Fall in Euskadi

Plentzia
Kristine and I!
The view from the cliffs
Castillo de Butron




Fall in the Basque Country is amazing. Some days are warm, some are crisp. The trees and flowers and still in bloom; the leaves don't change colour until late October or November. And so far, it hasn't rained THAT much.

We've been taking advantage of the fall weather and of Bilbao's being surrounded by coast and mountains over the last few weeks. Some are regular Sunday strolls, like a walk up Artxanda (and a funicular ride down). We've taken in the coast via Muskiz Beach and the trail from Sopelana to Plentzia along the cliffs. We walked more than 700m straight up for the views from the top of Pagasarri, and followed the seemingly never-ending trail from Plentzia along the river to the Nintendo-castle Butron.

Basque hikers are hardcore. Young or old, they all get up early and do their hiking to be back home for a 2 or 3pm lunch. Then, on some of the more accessible trails you see people out for an after-lunch stroll in the late afternoon. We usually manage to time things so that we are just heading out when the hardcore hikers are heading home, active during everyone else's siesta time.

The best feature of hiking around here is that trails often lead from village to village. Which means that when you get to your destination there's always a pub or cafe where you can refuel before the trip back.

12 de octubre

Día de la Hispanidad, Día de la Raza, Fiesta Nacional de España--whatever name you give to the 12th of October, it remains a national holiday, complete with military parade in Madrid, celebrating the arrival of Christopher Colombus on American soil and beginning of Spanish colonization. Schools, businesses and public offices were closed for the day.

But if you don't exactly identify as Spanish, or don't think the beginning of colonization is something to be celebrated, the holiday isn't that meaningful, though a day off is always appreciated. But if you're a Basque who doesn't identify as Spanish, and on top of that feel some antagonism toward the Spanish state, it would be impossible to let the symbolism of October 12 and its flaunting of Spanish dominance pass by quietly.

Some students at my school organized a protest encouraging students to...come to school on October 12. The doors were locked, the teachers were at home, but some students showed up in a kind of symbolic eff-you to the Dia de la hispanidad. I have to hand it to these students; everyone accuses teens of expressing their adolescent rebelliousness by half-heartedly taking on the hippest political/social cause of the day. But these students who came to school on a day off are obviously 100% dedicated to what they believe in.

Muskiz

The 6000 or so residents of Muskiz must have crapped their pants 30 years ago when Petronor finished building their giant oil refinery outside town. The quaint downtown, the soft-sand beach ringed by green hills and cliffs and the river that snakes between them are dwarfed by the tanks, smokestacks and machinery of the several-kilometres sqare refinery and chemical plant .

Minutes from the Vizcaya/Cantabria border, Muskiz's industrial installations blink and hum, grabbing your attention as you pass on the highway. I'd heard about their great beach, though, so Kristine and I took advantgae of a warm, late-September afternoon to check it out. The 4km walk between the train station and the beach followed a dirt path along the quiet Rio Barbadun. It was early-fall lush: cows and sheeping grazing in small-scale farms, reeds and trees growing out of the riverbank into a canopy over the trail, splashes of purple and pink flowered vines.

And the whole walk we were never more than a couple hundred metres away from the towering, noisy monstrosity of a petrol refinery. From the town right to the coast. We were blown away by the sheer hugeness of it. (Check out the relative size of the villages of Muskiz, Pobena, and San Julian compared to the refinery, with its dozens of round white oil tanks, on the map.)

But somehow, magically, when you got to the beach, from the vantage point of a towel in the sand, a chance combination of a couple of jutting, stony hills and a patch of trees blocked Petronor from view. You could look out at the ocean, pretend the salty wind fully masked the chemically odour, and concentrate on more important things: e.g. seeing which of the September surfers braving the waves that day could ride the waves the longest.