), which includes a permanent collection of 20th and 21st century “avant-garde” paintings, sculpture, etc. (some of which was specifically created or commissioned for the museum), plus special exhibitions. It is also very easy for the Bilbao museum to get objects on loan from other Guggenheim museums around the world. The first artwork that catches our eye (apart from a gigantic flower-like sculpture on a second floor landing that Anselm forgot to look up and hasn't been able to find out anything about after the fact) is Jenny Holzer's enormous Installation for Bilbao, which consists of a blue-lit room divided by a set of columns displaying creepy messages in English (from the front) and Basque (from behind) running text.

We decide to start with the permanent collection on the second floor, which displays some works by famous artists, both international and Basque/Spanish (we recognise Mark Rothko and Yves Klein, and comment on the fact that as an artist, you know you've got it made when you have found a style that is so iconic everyone will immediately associate it with you). As a photographer Anselm notes that it is quite difficult to get pictures of some of the works of art with nobody standing in the way or walking into the frame, but that on the other hand it is fascinating to take photographs of the people looking at or taking photographs of the art. Consider it a form of “street photography” (which normally isn't Anselm's thing at all, but in this museum everyone is an artist, so who's to complain?). The first floor is currently empty, or to be exact, a new exhibition is being set up for mid-October so there's nothing to see there just now. But of course there is always the building, which offers nooks and crannies and views of the foyer and the city beyond.

Much of the ground floor is taken up by Richard Serra's “post-minimalist” The Matter of Time, which is probably right at the front of the race for largest indoor art installation of the world. It is a sequence of humongous spirals, waves, and ovals constructed from structural steel and takes up an entire very large wing of the museum (that must be one huge ego trip in itself; unfortunately Serra died earlier this year and is no longer in a position to enjoy it). Visitors are encouraged to enter the objects and walk around in them (always keeping in mind that the whole room is video-surveilled, so no shenanigans), and there is also a side room with explanations and an 1:12 scale model of the whole installation. The Matter of Time is the only permanent exhibit in the museum, presumably because it is quite impossible to move in the first place (not without very heavy equipment) and where would you put it, anyway; it's not as if you could loan it to another museum.

On the ground floor there is also a special exhibition with works by Yoshitomo Nara, a Japanese painter/sculptor who studied and worked in Germany for a while but is now back in Japan. Nara apparently had an isolated upbringing with no friends and consequently most of his pictures are of kids who look sad, truculent or even vicious; to the observer they range from the cute all the way to the quite disturbing. On the other hand, though, Nara is involved heavily in projects like improving life for the victims of the 2012 Fukushima earthquake/tsunami disaster and anti-war protests. We're not in any way experts on contemporary Japanese art but this is a fascinating exhibition; if you want to find out more, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao web site hosts a virtual tour which is quite well made.

All in all we spend over three hours in and around the Guggenheim museum (of course the architecture must also be appreciated from the outside, and there are more works of art to look at, such as Anish Kapoor's Tall Tree & The Eye, a close-up photo of which by Anselm made it into one of the calendars his employer used to distribute to its customers, or Louise Bourgeois' Maman, a giant spider-like thing which Anselm – certainly not a Bourgeois fan in any way, shape, or form – thinks is extraordinarly deranged and creepy, just like every single one of her other works that he's seen.)

We sit outside for a bit in the sun, enjoying the weather that is way better than the forecast had said the day before, and then continue up the Nervión river towards the Old Town, crossing on the Zubizuri (Basque for “white bridge”, an elegant design by Santiago Calatrava) accompanied by the lively strains of a Basque bagpiper, and eventually arrive at the Plaza Nueva in the heart of the Old Town. This is pintxo bar territory and we're ready for lunch, so we stop at Iturriza Taberna for some pintxos and a drink. Once again we flout the Basque tradition of changing bars between pintxos and simply enjoy a selection of what this place has to offer (they're all very good) before exploring the siete calles (“seven streets”, the locals' name for the old part of Bilbao) some more. The city started out in the 1300s with a sea port and a church for Santiago pilgrims and gradually grew from there, first with three streets and then later four more, hence siete calles. The pilgrim church was rebuilt in the 15th century in a Gothic style, declared a basilica minor (i.e., church that the Pope especially likes, and which is supposed to be especially nice to the Pope in return) in 1819, and eventually became a cathedral – only in 1949, though, when the diocese of Bilbao was established. Visiting it costs €6 (with an audio guide) and we've had enough museum-type stuff for the day so decide to give this one a miss. Instead, we walk through the old town to the Mercado de la Ribera, or “riverside market hall” – which apparently has been done up since Anselm visited in 2016 and now looks very prim and proper –, cross the river again and go down the calle San Francisco to Zabalburu square and our hotel.

Dinner tonight consists of some goodies from the supermarket in the Zabalburu centre – after last night's sumptuous Greek meal, Anselm doesn't feel like going out for another big dinner, and Marie goes along with that –, and we're watching the news and a political talk show on the Tagesschau 24 live stream and later the two episodes of University Challenge that we'd missed during our holiday. In both cases, the Oxbridge colleges win – Anselm doesn't quite understand why different Oxbridge colleges get to field individual teams, when, e.g., Durham (also a college-based university and one of the competitors in today's episodes) can only send one team for the whole university, but that's probably because the people in charge at the BBC are all from either Oxford or Cambridge themselves and so these universities get special privileges. Boo. Other than that, our suitcases are (mostly) packed and we're ready to go to the airport tomorrow.

9th October – Going Home

Today it's time to pack up the remainder of our stuff, do a quick provisions run to the supermarket, take a few photographs of the exterior of the hotel, pick up our bags, check out of the hotel and maneuvre the car out of the garage of the hotel once more (fortunately again without dents or scratches, which would have really sucked on the last day). We're driving out of Bilbao to the airport, or to be exact, first to a petrol station near the airport to top up the tank and then to the rental agency to return the car, all of which goes through without a hitch. While we're waiting for the courtesy van to the airport it starts raining.

Having arrived at the airport (which is only five minutes or so from the car rental place by van) the first thing we see is the departures board which says that our 2.10pm flight to Frankfurt is delayed until 4.55pm. That sucks, but not as badly as a bunch of earlier domestic flights on the Spanish discount carrier, Vueling, which have been summarily cancelled. (We hear announcements over the airport PA telling the passengers in question to find their replacement buses; we wonder whether it is better to have to go from Bilbao to, say, Granada by bus than to wait for the next flight with a vacancy. Probably the bus.) So, something's clearly going on. We check our suitcases and go through security. (Anselm's rucksack, which is – as usual – filled to the brim with electronics and camera equipment, attracts the particular curiosity of the security agents, needs to be partly unpacked and repacked, and then we need to go back from the “sort yourselves out” table to the security scanner station to pick up all the stuff that, in the chaos, had been inadvertently left there unnoticed. That would be the big telephoto lens (expensive) and Anselm's stuffed penguin and rabbit (irreplaceable), so it's always good to check. There is a lot to be said for the new-style machines they have in Frankfurt where you don't need to unpack anything.) After that, the first thing we need is coffee (or peppermint tea in Anselm's case, who notes that in the gate area, a cup of hot water for tea is actually more expensive than a cup of coffee – strange!) and a breather. The weather is getting progressively worse, and more flights are being postponed or cancelled.

Eventually we find out several things:

• The weather is so terrible that “our” aircraft doesn't even take off from Frankfurt for the time being; and
• Lufthansa graciously sends us a message saying that we each have €15 credit in any of the restaurants and food-selling shops in the gate area, based on our boarding passes. This is nice although we suspect that at airport prices this will be enough for a tiny sandwich and a small bottle of water.

So we settle in for a longer wait and ponder whether we're going to spend another night in Spain, courtesy of Lufthansa (which wouldn't be a huge problem in principle; neither of us needs to go back to work before Monday, but of course we would prefer to sleep in our own beds tonight). While Marie watches over our stuff and – more importantly – the comfy seats we've been occupying for the last couple of hours, Anselm goes to see what our boarding cards will buy and is pleasantly surprised when the checkout clerk at the Giraffe “restaurant”, where Anselm has picked up what he thinks is €30's worth in food and drink – two salads, a ham sandwich, and a half-litre of Coke –, tells him that one boarding card is good for stuff to the value of €32 (the actual total price of Anselm's load is is €32.90, so he is happy to pay €0.90 for the lot) and the other boarding card would pay for another €32 of more stuff. Anselm is certainly not going to argue with that, so he takes away his haul and then comes back later for more food to take on the flight – we're actually in the unusual situation of having way more things to eat that we can or want to eat at the moment, which in the departure area of an airport is obviously a luxury problem.

As far as the flight situation is concerned, the aircraft has now taken off in Frankfurt and we're mildly optimistic that if it comes to Bilbao it will also leave again, ideally with us on board. The weather has been improving somewhat but is now even more terrible than earlier, so the suspense remains at least for a while, until the fog seems to be lifting and we can actually see the hills on the other side of the runway again. The plane eventually turns up at 5.50pm and we're asked to go to a gate and wait there; eventually there are buses (all the comfy jet-bridge positions near the terminal are taken by other aircraft) and at 6.45pm or so we're safely installed in our seats and ready to leave.

The flight itself is unproblematic; the captain issues a lengthy explanation/apology about how the remnants of hurricane Kirk have been buffeting Bilbao airport, and how that airport in particular is susceptible to problems with winds from the south. We're ready to believe that, given our extra circuit coming there two weeks ago. Lufthansa wanted to be reasonably sure that the plane would be able to land – the day before yesterday, the same flight had to be redirected to Madrid – and therefore delayed the departure from Frankfurt until the weather gave signs of improving. So far, so good. The return journey to Frankfurt is quick – only 90 minutes (as opposed to 2 hours coming to Bilbao), and when we're in Frankfurt nobody seems to be expecting us yet, so since we're on an apron position, too, it takes a few minutes for the stairs and buses to arrive. By 9.30pm we have our suitcases back (for once, they appear on the conveyor belt next to each other) and, having decided not to bother with the suburban train/tram schedule tonight, are sitting in a taxi to Mainz. We arrive around 10pm. What a day. What a holiday! We definitely did have a great time but are also glad to be home as we collapse on the sofa.