Spain 2025, Part IV: Against Dereliction

This is the fourth and final piece in a series that began here.

Sated on San Sebastián and ready to head the province of La Rioja, Andrew and I pick up a rental Cupra, which is Spain’s effort at a sporty car. We roll down a winding Basque tollway and up into the Cantabrian Mountains, where we seek out the Salto del Nervión. In wet times this is the highest waterfall in Spain, but today, it is just a pretty cliff. We chat with two older ladies who are taking a new car for a spin and get some sense of how it should look. The forests are lush, the karst formations jarring, and a few toros wander on to the road. We are back in rural Spain.

The number of elderly people who get out for this several-mile hike is a statement on Spanish superiority. The life expectancy in this country is 84, between second and sixth in the world depending on the source and inclusion of micro-states, even though booze consumption per capita is not low and smoking remains more ubiquitous than it is across the pond. The culprits would appear to include a lot of walking, a lot of olive oil, and a densely knit lifestyle that keeps people enmeshed in social networks long into old age. On the streets of Briones, the small town where we spend the next two nights, the average age appears to be about 70. But everyone is still shuffling about in their little friend groups, gathering on squares, no one warehoused away or struggling much beyond the inevitable physical toll. Almost no one is overweight, and the drinking seems like a steady social activity instead of a lonely or perpetual rush to blackout. There is an art to living well to a ripe old age here, and it comes not through self-denial but through keeping everything in its place.

Speaking of old, the Monasterio de San Millán qualifies: the twin monasteries of Suso and Yuso date to the sixth century, and we stop by Yuso, which is open for tours. The first recorded writing of Spanish (and of Basque) took place here, an attempt by a monk to bridge the Latin of the church and the vulgar Latin of a Visigoth-ruled Iberia around the year 1000. It is also home to one of the few complete sets of giant books of Gregorian chants for each day of the year, all stashed in a specially built chamber to control their humidity. Yuso’s 11 remaining Augustinians honor San Millán, a hero from that area who, like St. James along the nearby Camino de Santiago, got drafted into slaying some Moors on behalf of the Reconquista. A few pilgrims have made the side trip up here, including a Spaniard who started in Barcelona and a couple from Iowa City for whom we translate the tour. I feel the pull to don a pack and start walking.

As it is, however, driving around Rioja is a beautiful way to spend a few days. Roads swing their way around ridges and vineyards, a view off to the next hilltop town or castle always somewhere in sight. Clouds hang over the mountains to the north, much closer in person than they appear on a map, and the valley of the Ebro River drinks in the sunlight that filters through them. Briones, where we stay at a restored old stone manor named Santa Maria Briones, is a quiet hilltop town that feels frozen in a different era. Once upon a time it was an outpost in competition with the even larger castle across the Ebro in San Vicente de la Sonsierra, a contested zone between the kingdoms of Castile and Navarre. Now, it feels about as far from war as a place can be, basking in wine country sun as the bell on the great old church tolls out the quarter hours and its residents shuffle into their later days.

We are of course in Rioja to drink wine. We schedule three tastings, and the two on day one are contrasts in the scale available here. First we visit Miguel Merino, a small producer that we can walk to in Briones, where it’s just us and Lorena, one of the five people employed by this operation founded by an exporter and carried on by his son, relying on small batches and doing some experimentation as they get into many Michelin-starred restaurants. Later, we tour the Marqués de Riscal, an industrial-scale pillar of Rioja complete with a Frank Gehry hotel reminiscent of the Guggenheim, with a dash of wine purple added to the color palette here. The place is massive, a winemaking machine in full force, though the Marquis himself still sits in a corner with some friends sampling the product. Up in Haro, one of the larger towns in the region, we stroll past some of the other big Rioja names in its neighborhood of bodegas and do lunch on a convenient patio at Muga.

Our two nights here, meanwhile, are a marked contrast. On the first we eat at Allegar, the restaurant at Santa Maria Briones. Seventeen small plates come out through the course of the tasting menu, each with a major element from Rioja itself, along with wines to match. The three-hour tour is a culinary peak of a trip of nonstop great food. The next night, Andrew, a diehard fan of Tottenham Hotspur, must find a spot where we can watch Spurs’ Europa League final against Manchester United in Bilbao. We wind up in an Haro sports bar surrounded by large, booze-fueled Spanish men. They approve of our allegiances (“fook Mahnchesta”) and provide some high-fives when Spurs, one spot above relegation from the Premier League, improbably hold off United in a fairly disgusting soccer game. The aesthetics do not matter to Andrew, who is giddy, and I am amused as we watch Spanish sports talk into the night.

We have one final wine tasting on our way south back toward Madrid. When we pull up in the town of Sojuela, I’m worried I’ve made a mistake: the address for the Ojuel winery takes us to an unmarked door on a nondescript house in a town much further off the beaten path than Briones; the website is down and the phone number we have doesn’t work. But an ancient lady calls down to us from the upper floor and says someone is on her way, and before long Mila, the daughter-in-law of our greeter and the mother of the winemaker, is taking us on what is, by several orders of magnitude, the most memorable wine tasting tour I’ve ever had.

Mila takes us in her car up to a vineyard. This is an all-natural, all-organic operation, and all Ojuel bottles feature a different butterfly in honor of these pollinators. The contrast with the neighboring field is striking, these gnarled smaller vines with weeds tangled around their bases separated by a wall of vegetation from the monoculture beyond. (Grapes from the first few rows are sold to other winemakers who don’t care as much about purity, lest any pesticides have drifted in.) This plot’s history is deep, as a stone set here traces its owners back for generations and lists the varietals grown here, though two of the nine are not listed because they have been effectively lost to time. We learn of how Mila’s son Miguel did some oral history work, pulling out old wives’ tales of the supurao wine made for holidays and special celebrations in the youths of some village elders, and reproducing their methods by hanging grapes to dry to produce that rare beast, a delicious sweet wine.

For the tasting, Mila throws a few bottles in a tin pail and takes us on a walk to a couple tiny old bodegas dug into the hill, a gathering place where locals would create their own stocks back before mass commercialization, where people would gather for a few drinks in the climate-controlled holes slowly dug out with pickaxes. Those not associated with Ojuel are now rotting away, but these have been lovingly restored and put to use aging barrels. Ojuel rebels against the Rioja control board, experimenting with new things; at one point, Mila pulls out a turkey baster and dips it into a barrel so she can draw out some wine and offer it to us. This is deep winemaking, pulling on old tradition in ways that can now feel radical, experimentation and rejuvenation and daring to let things be different. Long live the Ojuels of the wine world, in firm revolt against the unthinking present and the decay of rural Spain.

After Ojuel, it is time to return to Madrid. Our Spanish road trip is smooth sailing, packing a lot into a few hours. Just south of Sojuela the N-111 winds along red cliffs dotted with green reminiscent of the American Southwest; soon, it climbs up a long cut through the Sierra de Cebollera, where spring is still in its earliest stages. We descend to the plain, try to figure out how the city of Soria functions when every single road is under construction, and then cruise easily across Castilla y León and Castilla-La Mancha, that rolling open green country that could have been dropped in from the Great Plains. Spanish highway etiquette is immaculate, everyone weaving in and out of appropriate lanes based on their speeds. Over four days of driving Google Maps has the occasional misfire where it sends us down some very sleepy, bumpy back lane and the narrowing of streets through town centers is at times harrowing, but all in all I enjoy my time behind the wheel in Spain.

Andrew and I get to do a circuit of central Madrid together and share one final meal before my very early flight out the next morning. Unfortunately this is where I hit the wall, so I do not have my reflections in good order that evening, but it has been a joy to take this trip with Andrew. We survived a two-week road trip together as we both shifted between phases of life in 2016, and we are able to jump back in and seamlessly do it again now that we have attained some modicum of professional stability. Of course sharing tight European lodging with even a good friend for ten days will reveal some neuroses and see us both cycle through moments when exhaustion or annoyance catches up with us, but we share a commitment to the pace, a hunger to eat and drink it all up in short order, and that can power us both through anything that might drag us down.

We are a funny pair here, more capable in Spanish than the vast majority of tourists, one who could pass for a German and speaks like a Mexican alongside a half-Filipino who speaks like an Argentine, and I am amused by how often we confuse people. At Ojuel, Mila tells us Americans are the best tourists they get, respectful and curious about experimentation and eager to spread the word to their friends. It is not hard to juxtapose us against the loud, boozy British who make no effort to speak Spanish and the famously insular French. The Spanish resignation to bad tourists is at its worst in San Sebastián, where some waitstaff continue to talk to us in awful English even when we demonstrate some Spanish capability, but when we show that clichéd American enthusiasm for taking stabs at new things in Rioja, the people we meet are delighted. Of course the American tourists who get to second-tier European destinations clutching Rick Steves guidebooks and lists of Michelin-recognized restaurants are unlikely to be of the same demographic as those who go to Gulf Shores for spring break; this filtering is not present among the British, for whom Spain can be a quick weekend jaunt. But I do think there is something uniquely fetching in an American hunger to absorb the European deep histories and cultures that our imperial reality so often buries.

I am on that nonstop search on this trip even though I don’t think I am ever quite at one hundred percent. I develop a gross nagging cough early on, while my back does not seem to like the backpack I wear; bad sleep, a sporadic but lifelong scourge of mine, returns at times. For a second straight trip I make a dumb mistake with my writing tablet, this time losing its stylus (replacement cost: a disgusting $150) on the first plane flight. Because of that I never hit the reflective rhythm I aspire to, don’t have my thoughts organized the way I should when Andrew the lawyer probes me about our trip or our world beyond us. I worry I am too much a chameleon, am not reflecting as thoroughly as I should on recent developments in work and in the personal sphere, am only barely scratching a few deep yearnings I find welling up within.

But that is alright. These annoyances show I know I have work to do, and I will do it at whatever pace I can. For now, I can smile easily as I think of two weeks well-lived, of a drift down Spanish streets, of good art and good food, a drive up the coast and a sip of special wine. A hearty gracias (and an eskerrik asko) to this country I have come to love, though after three straight years it is probably time to try somewhere new next. We have so much to explore.

Spain 2025, Part III: La Boca del Cielo

This is the third in a four-part series that began here.

The list of cities on earth whose setting can compete with San Sebastián, Spain, is a short one. Called Donostia by the Basques, its centerpiece is La Concha, a shell-shaped bay wrapped by a beach for nearly its entire length. The Parte Vieja (old town) wedges between the western end of La Concha and the broad Urumea River, and the grand shopping avenues strike out south from it. Three sentinels stand watch over the harbor: a Rio-reminiscent statue of Jesus on Monte Urgull above the Parte Vieja, a tower atop the highest point at Monte Igeldo at the other end of the mouth, and the striking island of Santa Klara between them. Miramar, a Tudor manor home built by the Spanish royals, sits upon the one interruption in the beach, and the city rises up gracefully into the Basque hills as it recedes from the water.

San Sebastián is too pretty not to have been discovered. It may not yet be on the level of the French Riviera or some of its Italian counterparts, but it is a city filled with beautiful people being beautiful, of large crowds and moments when one will find oneself surrounded by people speaking French and German and English. But I am a sucker for it, unapologetic for my basic tastes: incredible food scene, stunning scenery, and a stellar beach, an urban ballet that becomes an easy party into the night, that Spanish triumph of life done right.

Andrew and I stay in a hotel tucked just beneath Monte Urgull and just off the water, alongside a staircase up the Monte that becomes a party scene every night. The room is cramped and unremarkable, but the setting is on point. Just stepping out of it is immersion in the Spanish street scene, the crowd already building as others wander down to the waterfront, basking in the haze over La Concha as the sun sets behind Monte Igeldo. Here the pintxos crawl goes from an idle stroll to full-fledged fiesta, thousands from around the world seeking out the delicacies tucked into tiny storefronts, lines building where the most famed chefs produce the hallmarks of Basque cuisine alongside their own experimental takes. It is a culinary paradise.

On the first night we do a classic San Sebastián pintxos tour. We start at Ganbara, which Anthony Bourdain called “my favorite place,” and slurp down monkfish, foie, shrimp, crab, and croquetas that melt in the mouth. Despite a massive crowd it is a well-oiled machine, a carefully tended line down the street invited to tables, and there is no rush once seated (or stood, I suppose, as we are at a table on the street). The same cannot be said for several places we try afterward, which are a Lord of the Flies competition for counter space or seats, and in the end we are relieved simply to let a waiter guide us to a table on Konstitizio Plaza, even if the fare is nothing memorable. At some point in the night everyone heeds a silent summons to a place that churns out cheesecake by the boatload, and while it can’t match Casa Rufo it is satisfying, and for a nightcap we sample the local macrobrew, Keler, which is bad.

The next day is San Sebastián in an ideal state. We walk the length of La Concha’s beaches and ride the funicular up Monte Igeldo, an overlook plus amusement park that includes a “rio misterioso” (a lazy river that seems precariously close to the edge of the cliff). We befriend the keeper of the tower at the very top of the mountain, perhaps because we, unlike the Brits in line in front of us, understand that, when she says “tunel” and makes a tunnel with her hands, she is trying to convey the word “tunnel.” We ask her why Monte Igeldo’s puttering roller coaster, which would normally be called a montaña rusa (literally, Russian Mountain) in Spanish, is called a montaña suiza (Swiss Mountain) and she explains this was a Franco era maneuver to avoid any hint of communism and suggest as much neutrality as possible. She rants about Trump at us for a while but drifts into sadness that her own daughters haven’t given her more than one grandchild, a commentary on that we do not have time to unpack before the next tourists come to request their tickets.

The guardian of the tower on Monte Igeldo is not off the mark. Spain’s birth rate has plummeted to 1.1, nearly half the rate a population needs to stay even. Even with increasing immigration, that trend plus long life expectancies could leave the nation with a financially terrifying ratio of 1.5 workers per retiree by midcentury and a whopping 33% population drop by 2100. The below replacement birth rate is now a reality across the entire developed world excepting Israel, though it is particularly acute in Spain. (Neighboring France, meanwhile, is keeping pace with the somewhat more stable United States.) One could speculate that societal change has been particularly impactful in countries with the longest histories of harsh gender divides and machismo (see Spain’s companions at the bottom of the birth rate list such as Italy, South Korea, and Japan), but it is only a matter of degree; whatever the cause of this digital era birth plunge, the trend is real, and only just now starting to alter Spanish life.

There are so many things I adore about Spanish culture that it is somewhat haunting to think about this looming collapse, a concern that all these lovely and sustainable Spanish lifestyle choices are caught up in a culture that is choosing, either intentionally or through happenstance, not to sustain its very own self. The Madrids and San Sebastiáns of Spain will likely get by just fine thanks to in-migration, though they will have to fight that very European fight to avoid becoming total museums or tourist playgrounds. But things are different in the older towns and dusty cities in the center of the country, which I have come to know both on this trip and on my Camino across Galicia last year.

My lifetime may see the diminishment and even death of many pockets of Spanish culture, of some of these funny little cultural quirks that make this country so easy to visit again and again. But unlike American boomtowns, which are rarely built to last, the stone walls of Spanish towns ensure a very old history will fade very slowly. Historical memory runs deeper, faces a proportionately deeper loss, and it should bring out deeper fixations. Even in an era of Trump unleashed, successful navigation of reality does not come in day-to-day headlines or a doom loop of algorithmic content, but instead in finding ways to live in deeper touch with both the past and the future.

Achieving that state is easy to do among the attractive humans on display on La Concha beach this afternoon. After catching some sun we spend the evening in Gros, which is across the Urumea River from the Parte Vieja. This is an updated version of San Sebastián as a beach town, its apartment blocks well-built but modern, its beach dominated by locals with genuine surfing and volleyball skill. We have beers at Basqueland Brewing, pintxos at a good wine bar, and dinner at a Basque-Mexican fusion place, all of which deliver. Tonight’s nightcap comes on the steps of the Santa Maria basilica amid the crowd of revelers, easy laughter across a mix of tongues, and never am I more relaxed on this trip than on those steps beneath that gothic facade with a whisper of change flowing in on a cool breeze off the Cantabrian Sea.

Day three reveals a different San Sebastián. Gone is the riviera feel: suddenly it is a moody seaside town from the Pacific Northwest. We venture out in a light drizzle and climb through the pines on Monte Urgull to a fortress atop the harbor, ramparts and cannons left behind by Napoleon’s French and the British who fought their way into Basque Country by sea. (They appear never to have left.) The foreboding mood continues as we visit the gothic cathedral, shelter from rain over a long lunch involving beets and mackerel, and tour the local aquarium, the first half of which is a historical exhibit on Basque seafaring and fishing in these choppy waters instead of the expected tanks of fish. By the time we emerge, some stray sunlight casts a delicate glow, and we can stroll the promenade along La Concha again. Over in Gros, the surfers are all over the big waves thrown up by the sea. An inky dark squid seems an appropriate entrée at Bodegón Alejandro, a first-rate basement restaurant in the Parte Vieja, and we stroll a little and take that nightcap one last time.

San Sebastián could just be a dream state place, one that gives of endless days on a beach and climbing hills and long dinners and drinks among friends. And yet it still has history, still has some semblance of a local consciousness even under the crush of tourists. The final day showed a depth that eternal Caribbean bliss cannot muster, gave me new appreciation for those November gale days back in my own similarly sized hometown back in northern Minnesota. Seeing San Sebastián even makes me wonder a little more about what Duluth could yet be. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden.

Part four is here.

Spain 2025, Part II: Basque-ing in Finery

This is the second in a four-part series. Part One is here.

Northeast of Burgos the Spanish countryside grows more picturesque. My train cuts through passes in granite crags with old cities clinging to hillsides, all robed in fog on this wet day. The train slows for twists through thick trees and night swallows the scene quickly. A weird new language I cannot understand at all joins Spanish and English in the train’s announcements. I am approaching my destination: Basque Country, the Euskal Herria, the autonomous community on Spain’s northern coast and along the border with France, at the elbow of the Bay of Biscay. I’ve previously knocked out two of Spain’s regions with their own languages and complicated histories with Madrid (Galicia and Catalonia), but the Basques are in a league of their own, their mother tongue bearing no relation to later-arriving Romance languages and their separatism punctuated by violent militancy well into this century. In the far north they have carved out a state with immense national pride, Spanish flags almost universally replaced by the red, white, and green of the Basques. It is here that my friend Andrew and I have chosen to spend some time exploring in May.

Northern Spain is not the stereotype of dusty windmill-strewn plains nor of Moorish architecture nor an excess of loud British tourists chasing some cheap sun, though they are still around. It is a lush, wet land, its regions relatively small in area, cut off from much of the rest of Spain by a wall of mountains. The Moorish advances trickled out here, and the Reconquista began in places like Asturias and Cantabria and Northern Castilla y León. By Spanish standards the north is relatively affluent, the birthplace of several national banking giants and home to a respectable industrial base and such darlings of local control as the Mondragón Cooperative. And while there is good food everywhere in Spain, Basque Country is its peak.

The Basque cultural capital is Bilbao, a metro of one million and in many respects an ideal type European city: tight winding historic old town, newer grand promenades, a famous museum, a fancy old train station, a gaudy new soccer stadium, apartment blocks in rings around the cool stuff, a few discordant office towers, and a river winding through the middle. Its twist is the national pride for a nation that spent long parts of history hidden away in these rugged hills along the sea, speaking their obscure tongue punctuated Xs and Ks and Zs and Ts. (Andrew and I are curious to see the point values in Basque Scrabble.) While Spanish remains the dominant tongue, Basque is present, from a dignified group of elderly diners at the nicest restaurant we visit to a flock of teenagers slurping Aperol spritzes on the patio where I grab a late-night snack upon my arrival. The rebellion against the crown continues, subtle but persistent.

Our hotel sits on the Albiako Lorategiak, a placid square whose towering sycamores rise high above our fourth-floor balcony. Andrew misses a connection from Madrid to Bilbao (he spends his delay at the Prado, the poor soul), so I go back to my wandering routine on the grey, drippy sort of day that is common here in the Euskal Herria. I stroll the Gran Vía and meander the tight streets of the Casco Viejo, grab a pintxos (Basque tapas) lunch, ascend to a basilica on a hill. The city is in the preparation stages for a British onslaught, as Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur will meet here in a week for the Europa League final; soccer balls dot the city, and a new wrap is going up on the sparkling San Mamés stadium. On the way down from the basilica I lose myself briefly in apartment block Spain, that dense, urban reality that is more representative of contemporary Spanish life than a tapas crawl on a historic street. In the US this sort of neighborhood would prompt some nervous looks from outsiders, but here it just feels like a normal Thursday afternoon. Kids pour out of a school, people reel in the laundry from beneath their umbrella-covered hanging spots out the window. The shops are a bit grittier but the fundamentals of Spanish urban life are unchanged.

When Andrew arrives, the pintxos tour begins in earnest. We nail our first two stops, octopus at Gure Toki and mussels with good wine at Taska Beltz. There is quality craft beer at La Ley Seca, a mediocre Mahou to end the night on a pedestrian street a block from the hotel. It continues the next day with breakfast at the Café Iruña with its stunning Moorish interior, lunch at the vast Erriberako market, more good beer at Bihotz, and a dinner at Casa Rufo that slowly builds: white asparagus from Navarra, a well-salted cod, a gaudy steak, and a divine Manchego cheesecake for dessert.

Bilbao’s great attraction is the Guggenheim Museum, the striking Frank Gehry-designed eruption of molten titanium lava flows that takes on to the shifting moods of Basque Country weather. The tour starts on the outside along the riverfront promenade, with Anish Kapoor’s giant pile of reflective balls and a giant spider (its effect somewhat reduced by the crews buffing it on the day we visit) and a towering flowery puppy by Jeff Koons. The titanium-clad exterior somehow turns to an airy glass interior, cavernous and at times vertiginous on its catwalks, able to hold ten thousand French schoolchildren with ease. Its three immersive exhibits are its best, and it wins me immediately with Richard Serra’s The Matter of Time, a series of giant pieces of iron that invite exploration as if they were a series of southwestern slot canyons. Next is Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrored Room, a trippy house of mirrors and flashing lights meant to invoke the artist’s hallucinations. Finally there is Refik Anadol’s in situ, a room covered in a nonstop flow of AI-generated images of Frank Gehry architecture and its influences that occasionally hallucinates and goes wrong. Beyond that there is a collection of modern art’s greatest hits: a Warhol, another Koons, some de Koonigs, none of which are my cup of tea but are welcome enough as a summation of a movement. (The one I do enjoy: Cy Twombly’s nine-part descent of Emperor Commodus into insanity.) An exhibit on the Brazilian painter Tarsila do Amaral also opens new worlds, a blend of modernism and Cubism and Brazilian color. The Guggenheim is a triumph of urban renewal, a peak many cities chase but achieved successfully by Basque leadership that saw the creation of monuments like this, not just another European micro-state, as the path forward.

We rent a car for a day to drive the coast from Bilbao to San Sebastián, guided by a Siri whose command of Basque leaves something to be desired. The trip is just over an hour by freeway but over three and a half by our route, and while Siri takes us on a few rides, our road is well worth the time it takes. Our first stop is Gaztelugatxe, a medieval monastery and the site of Dragonstone in Game of Thrones, sitting alone atop a rocky isle just off a sloping cliff, its caves withholding any sign of fiery priestesses. We pass through little surfing towns like Bakio and Bermeo and Mundaka, and the coastline evokes Big Sur, complete with the road washouts requiring detours; this, I think, is what the California coast could have felt like several decades back, before history overtook California. It is stunning country, beautiful but not overpopulated, issuing a summons to stop and explore each small town, if one can possibly find any parking. Perhaps it is better that they do not build more.

A quick turn inland takes us to Guernica, the spiritual center of the Basque Country, home to a meeting hall for their centuries-old republic (admired by John Adams as he studied forms of government for the United States) and the oak tree beneath which the province of Vizcaya still gathers to elect its ceremonial leader. This history is part of why Francisco Franco and his Nazi allies selected it in 1937 as a test run for the first carpet bombing of a town, though the oak tree (and the actual military targets, like an arms factory and a bridge) withstood the bombing while the city center went up in flames. Today, Guernica is a bustling, pleasant town with regular reminders of a dark past, and the Peace Museum gives eyewitness accounts of the devastation, ponders questions of what exactly peace means. As anyone with a memory of Guernica’s carnage passes out of time, I wonder how well a world increasingly interested in reviving great historical struggles will remember its lessons. We are left with some museums and one raw, great Picasso to help tell the tale of what that era’s escalations wrought.

After Guernica it is back to the coast, back to weaving roads through maritime pine and eucalyptus, my steering wheel hands and break pedal foot growing sore. Ondarroa makes me gawk. We stop off at a beach sliced up by Flysch, sharp cuts of sheer sedimentary rock near where tectonic plates met at some point in time. The beach here in Zumaia is populated entirely by locals, blissed out on the Basque coast. Next we curve over to Getaria, a fishing town on a narrow finger of a peninsula, though we have mistimed its fine food scene. Driving up a coast never grows old, I say to Andrew, and as we turn toward San Sebastián I understand why the Basques cherish their homeland so much.

Part 3 is here.

Spain 2025, Part I: History’s Greatest Urbanists

This is the first in a four-part series. Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Being out in big surf is dreamlike. Terror and ecstasy ebb and flow around the edges of things, each threatening to overwhelm the dreamer. An unearthly beauty saturates an enormous arena of moving water, latent violence, too-real explosions, and sky. Scenes feel mythic even as they unfold. I always feel a ferocious ambivalence. I want to be nowhere else; I want to be anywhere else. I want to drift and gaze, drinking it in, except maximum vigilance, a hyperalertness to what the ocean is doing, cannot be relaxed. Big surf (the term is relative, of course—what I find life-threatening, the next hellman may find entirely manageable) is a force field that dwarfs you, and you survive your time there only by reading those forces carefully and well. But the ecstasy of actually riding big waves requires placing yourself right beside the terror of being buried by them: the filament separating the two states becomes diaphanous. Dumb luck weighs heavily, painfully. And when things go badly, as they inevitably do—when you’re caught inside a very large wave, or fail to make one—all your skill and strength and judgment mean nothing. Nobody maintains their dignity while getting rumbled by a big wave. The only thing you can hope to control at that point is the panic.

-William Finnegan, Barbarian Days (Against Dereliction)

On my recent trip to Spain I spent a little time mesmerized by the skilled surfers off Zurriola Beach in San Sebastián. Old friends and readers of my writing will know surfing can enrapture me, inspire words that go far beyond the exploits of a beach bum on a board. It is a feeling known to anyone who has ever given himself over to something beyond him.

The passage above, while less immediate in its death-daring fear, approximates the dream state I enter when exploring a European city on foot. I feel it all deeply, want to wander without a map, one with thousands of forces that flow of their own accord to weave together into the fabric of an urban life. Gifted thirty jetlagged hours in Madrid at the start of my trip, I pick out one museum for a visit, but I am mostly here to wander and explore.

Madrid is a city of seven million people, and yet most of its great monuments are reachable by foot. The Plaza Mayor and the Puerta del Sol are the humming hearts of the city; down the Gran Vía and Calle Alcalá, luxury brands take up shop in ornate buildings, a pastiche of revival and art deco architecture. On the west end sit the monumental palace and cathedral, while a series of arches in traffic circles (puertas and glorietas in Spanish, far more melodious) ring the entrances to the city center. To the east and southeast are the great museums, the Prado and the Reina Sofia and the Thyssen-Bornemisza. Great green spaces bookend the Centro, the sprawling Parque del Buen Retiro to the east and the lush Campo del Moro below the palace to the west. Strewn between are neighborhoods of life and culture and history, La Latina and Letras and Chueca, plazas dotting them to open up the narrow streets and give people places to settle at tables for a drink or a bite. Fountains flow and statues stand guard and that central Spanish sun beats down on the scene.

And so I re-immerse myself in that Spanish urban rhythm. I revisit a good brewery here and a fun restaurant there from my previous visit. I pause to read sign boards and take unexpected turns when piqued, and I sit in some churches and gaze upward in awe. In the Plaza Mayor, a stage has been set up and trucks are unloading kegs for the celebration of the Feast of San Isidro, which I will miss by one day. In the Puerta del Sol, lit up for the night, I sit for a spell and feel the rush of freedom that comes at the start of a new great trip, enchanted by what the Madrileños have designed here.

The Spanish are, after all, history’s greatest urban planners. It is difficult to find any Spanish town, no matter how godforsaken, without a walkable grid at its core and a pleasing central square and a couple appropriately scaled monuments: a church, a government building, some statues or fountains. Small, specialized shops are everywhere, selling food and technology and books (so many bookstores!) and just about any basic need within an easy walk of home. They make ample use of arcades, a superb and underused design feature, especially in hot or wet climates. Their housing is dense but not overcrowded; the apartment blocks in the suburbs, while not aesthetically pleasing, provide ample housing and are well-connected into the city.

These characteristics are not uncommon across Europe, but Spanish innovations endure. Whatever else one may say about their colonial exploits in the Americas, the Spanish did very intentionally export their urban form over the better part of two continents, and those plazas and zocalos will live on from Buenos Aires to Santa Barbara long after anything Bob Moses built gets replaced and the high modernists get consigned to the museums where they belong. More recently, the Spanish have built a train system that is the envy of the Western world, high-speed AVEs flying about, full lines built for the cost it takes to lay three ties on the California High-Speed Rail project; in Barcelona, the subway arrival time boards count down to the second. When I recently heard a joking proposal that we fire all train planners in the United States and replace them with Spaniards, I found myself nodding in solemn approval.

Besides the timeless aesthetics, Spanish cities understand something about human nature. An innate curiosity to peek around a corner, slip down an alley, emerge into a square. A simultaneous desire for order and ornament, a stable foundation topped by some of the flair that makes life fun. Spaces where adults can sit at tables and talk while the youths gather in another corner and younger kids can just dart about, all free to intermix while also carving their own little spheres. Spaces for God and spaces for hedonism; spaces for government and dim alleys to escape it. Meals are a progressive feast, small plates to escape gluttony, a free bite with every drink. Spanish city centers are a pleasure to stroll through, a pleasure to linger in, the place everyone wants to hang out instead of alone in little boxes every night.

My visit to the Reina Sofía modern art museum confirms my belief in Spanish urban thinking. How, exactly, does an art museum reflect values in city planning? Well, in it, I find a healthy heap of the original versions of designs I remember from introductory urban planning texts, from Garden City drawings to Le Corbusier’s schemes, along with plans for Madrid and Barcelona that seek to update these great old cities with grids that can sustain modern living. In a museum with relatively few non-Spanish works, the curators have seen fit to collect some of the most iconic pieces in the history of the field, show how their country then took those ideals and adapted them to their own towns. For the Spanish, urban planning is an art, worthy of its own wing just down the hall from Guernica.

Like its more classically inclined compatriot, the Prado, the Reina Sofía largely leaves out anyone who is not either from the country or in some way tied up in its history or artistic movements. Picasso and Dalí take center stage, but here also are Joan Miró and Juan Gris and adjacent surrealists who made the art world churn in the early 20^th century. The temporary exhibitions include the funky sound artist Laia Estruch, a reasonably well curated collection of art attempting to subvert narratives associated with Spain’s colonial history (here I am pleasantly surprised to find art and video from a Mexican Zapatista community I have visited), and a painter named Huguette Caland with no obvious tie to the country who does hold the attention, sitting at an intersection somewhere between Picasso and Georgia O’Keefe, with the occasional sprinkle from the Middle East.

After my museum visit and a leisurely lunch on the Plaza Tirso de Molina a few blocks from my hotel, I head for Chamartín train station to get a taste of that great train system. It runs like clockwork, trains humming out every few minutes, and this isn’t even the busiest station in Madrid. The train I take rockets north, through tunnels under the Sierra Central and across the savannas of Castilla y León. The rain falls steadily on my train across the Spanish plain, through Segovia and Valladolid and Burgos and the smaller farming towns between them. The cities feature large industrial parks and larger apartment blocks, a somewhat bleak Spanish heartland.

When seen by train Spain feels like it is in a different stage of development, still suspended in an agricultural and industrial state instead of deep in the knowledge economy. In some ways this does not feel like a terrible tradeoff, with less job disruption and a healthier small business sector, with fewer basement-wage service jobs and a step of removal from the tech obsession and paranoia now gripping American culture. The only things that hurtle at maximum velocity here are the trains.

Still, it is a tradeoff: prior to the Great Recession, wealth in Western Europe’s leading economies (of which Spain is not really one) was basically on par with the United States. Now, American GDP growth has left Europe in the dust over recent years. Coming out of the recession, Angela Merkel’s Germany imposed bad austerity economics on the continent while the U.S. gave its economy some halting stimulus, and already higher energy prices have since been exacerbated by the war in Ukraine. Tech has been an engine of American growth, while Europe has maintained a skepticism of that whole push. Throw in a strong dollar and it’s easy for an American to feel relatively affluent in Europe: even with some exchange rate rebalancing amid a trade war, prices on most things still feel like a bargain, especially since Europe eschews the absurdity of tip inflation. Real estate in downtown Madrid is expensive, but under conventional American loan terms I could make a play at it with my current salary if I really wanted to. Doing the same in New York or Washington would be laughable.

There are still many reasons, some empirical and some subjective, to prefer European choices over the American growth-at-all-costs machine. But there are serious long-term implications for that widening income gap and what it will take to sustain those European welfare states. What the economy gains in preservation of the past, it can lose in any sense of dynamism; youth unemployment is an actual thing here. A loud soccer bro on his phone two rows behind me on the train, speaking in a Gen Z English punctuated by an appropriate number of fucks and bros, thinks his future is elsewhere. The question looms: how next will the Spaniards reinvent their cities and networks to meet the world they now live in?

Part 2 is here.

Camino 2024, Part II: Finding a Stride

This is Part Two in a four-part series. Part One is here.

Day 1: Wet

It rains. And then it rains. And it rains some more.

We begin the Camino on a riverfront promenade and then cross the long span of the Ponte, built to stay above any flood. The Camino turns out of town and quickly becomes a country lane along a rushing watercourse, and we struggle around a marsh before finding easier paths. At first the Portuguese countryside looks to be in a state of crumbling disrepair, but the town of Arcozelo is well-tended, stone walls and gates holding fine lawns with swimming pools. Garlic-domed churches peek up here and there, their bells tolling out the walk in 15-minute increments, and roosters serenade us through the morning. The rain picks up.

Statistics would suggest about 200 people finish the Camino Portugués on any given day this time of year, but in Portugal, all above and beyond the 100 kilometers necessary for a compostela, the crowds are sparse. The first fellow pilgrims we see are a mother and a 10-year-old son on bicycles, plastic bags on over the kid’s legs to keep off the mud, the scallop shell that identifies a pilgrim strapped to the back of his bike. Later, by a thundering waterfall on the crystal clear Labruja River, two German girls march past, followed by a Frenchwoman who idly twirls a stick like a baton. We catch them all and collect a few more at a stop for coffee and sandwiches and a dry roof at Cunha Nunes in Revolta, the first of the classic Camino cafes that cater to passing pilgrims.

In our infinite wisdom, we have started our Camino on the stage with the biggest ascent on the whole route. Granted, summitting the 1,000-foot climb up the Alto da Portela Grande is no technical struggle for someone who tackles passes in the Rockies with a much heavier pack every summer, but it is long and steady, and did I mention it was wet? We slog upward, fixated only on the muddy path in front of us. Never is this truer than on the last great push up, where the trail has become a flowing cascade the whole way down, a lengthy dance up this dancing brook to a completely obscured overlook.

The descent is speedy, and as we have not booked any lodging between Ponte de Lima and Santiago ahead of time, we are enticed by a sign for an option with heat, private bathrooms, and rides to a restaurant in the otherwise sparse rural hamlet of Rubiães. We cross one last Roman bridge, are overtaken by rapidly marching Germans, and turn to find Sofía’s hideaway, where we arrive just behind the two younger German women we’d seen in Revolta, who have made their way back here after learning the municipal albergue has no heat or hot water. A crew of Taiwanese roll in a bit later, too, and we all populate the bedrooms on the upper level of Sofía’s house.

Despite strong defenses, everything is wet. So wet. We set about rigging everything up to dry, clothing draped all over the place, passports and papers placed over the heater to rescue them. One of the Germans, Ariane, joins us for 5:00 dinner at Bom Retiro, a mile down the road, where we consume heaping portions and a carafe of wine for about the price of a single American glass. The downpours come and go as they please, though we still hopefully note every time the sky grows lighter. The hope is always false. We pass out early in the evening to the soundrack of Sofía’s kid’s faltering trombone practice.

In past hikes I have been in more brutal downpours and I have climbed steeper slopes, but their total effect here makes for one of the most punishing days I’ve ever had on a trail. And yet, with the ability to wring everything out and take a warm shower and clear it all out with a hearty meal and some wine with good company, I am sold. If the Camino can be this enchanting on a day when the trail turns into a waterfall, what can it bring on a good day?

Day Two: The Fortress of Silence

On day two, though the rain threatens occasionally, is liberatory by comparison. We manage to turn the wrong way out of the hostel—we hadn’t realized the access road to Sofía’s was the Camino itself—but before long we’re at a glass box of a snack shop staffed by a woman from Massachusetts beside Rubiães’ main church and a Roman milestone used by later inhabitants as a sarcophagus. Much of today’s route is on the old imperial road, beginning with a big bridge over the River Coura followed by a series of mile markers, those same roads built for legions two thousand years ago still guiding pilgrims today. We wind up through a few hamlets, climbing again past sheep and garlic domes, and we pass a stream that boldly claims the be the troutiest in the universe. Before long we enjoy a steady plunge through a eucalyptus forest and moss-shrouded paths before a grand view of the Minho River valley opens up, our destination of Valença on the Spanish border looming in the distance. The pace differences between pilgrims are obvious on the descent, as we are both passed and overtaken.

At the bottom, the town of Fontoura proves a disappointment: first we are hounded by a Russian woman trying to sell us overpriced snacks, the ATM doesn’t work for me, and the café is closed. (If the Russian had told us this, we might have been more convinced to pay up.) Two Danish pilgrims are swimming off the medieval bridge over the Rio Pedreira, but from here the path is fairly nondescript, tame woods and clusters of homes, and then a long slog through suburban Valença. We stop at a roadside diner, pricey but filling, a pitstop for a bunch of local blue-collar men on their lunch breaks. After two days of pastoral Portuguese countryside Valença is a bit jarring, as we walk up sidewalks with backpacks while city life moves on, the once ubiquitous yellow arrows to guide our path now few and far between, dwarfed by the urban landscape.

A push up a long incline, however, takes us into a new world entirely: the walled medieval compound of old Valença, a fortress town for thousands of years, guarded by great earthen bulwarks below thick stone walls, all from a perch commanding the Minho valley, the bridges to Spain within reach of a good cannon volley. Inside the town are a bunch of narrow streets and a lot of shops, all of which seem to sell towels. Towels, sheets, comforters, pillowcases: this is indeed the historical craft of Valença, and they carry it forward now, selling them all by the kilo. (If you were to ask “who could possibly need a kilo of new towels,” my response might be “most lodging options on the Camino de Santiago.”) We find its 11^th century church, groaning with history, and get to know São Teotónio, a native son and Portugal’s first saint. We eat pizza at a trendy little shop staffed by a woman who responds to Portuguese speakers in Spanish.

After a rest at the hotel we head out for a drink on the town, but we quickly learn the drawback of turning one’s town into a medieval theme park by day: by night, it achieves zombie apocalypse levels of deadness. No one is out, save for the tame cats by the church. We retreat to the room. My blisters have started to bloom, and I am in a blah mood. Valença is all very lovely, but it is a museum now, the pilgrims as unwitting accoutrements, and while it is perhaps the appropriate use of an old fortress atop a hill, one should not mistake it for Europe’s present. Take this night of quiet retreat, I suppose, and move on to Spain.

Day 3: Spanish Hibbing

After the torrents of day one and a vaguely ominous day two, day three dawns brilliantly, scattered sun and clouds but no hint of rain. An older northern European couple exits our hotel at the same time we do, but otherwise, Valença is as dead as it was the night before. We trudge down out of its dark gates and cross the Minho (or, now, the Miño) into Spain, past an austere Franco era guard station and on into Tui.

Spain is clearly wealthier than its peninsular partner. Fewer homes lie in ruin; there are real drainage systems. The pedestrian infrastructure is significantly better, and drivers actually stop for people. Every drink order comes with a snack. We are in a refined, thoughtful culture. There are trade-offs: gone are the blue tiles and garlic domes of Portugal. Rigid, solid stone now reigns supreme, especially in the locally mined granite, a building block to stand the test of time.

The seeming wealth is all relative, of course. Galicia is a poor corner of Spain, and like much of the country, its rural areas are emptying at such a rate that the moniker España vacía, or Empty Spain, has been slapped upon it. Next to well-tended homes are picturesque ruins, the slow decay of centuries-old structures no longer necessary to house the population here. Rural Europe in general is re-wilding at an unprecedented rate, with more and more greenery and the return of once-failing species such as the Iberian wolf. Of course this rush for the cities is happening in the United States as well, albeit blunted by immigration and somewhat higher birth rates. But immersion in a place where construction is very old gives a sense of just how complicated it can be to live among structures that predate modern technology, and just how much the run to the cities is reshaping the countryside. There is an eternal tension here between preservation and keeping things livable and letting them fade, a blurry spectrum for each small community we visit on this walk.

We rise up to the old city of Tui, a fortress to counter an invasion of towel-wielding Valençans, broad stone cathedral on top. As snake through the streets, we pass herds of pilgrims emerging to blink at the sunlight. At just over 100 kilometers from Santiago, this is the most common starting place on the Camino Portugués, and for the first few miles out of Tui it shows. We are caught up in a clump of 10 Spaniards plus a British expat named Alan, an Aussie herd, and a clump of British girls with unfortunate laughs who cackle at everything. These and other groups begin to leapfrog each other, with Alan and the Spaniards brimming with energy on day one but stopping to photograph everything. We pass another Roman bridge, ford a stream by a cross to a sainted pilgrim who fell fatally ill here, and enjoy placid, leafy lanes. The lack of breakfast in Valença has my dad growing hangry, but we’re delighted to find a snack break at a new establishment in A Magdalena, which manages to space out the pilgrim crew a bit and leave us in tandem with Marcia and Michelle, two American sisters who are good company.

We come to the massive granite works of O Porriño, complete with signs protesting its growth and a bevy of large houses from that very stone built to withstand the millennia. The debate here is familiar to anyone who comes from a place where people pull things out of the ground. There are more gentle lanes up and down wooded hills, a bunch of lazy dogs, a hobbled German pilgrim with a wounded knee, and our Taiwanese friends from night one. Porriño is not the most enchanting place on the Camino, but a river walk into town does some good in crowding out the factories on the opposite bank and the freeway on the near one, and the historic center, while not large, teems with life. Our lodging is basic but well-appointed, its view down over a busy bus stop. After Valença, I appreciate just watching humanity go about its business.

It strikes me, after a couple of beverages at the Underground craft beer bar, that Porriño is just a Spanish Hibbing, the equivalent of a blue-collar Minnesota mining town I know well. It has 17,000 people, a handful of historic buildings in its downtown, and is near enough to some pretty landscapes, but is itself otherwise forgettable in its urban form. And yet there is wonderful food, top notch wine, good craft beer even though that scene here has nothing on America’s, and it teems with life and bustles with families late into the evening, long after any American town of the same size goes dead outside of a couple nondescript bars.

I come away with a soft spot for Porriño, even if it has few clear charms. Here there is none of the museumification that consumes the centers of many small European towns. It is here where Galicia lives in its present, striving, dreaming like our enthusiastic craft beer convert behind the bar at the Underground, caught up in a debate over saving the verdant forests or mining the stone that has built this region’s wealth and newer homes. Kids pour out of a nearby school, bum around squares, settle into social circles even as they dream of a life beyond the bland apartment blocks that surround the old city core. In some deep sense, people in places like this will always be my people, the steady believers in a land that is anything but empty to them.

Day 4: Galifornia

Day four dawns grey and misty. Breakfast is jamón and tomato atop a large slice of bread from a harried woman as Alan and the Spaniards dine a few tables over for the third meal in a row. Porriño departs slowly, long damp streets before a winding road and the 100 kilometer marker to Santiago. The next few kilometers stroll through the town of Mos, a sleepy place that welcomes its pilgrims brightly and then turns them loose on a series of steady ups into the Galician hills. We trudge up with groups of Spaniards, including one jolly older man with a deliberate pace, though we lose him when we turn aside for lunch near the hill’s summit, a sandwich with a killer view. From there we go down, first on gentle slopes with the loud Brits behind us. We escape them at a churrascaria, however, and are alone for the plunge down into the outskirts of Redondela.

This walk down the hill is both incredibly steep and incredibly beautiful, rich green hills dotted with farms and cottages, fruit and flowers, resplendent in sudden sun, a snippet of a Ría Baixa, an inlet off the Atlantic, visible in the distance. Our hostel-keeper for the night calls this region of Galicia Galifornia, and I understand why. Everything is resplendent and lush, all that rain now showing its gifts. Closer to the mouth of the strait sits Vigo, one of the largest cities in Galicia, but our destination is Redondela, a city of 20,000 known for its towering train viaducts and old town on a hill, close to the sea but removed from it.

After a short urban trek we find the old town, and we’ve lucked out with our lodging. A Casa de Herba stands on a small square the middle of narrow stone streets, and our second floor room has a long balcony from which we can survey a small square and the narrow lane the Camino traces through town. The smell of cooking seafood wafts over us, and I sit on the balcony and write as we wait out a slow laundry load. We wander about, meet Julie and Susan from Saskatchewan at a sidewalk table, eat fish, stumble on a place with a craft beer fridge and retire to the balcony. The city life of old town Redondela flits by below us, pilgrims wandering in, locals heading out, kids chasing each other about, even some nuns.

We are halfway to Santiago, at the peak of the walking experience, all the buildup to this point now beginning its release, an exhale as we settle into this way of being, a pace set for the rest of the walk. I have little to write today. I am one with it.

Part 3 is here.

Europe 2023, Part III: Out on a Peninsula

This is the third in a four-part series. Part I | Part II

After seven days at sea, the cruise ship disgorges my 41 family members and me in Barcelona. While our inevitable dispersal brings a magical week to a close, I am glad to be free from Royal Caribbean’s controls on my movements. A little more space, wandering back at our own pace, ready to explore two more cities that have set themselves up well for me to like them.

Barcelona is both the capital of the Mediterranean basin and the standard-bearer for modern Europe. Though there is some graffiti around town trashing tourists, it is certifiably alive in ways that museum pieces like Venice or straining old metropolises like Rome are not. It has reinvented itself dramatically over the centuries: Roman roots, a Gothic core, a grand City Beautiful charge from the 1800s embellished by Gaudí’s ornamental flair, and a cosmopolitan boom in recent decades that has it pulsing with young life, beaches and clubs plus art and architecture, enough Catalan ingenuity to keep it from becoming a stale playground for the wealthy alone. The buildings are stunning and quirky but functional, the trains run on schedules to the second, and the food and drink have little competition. The three Duluthians in our party stay across from the old cathedral on two pedestrian Gothic Quarter streets, a maze that loses none of its luster even after a week of meandering cities with similar appeal.

Barcelona is not without its warts. There are pickpockets afoot, and I have a bizarre interaction with a man who tries to scam me with a Metro ticket before I rather unwittingly turn the tables on him by only having five Euros in cash in my possession. The Catalan separatist struggle, while invisible on this visit, drives at the heart of the European tension between lofty universal ideals and local tribal pride. Even FC Barcelona, after reaching new heights in fútbol achievement a decade ago, now flounders in debt and corruption after overreaching as it tried to keep up with the Gulf and Russian oligarch money that has besmirched the sport across Europe. Barcelona is also a very raunchy place, which is not in and of itself a defect, but any edginess does rather wear off when one passes a tenth little shop selling t-shirts with the same trashy slogans in English. Some bits of culture are, alas, universal.

Grumbling aside, Barcelona is still a special place, the city a whole continent wants to think it can be. It also has some reminders of home, as I have a quick rendezvous with friends from Duluth who are also passing through and then visit Black Lab, a brewery owned by a Duluthian who makes some of the best beer we find in our wanderings. My cousin Steph and her husband Kyle lead me on a sampling of vermut at a quiet neighborhood bar north of the city center. A rooftop tapas dinner is the last 10-plus person family gathering on the trip, and the desserts, including the beet ice cream with a cake and the very cheesy cheesecake and the ice cream dish featuring a tray with several vats of the stuff with cones and toppings, are the winners. The next morning we make a circuit of Parc Guell, Gaudí’s experiment in a meandering pleasure ground where visitors have no real agenda other than to stroll its pathways and lose themselves in a mix of naturalism and neo-Gothic design. Tapas lunch comes a few blocks from the Sagrada Familia, the magnum opus of the architect who gave this city its flair, slow but steady progress evident in the 19 years since my last visit.

The group slowly disperses from Barcelona: many straight back to the States, some to linger here or nearby on the Balearic coast, a few back to Italy or off on lengthy tours. For my mom, her partner Doug, my cousin Rob, and me, it’s a ride on the AVE high-speed train across the Spanish plain to Madrid. The train hums with power as we shoot over the meseta at 300 kilometers per hour, through small towns with hilltop castles and churches, olives and grapes, and a lot of windmills that look unlike anything Don Quixote would have encountered in his wanderings here half a millennium ago. At times the landscape is so barren as to evoke, say, eastern Montana, but before long we are edging into Atocha station in one of Europe’s great former seats of imperial power.

Madrid will never quite match Barcelona’s underlying cool, but it is a delightful place. Even though the kings based here dominated most of a hemisphere for centuries, it lacks the consistent grandiose scale of a London or a Paris or even a Rome. The Palacio Real sits starkly alone on the edge of the city center, surrounded by gardens; the Plaza Mayor is one of Europe’s more cloistered central squares, with no 19^th century grand avenues punched through its colonnades. The Parque del Retiro is sprawling, but its green cover likewise encloses a certain intimacy, and while there are other triumphant arches and plazas scattered about, they seem to blend with the city, opening up logically even when they may seem haphazard from a bird’s eye view. Quality urban form is, of course, one of Spain’s great triumphs and exports to its former colonies.

Spanish culture is, if not insular, decidedly peninsular. This will happen to a nation that mired itself in inquisitions and counter-reformations as liberalizing advances made their way across the rest of Europe, but the view from 2023 is one of a place distinctive in its flavor, a collection of fairly stable local cultures that share a political system out of Madrid but often little else. Modern Spain is much less unified than France or even Italy, the difference obvious enough even in simply visiting its two largest cities. Madrid and Barcelona feel like different countries, and then there are the Basques and the Galicians; our last dinner comes at an Asturian restaurant, a nod to the lush pocket of the northern coast where apples and cider reign supreme. And that’s all in the northern half of the country alone, skipping over the massive Moorish influence in sunbaked Andalucía.

We spend a chunk of our first full day in Madrid touring the Museo del Prado. The Prado, while massive, does not have the worldliness of the Met or the Louvre or the British Museum: here, Spanish masters like El Greco and Velázquez and Goya still reign, alongside some associated Venetians and a few Dutch masters who drifted through the Habsburg orbit. In the Prado, Spanish artists and imperial collectors gathered works of nobility and religious iconography, but little else. To tour the Prado is to view countless Assumptions and Immaculate Conceptions and Passions, alongside myriad temptations of saints and looming sin. And yet there is still incredible range on display, from the cluttered fever dreams of Hieronymus Bosch to the stark austerity of Velázquez’s Jesus on the cross, from the subtle mastery of Las Meñinas to the empathy in every Goya portrait. Another gallery stages El Greco next to Picasso, showing ties across generations between artists who, at first blush, have nothing in common. The Prado’s collection, more than any royal language academy or stuffy French defense of certain standards, is the epitome of a cultural patrimony.

Otherwise, most of our Madrid time is devoted to wandering, with stops in the Basilica de San Francisco, the cathedral, and in the Corte Inglés department store, where I buy a new suitcase. We find the statue of Cervantes in the Plaza de España and educate ourselves on the various Carloses, Felipes, and Alfonsos seated on horseback around the city. (I muse as to whether the Felipes could have prevented the decline of the Spanish Empire if they spent less time posing on horseback.) The streets of Madrid feel safer and better tended than Rome or Barcelona, though there is still an element of the absurd, with busking accordionists playing the same eight tunes or people dressed in giant panda or Mario costumes at nearly every attraction. (How they live in these things in 90-degree Spanish summer heat is beyond me.)

One could paint staid, imperial Madrid as a tired counterpoint to sexy Barcelona and its beachfront brethren, but when the sun goes down, Madrid shows out. The routine across three straight nights here is the same: after siesta, tapas and wine, with dinner extending through to midnight. Traveling with Rob means we have nonstop great food, and instead of sitting for dinner for hours as in Italy, here one can drift about for tapas, served almost immediately and savored slowly, a movable feast whose style I would gladly import across the pond. We continue our bold quest to find decent Mediterranean basin beer and have better luck here than anywhere else, including from a brewery named Oso whose bear-head-on-hops logo eerily resembles one in Duluth. My European culinary apogee comes at Juana la Loca, a tapas restaurant that was high on Rob’s list and turns out to be just one block from our Airbnb off the Plaza de Carros. The truffles, crab, and foie gras carry me away to a blissful place, and we walk off the meal with a stroll to a nightcap at a mezcal bar with the prettiest menu I’ve ever seen, with a detour for some people-watching at blocks-long line outside the one nightclub that apparently attracts every single Madrileño youth.

I am pleased to find my Spanish still perfectly functional once I kick off the rust, though plenty of Spaniards still open conversations with us in English, which I suppose is our blessing and curse as native speakers of tourism’s universal tongue. Still, there are moments of pride: at one dinner, Rob and I proudly order in Spanish before realizing there is an English menu if one scrolls further down; we sit between a loud British couple who demand the biggest beer available and a group of Indians who scandalize the waiter by asking for red pepper flakes. With competition like this, we are model tourists, blending smoothly into a country where I’ve scarcely spent a week.

Even model tourists must go home, however, and after three nights in Madrid, drained by rotating through my modestly sized Italian wardrobe and still anxious about my bag, I am ready for a return journey. If things go according to plan, I will be back on the Iberian Peninsula before long, ready to sample more of its diversity, more of its tapas, and more of its inviting streets before the siesta calls. I have no Spanish blood, but as the child of a Spanish professor and someone who studied in Madrid some 40 years ago, and this peninsula feels like a natural extension of my life.

Part Four is here.

Spring Fútbol in Spain

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had to find a way to endure the gap between high school hockey and the baseball season. The NCAA Tournament is some consolation, but not much of one for us jilted Hoya alumni, and I’ve never liked basketball all that much to begin with. Instead, I let my attention wander overseas, where a pretty nice race is shaping up in Spain.

The European soccer leagues are now in their respective stretch runs, and on Sunday I was treated to an exemplary installment in European soccer’s biggest rivalry. The goals flew left and right, and while the referee imposed himself a bit more than one might like, Barcelona came out with a crucial 4-3 come-from-behind road victory over Real Madrid. The win rescued Barcelona’s chances at the La Liga title, and gives them reason for optimism heading into their other two trophy competitions—a Copa del Rey clash with Madrid in a few weeks, and in the quarterfinal stage of the European Champions League. The match-up had been hyped as a changing of the guard, with aging Barça perhaps finally relinquishing the crown Spain’s most expensive team. It wasn’t to be.

The man who grabbed the headlines was, of course, Lionel Messi, whose hat trick answered any questions about his recovery from injury, and quieted the tiresome efforts of the Madrid backers to suggest that Cristiano Ronaldo might have surpassed him. Messi breaks records nearly every time he scores these days (and he’s still just 26!), and his performance in his prime is a once-in-a-generation joy to watch. But just as dominant in Sunday’s win was Andrés Iniesta, the sublime midfielder with a flair for the dramatic. Iniesta’s goal in the seventh minute set the tone for the rest of the night, and his effort to wriggle through a pair of Madrid defenders earned the decisive penalty kick late in the game. At Barcelona he will forever be in Messi’s shadow, but the man who scored the game-winner in the 2010 World Cup final and was named the Player of the Tournament in the 2012 European Championships would be a legitimate superstar anywhere else, yet the quiet man from La Mancha is content to humbly play the wingman to Messi.

While Barça isn’t guaranteed of anything yet, they look much better heading down the stretch this season than they did a year ago, and the reasons lie in the wrinkles introduced by new coach Tata Martino. They’ve done a much better job of rotating their squad this season, keeping the top players fresh, and while they still rely on their bread-and-butter passing game and the peerless all-Spanish midfield of Iniesta, Xavi, Cesc Fabregas, and Sergio Busquets, they’re a bit more willing to play with pace on the counterattack now. Oddly unimportant in all of this is Neymar, the 22-year-old Brazilian record offseason signing, but he has some excellent flashes, and will slowly find his way into the system. Their demise, as has been the case of late, could be on defense, where Martino joins his predecessors in wishfully thinking that Javier Mascherano can hold down the back line against the best in the world. (I like Mascherano, but a central defender he is not, especially on a team whose fullbacks are often found bombing down the wings.) Goalkeeper Victor Valdes’s season-ending injury midweek could also dent Barça’s title hopes.

Real Madrid has also evolved tactically since last season, with new boss Carlo Ancelotti adopting a much more direct approach than José Mourinho’s dull counterattacking game. Against inferior opponents, it does look better, but the natural tradeoff here is a thinner midfield, where Xabi Alonso alone cannot quite cut it against an attack of Barcelona’s caliber. The front line of Ronald, Karim Benzema, and Gareth Bale piles up a lot of goals, but it isn’t clearly better than Barcelona’s somewhat deeper front line; like his fellow expensive transfer Neymar, Bale has been hit-or-miss in his first season in Spain, and Benzema, despite scoring twice against Barcelona, probably should have had himself another goal or two. Real’s saving grace may be the less-hyped midfield duo of Luka Modric and Angel di Maria, both of whom are having stellar years.

The thing is, neither of these teams is leading La Liga right now: that honor instead goes to Atlético de Madrid, the Spanish soccer equivalent of the New York Mets, the team that just sort of hovers there in the shadow of a giant crosstown rival. Atleti doesn’t have the firepower of the two perennial contenders—they’ve scored 14 fewer goals than Real, and 21 fewer than Barça—but they make up for it with rugged defense. Time will tell if they can hold up for another eight fixtures, plus a Champions League quarterfinal showdown with Barça. Those two also play on the regular season’s final day, so the race could be in for a thrilling conclusion. If Atlético can pull it off, it would be the first championship by someone other than Real or Barça in ten years.

Real has a somewhat easier road both in Spain and in the Champions League, where they drew injury-riddled Borussia Dortmund in the quarterfinals. The favorite to win the thing, Bayern Munich, also has a pretty easy path forward, having drawn reeling Manchester United. (David Moyes, given the unenviable task of succeeding the legendary Sir Alex Ferguson as manager, is allegedly facing open revolt in the dressing room, while opposing fans unfurl banners applauding his coaching skills. Once again, American sports fans have nothing European football fans.) The last quarterfinal, between Chelsea and Paris-St. Germain, is perhaps the most intriguing. PSG is very talented but has yet to win anything of any magnitude (the French league doesn’t count), while José Mourinho will look to rediscover his specialness and help English football save some face. I’ll admit it, I’m rooting for him: there is no more delightful mixture of arrogance, style, and coaching brilliance anywhere in the world.

Spain’s La Liga doesn’t draw the American audience that England gets, and that was true even before NBC snapped up the Premier League; the language barrier probably plays a role there, as does the league’s very real issues with competitive imbalance. But while Spain doesn’t have England’s depth of decent teams, it does have the best stable of top-end teams of any European league. The Brits and Italians have not fared particularly well in Europe over the past two years, while France and Germany are both dominated by one lonely powerhouse. Spain, meanwhile, has three serious contenders every year between Barcelona, Real Madrid, and one rising interloper, whether that be Atlético, Málaga last year, or Valencia in the not-so-distant past. In the Champions League, it is Europe’s best.

All is not well here, though, with debt burdening many of the lower-tier teams. Spanish soccer gives a taste of the best of the sport, but also more than its share of the worst, with its giant financial inequities and the growing gap between the haves and have-nots. Superficially, it’s easy to like international club fútbol: there are good teams in so many countries, and those teams draw from everywhere. Yet for all the apparent cosmopolitanism, this global sport is more ruthlessly capitalist than any major American sports league. While I actually prefer a bit of imbalance to some of the more rigid salary-capped leagues–sports need dynasties and villains– and one wonders just how strong the foundations really are in European soccer. The good news: we have a World Cup in less than three months!

Fútbol Evolves

For the past six years or so, soccer fans have enjoyed (or been endlessly annoyed by) the domination of two teams: the Spanish national team in international competitions, and F.C. Barcelona in club competition. Spain has won the past two European championships and the 2010 World Cup, while Barcelona won three of six Champions League titles (the European Super Bowl, so to speak). Seeing as six to eight regulars for Spain have also play their club soccer for Barcelona, the two are, effectively, the same core squad. There are key differences, of course: Barcelona enjoys the services of one Lionel Messi, the greatest player on earth at the moment; the Spanish defense is somewhat better than Barcelona’s, and they also boast the sainted goalkeeper Iker Casillas of Real Madrid. But the similarities in style are all too obvious, and there is no doubt that the heart and soul of both squads is the midfield of Xavi, Sergio Busquets, and Andrés Iniesta.

In the past three months, both dynasties have come apart. First, Barcelona lost to Bayern Munich in the Champions League semifinals by a brutal 7-0 scoreline over two matches, and earlier today, Spain was thrashed 3-0 by an inspired Brazil squad in the Confederations Cup final. There are excuses out there: Messi and a couple of other key players were hurt for the Munich matches, and the playing Brazil in Rio de Janeiro a few days after a draining semifinal against Italy is no easy task. Several players have shown signs of age, as well: Xavi and Casillas aren’t what they used to be, and the strikeforce that carried the Spanish national team, Fernando Torres and David Villa (the latter also a Barcelona man), has been out of form for a few years now.

But even more importantly, there is the sense that the style of play made famous by both squads has been eclipsed by that of its rivals. Both teams relied on that famed midfield to unleash the mesmerizing “tiki-taka” passing patterns that wore down the opposition, demoralizing them with relentless ball control. The few teams that beat Spain or Barcelona usually “parked the bus”—that is, they put as many people back on defense as possible to clog up the area in front of the goal and hope to spring the occasional breakaway the other direction when Spain or Barcelona overcommitted offensively. Bayern and Brazil, however, took the game straight to Barcelona and Spain, pressuring them across the pitch and unleashing a physical style that the smaller Spaniards struggled to match. Their defenses, always the teams’ weaknesses (to the extent they had one), were exposed badly, while the pedestrian forwards not named Messi have had zero answers. The midfields have been rendered unable to control play anywhere near the level they used to, and their offenses have degenerated into Iniesta trying to dribble through five defenders.

As damning as that end of tactical dominance may sound, however, it is by no means the end of these great runs by each team. It’s not a coincidence that the two teams that have beaten them have relied on a pair of rock-solid holding midfielders to shut down the tiki-taka, and with Bayern star Javi Martínez gathering dust on the Spanish national team bench, perhaps it’s time to pair him with Busquets to give La Roja its own strong defensive midfield. It might not be as sexy, but it’s not like they’d lose much by taking off one of their mediocre forwards, and that strength would allow offensive fullbacks such as Jordi Alba to range forward into the attack more often. Up front, the national team also has some options; winger Jesús Navas, who came on in the Brazil game a bit too late to make a real difference, adds an element of speed and pace that is otherwise missing from the plodding tiki-taka, and should start playing more. It’s also probably time to start working in the next generation, which early evidence suggests is just as talented as the last one; while it’s hard to see the likes of David de Gea, Isco, and Thiago Alcántara starting full-time by next year’s World Cup, an infusion of youth could add a needed spark to an otherwise aging squad.

Untroubled by the limits of national boundaries, Barcelona opened up the checkbook this summer and bought themselves Neymar, the 21-year-old Brazilian wunderkind who just finished making mincemeat of several of his future teammates for the national team. There are some questions as to how well he’ll jell with Messi, but the potential is there for one of the most lethal combinations in fútbol history. Even if he isn’t an instant hit, he should at least lessen Barça’s Messi-dependence and open up some space for other players on the team. They still have some pressing needs on defense, and just about every center back on the market has been linked to the Catalan giants. Barcelona, too, may want to consider adding a second holding midfielder: like Spain, they have got a good one on their bench in the out-of-position Javier Mascherano, and Bayern certainly showed that such a lineup need not come at the expense of artistic play going forward. This would be especially helpful for the Barça defense, as their fullbacks are even more offensive-minded than Spain’s.

All dynasties must come to an end; it’s impossible for a team to put together a core that will win championships for ten years or so. But with flexible leadership, there’s no reason that a great team can’t build a second dynasty with a little bit of tweaking around the edges. Both Spain and Barcelona have the resources to do so. It’s now up to the teams’ respective managers—veteran Vicente del Bosque with the national team and the green Tito Vilanova at Barcelona—to prove their worth.

A Patient Cycle

Karl Schuettler on Culture, Politics, and High School Hockey

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