More Basque Country

text by Tim; photos by Terre

We left the Basque Country on Sunday morning, December 11, after a week there: three days in Bilbao, three in Vittoria-Gasteiz, and two in Luyando.

Bilbao was basically a washout—literally. It rained—hard—practically the entire time we were there. We were cooped up in our hotel room almost all the time. We finally ventured downtown as we were leaving the city. We caught a glimpse of the Gugenheim art museum. Well, more than a glimpse as we parked across the river and ate our lunch. It is quite a striking building, a work of art on its own. But then we hit the road for Vittoria-Gasteiz.

On the way there we had to cross a 700 metre pass where it was threatening to snow. Our rather worn front tires made us nervous. The back ones were fairly new, but the front ones were definitely ready for replacement. We moved that way up our priority list and despite two intervening national holidays where everything was closed, we managed to get new tires before we left Vittoria-Gasteiz. Of course, we’ve not seen any snow, but we are ready!

Vittoria itself was a delightful surprise. It is a charming city, the provincial capital. It lies in a valley at about 500 metres elevation. Our host, José Luiz, works for a shipping company. He had a few days off as Tuesday, Dec 6, was Constitution Day, and Thursday, Dec 8, was the feast of the Immaculate Conception, both holidays. Like many Spaniards, he was also taking off the day in between - a bridge day - so he had lots of time to spend with us. If a person takes the rest of the days of the week off, it's called a viaduct.

Every evening, on the car-free mall area downtown, hundreds of people are out walking with their families, even on weeknights. The stores may be closed, but the place is jumpin’!The restaurants were crowded. A trio of two hot accordions and a base were just jammin’ it up. And everywhere people were in a holiday mood.

The local wine producers were putting on a wine tasting for the residents of the area and had put up large tents around the mall for folks to come to sample the vintages. We saw many people with their wine glasses in felt bags strung around their necks. This used to be potato-growing country, apparently, but Jose Luiz says that EU bureaucrats in Brussels decided there were other areas better suited to growing spuds and this area has converted largely to other crops, including a now thriving wine business.

On Friday, December 9, after we got our tires, we moved to Amaia’s place in Luyanda, a village in a mountain valley. She is a woman about Terre’s age who works in accounting. Amaia has lived her entire life in this village. She and three of her four siblings were born in a house just a few blocks from where she now lives.

But where she now lives is a sign of what is happening to her little village. She lives in one of eight twelve-unit apartment blocks put up at the edge of town. And there are others throughout the valley. The commuter trains to Bilbao make it a 20-minute trip to downtown and with house and apartment prices in the city outrageous—we’re talking half-a-million euros for a 120 sq. m. apartment (1300 sq. ft., $600,000 US)—folks are looking to places like Luyando if they hope to ever own their own homes. Amaia’s rural valley is quickly becoming a suburb.

On Saturday, she took us to see “el nacio del Nervión,” the birth of the Nervión river. This is a spectacular waterfall that plunges 600 metres, almost 2000 feet, from a hanging valley. Most of the year, she told us, it is dry. We were lucky and caught it on a wet day. It was truly breathtaking. I don’t think our photos can begin to capture it.

On Sunday, we were supposed to head west to Gallicia, the upper left-hand corner of Spain, but one of the neat things about this trip is we can do what we want, and we found we didn’t really want to go that way. So we turned the other way and pointed Yoda east, for Barcelona. It was a long day, almost 600 km., but the change in the landscape was quite marked. We went from damp, dark forested mountains, something like the coast of northern California, to land that looked more like what I had expected of Spain—dry, semi-arid, scrub.

And on some of the ridgelines are these massive black silhouettes of bulls. Now what is that about? Darned if I know, but they seem to be all over the country. I’ll let you know what they’re about when I find out.

One last thing. Before we left Vittoria-Gasteiz, we had decided to enjoy one of Europe’s truly cross-cultural experiences, something you can only do over here: go to a dubbed American movie! We chose Jodie Foster’s latest, Desparecido! (Disappeared assuming the name is the same in English) about a woman whose little girl goes missing on a trans-Atlantic flight. We figured “How difficult can it be to translate this one?”

We were right. The movie was so predictable that you could have watched it in any language. Woman’s husband dies in Berlin. She and daughter flying back to America with the body. Child goes missing; how and why is never explained. We checked that with some Spaniards, by the way, at the end. They didn’t know either. Anyway, nobody can find her. “How can a seven-year-old girl just disappear on an airplane?” She freaks. Nice looking guy in the row behind her turns out to be air marshall, who, in my opinion, should have handcuffed her long before he did. Anyway, she manages to cause havoc all over the plane. She shorts out a bunch of circuits, could have easily crashed the damn thing, and she’s still not cuffed to her seat! They tell her that her daughter is not on the manifest. “Your daughter was killed with your husband.” “No! She came on board with me.” But no one has seen the little girl. The woman is obviously crazy. Yada, yada, yada.

Could you have written this in your sleep? Could the seven-year-old girl in the script have written it in her sleep? No translator needed.

We had a blast!

Maybe we’ll get our courage up to go to a purely Spanish movie in Spanish soon. But not yet. In Belgium, we watched a movie in Italian and English with Dutch subtitles. Luc was translating for us the parts that weren’t in English, and I got pieces of the Italian. But it was exhausting for all of us. So, no pure Spanish for now.

By the way, the quality of the dubbing was incredibly good. Generally, you could not tell. The dubbing actors and the translators had worked hard to match the new dialogue to the old so that the consonants—which are the sounds we make with our lips and that you can see—remained the same or similar. If you can pretty much match the consonants, it won’t look dubbed. Ninety-five percent of the time, this did not.

Next stop: Barcelona.