Northern Spain – Getaria in Basque Country

 

This morning I woke early.  I generally wake early.  I really wanted a cup pf tea but it was only a small room and I feared that firing up the electric kettle would disturb Kim so I dressed as quietly as I possibly could, negotiated the creaky floorboards and left the room.  I thought that I might take a walk down to the harbour to see if there was any fishing boat activity.

The sun was shining, the sky was blue, the sea was blue and fishing boat crews were completing early morning activities.  A team of men carefully landed and folded an empty net and then went off somewhere, I suspect for breakfast or a sleep or maybe breakfast and then a sleep.

Around the port are old fish market warehouses which are no longer required and are undergoing restoration or maybe conversion into tourist attractions and harbour side restaurants because they are are no longer required for their original purpose because on the far side of the harbour is a modern fish processing factory of industrial proportions where all of the catch is delivered and processed and then efficiently dispatched all across Spain in a fleet of refrigerated HGVs.

No chance of going inside to take a look like this.

Fishing here is big business.  Very big business. After Galacia further west along the coast, the Basque fishing fleet is the second largest in Spain. Although it only represents 2 % of the number of vessels, it has 19 % of the tonnage and 14 % of the power. In the harbour this morning the huge steel clad trawlers were laid up, their job done for now, ready to sail again later no doubt.

In Spain they eat a lot of fish but not as much as people in Portugal who eat more fish than any other in mainland Europe, fifty-seven  kilograms per head per year which is like eating your way through an average sized cod or tuna,  Norway is second, Spain third and then France and Finland.

In the UK we like to think of ourselves as fish eaters and we voted to leave Europe on the basis of getting our fishing fleets back but we only eat cod or haddock or anything else from the same genus ( hake, colin, pollack etc.)  and on average we eat a miserly fifteen kilograms per person per year.

In mainland Europe, those who eat least fish are Albanians at only five kilograms followed by people from Serbia and North Macedonia and what is surprising is that none of these are really that far from the sea.

The most popular fish in the UK is cod and in the USA it is prawns (shrimp), Canada and in Australia it is salmon; in France it is sea bass and in Spain hake.  The most popular Christmas Day meal in Australia is prawns (shrimp).

After an hour or so I returned to the room, Kim was awake so I could safely boil the kettle.  She had improved and I told her where I had been and she said she wanted to do that so after a croissant for breakfast we went out and I did it all over again.

Mid morning and the port was getting busy, day trippers of course but also workers.  Sitting under umbrellas to shield from the sum local women were busy mending nets.  The nets were huge so how they knew which bit to mend I have no idea but they seemed to know what they were doing.

I used my Google translator to tell them that I lived in a fishing port town called Grimsby in the east of England, they smiled very politely and carried on working.  They had no idea what or where I was talking about.

This is Grimsby…

This is Getaria…

Rising above the port was a headland walk.  It looked tough but Kim declared herself fit enough to tackle it so off we went.

It was just a gentle climb and every twist and turn along the path provided a view or photo opportunity.

A rock carving…

And an eagle…

So, we walked to the top to an abandoned lighthouse and what was once a cafeteria, admired the views and walked back down again.

At the bottom of the path there was a seafood restaurant, not one of the posh ones in the town centre with tablecloths and high prices but rustic and reasonable and full of local people so we took that as a good sign and ordered plates of  squid and shellfish. It was so good that we agreed we should return later for evening meal.

 

 

Northern Spain – Fishing Port of Getaria and an Around the World Sailor

“…lively commentaries on village happenings relieved the monotony of net-mending to which many women were obliged to devote the major part of the daylight hours.  Net-mending left the brain free to create its own fancies and to work on the raw material of speculation and known fact from which the tissue of gossip was woven.” – Norman Lewis – “Voices of the Old Sea”

After three days in Labastida it was time to move on.  I had liked it,  it was the sort of place that could go on a ‘must go back to one day’ list but I won’t go back because I fear that if I did it will have changed dramatically from how I remember it.  I’ll just keep it locked away in my memory.  I had even walked in the footsteps of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Kim’s back had made some small improvement, it is amazing what a bag of frozen peas can do to provide relief so we cleared the apartment, I put more air in the tyres, probably now dangerously over-inflated and we set off north towards the coast.  We had done the turf and now it was time for the surf.

Northern Spain is a wonderful place to drive a car, the scenery is immense, Alpine villages, lakes and mountains and an ever changing sky, sometimes clear, sometimes cloudy and sometimes bleak but always interesting.  The lace bonnets on the mountain tops often replaced by unwelcome black skull caps. 

Sometimes challenging, especially bouncing about on over inflated tyres the drive north is fascinating along roller coaster roads sometimes flying like eagles, sometimes burrowing like moles, the road twisted and swooped, turned and soared into the sky and then disappeared into sinuous tunnels and always with more curves than Marilyn Monroe.

We had considered driving to San Sebastián but we had been there before and we didn’t have a wonderful experience so instead choose a seaside town further west and closer to our return airport of Bilbao.

After an hour or so we arrived at the coast,  The sun was shining, the beaches looked biscuit caramel immaculate and the sea was the sort of soft gentle blue of dreams.  It looked wonderful, good weather at last as we made our way into the fishing port of Getaria, parked in the harbour  where Kim dispensed with the soggy bag of once frozen peas and we made our way to the village centre.

Getaria is an up-market sort of place which is popular with day-trippers out of  San Sebastián and Bilbao.

And by our lunchtime arrival the place was already buzzing with visitors competing for tables at the seafood restaurants.  Along the narrow streets grills were sizzling with fresh fish and the harbour side restaurants were rapidly filling up as visitors bagged the best tables.  We planned to eat later so this lunchtime found a bar with a table in the sunshine, sat and simply enjoyed the view over the harbour.

It struck me as the equivalent of somewhere like Padstow in Cornwall but without the riff-raff, the sort of place that if he were Basque that Rick Stein would have opened a seafood restaurant and various other shops and establishments.  Luckily Rick Stein isn’t Basque so it is spared his sort of commercial expansion and exploitation.

Close to our lunchtime bar of choice was an impressive statue, a statue of a sailor called Juan Sebastián Elcano (Elkano in Basque) who I had obviously never heard of before but everywhere I visit has a surprising story to tell.

Elcano sailed with Ferdinand Magellan on his voyage of circumnavigation in 1519-22, the first ever to achieve the feat as the captain of one of the five ships of the expedition.  Magellan gets the headlines for organising it all but he himself never actually completed the voyage because like most other sailors accompanying him he died on route, he himself meeting a bloody and rather grisly end somewhere in the Philippine  Islands and it was Elcano who actually completed the famous voyage of discovery.  Who knew that I wonder?

Here he is…

As the sun began to sink and the shadows lengthened eventually subsuming our table we thought it time to locate our accommodation.  It was close to the harbour and although tiny was perfectly adequate and acceptable for just a couple of nights.  Kim settled in and rested her back and I tested mine by making three return trips up and down several steps to the car park in the harbour to transport our luggage from the car to the room.

Later we returned to the streets and there was quite a transformation, the day visitors had left, the fish grills were closing with only dying embers as a reminder of a frantic lunchtime and the once vibrant bars were practically empty.  We needed somewhere to eat but the reasonably priced lunchtime menus had gone and  it was all more expensive.  We read and rejected and eventually ended up in a sort of  popular Mexican fast food sort of place where to be fair we had a very good meal.

It had been a good day and we had enjoyed it and looked forward to a second day in Getaria tomorrow.