On August 10th we took off on a 9 day road trip to the north Atlantic coast of Spain. This post will just cover the first few days of the trip. Check back next week for more details of the trip.

The car rental experience went off without a hitch and we were soon on our way to Bilbao for the first 2 nights.

Pulling in to Bilbao and trying to locate the apartment where we were staying had to be one of the most confusing experiences of our lives. One lesson learned was to use the navigation on the car rather than on our mobil phones. Google maps tells you to turn on street names which we found extremely confusing because they were in Euskara which is what the Basque’s call their language.  The Google voice garbles those names in a most confusing manner, while the nice British lady on our car navigation system simply told us which direction to turn at the next intersection.

One of the first things we did while in Bilbao was to try some of the local cuisine. In fact, we asked our host if there were any restaurants nearby and she told us about one a few doors down but said their kitchen would be closing soon. So she called and asked them to stay open a bit longer so we could get something to eat! She even recommended some things to try. Chipirones was one of the things we tried. They are deep fried baby squid and I like them better than calamari. We also had stuffed mushrooms and fried pimientos. Roy even got a lesson from a fellow patron of the bar on the proper way to eat a fried pimiento.

The next day (Aug 11) we set out for a place that I learned about from my computers screen saver! When I looked up where this amazing place was and saw that it was on the north coast of Spain, I knew we had to visit it. It is San Juan de Gaztelugatxe. It is an island that is connected to the mainland by a stone bridge. There is a tiny church at the top that has artifacts from shipwrecks mounted all over the walls. It was a perfect crystal clear day for the hike. We hiked a couple of kilometers to the bridge and then climbed 241 steps to the top. It was breathtaking in more ways than one!

Later that day we visited Salinas de Añana. This place we learned about from reading some tourist info handout we acquired earlier in the day.  This village is built up the hillside from a salt works that was used since Spain was a Roman colony and there is evidence that it was used as long as 7,000 years ago.

There are brine springs in the area with a salt concentration of about 25%, and until the 1950s when salt became much more readily available, the salt export business was the primary source of income for the area.

This is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  We went on a fascinating tour that lasted an hour.  Until  the 1950’s or so all of these works were constructed from either stone, wood or clay.  The wooden sluiceworks in place to direct brine to the salt pans are in some cases over 300 years old – the wood protected from rot by the salt in the brine.

We arrived back in Bilboa after dark – too exhausted from the day’s hikes to explore the pintxo bars that abound in the city.  Did we mention that our lodgings were on a pedestrian lane and the parking was 1km away?  In any case, we only had energy to stagger to the nearest bar for a bit of supper.  There were a few pintxos left on the counter, including this version of a “Gilda”, reportedly named after Rita Hayworth’s character in the movie ‘Gilda‘. The reason being that this pintxo was ‘verde, salado y picante’ … 

More about pintxos in a later post…

The next day (Saturday, Aug 12) we visited the Bilboa Guggenheim Museum of Art (photos above) and then headed west — towards Oviedo.  We will cover that in a future post…