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.