Our last week in Bilbao, towards the end of June, brought midsummer celebrations. On June 23rd, the Noche de San Juan (St John’s Night) is celebrated with after-dark bonfires on beaches and hilltops throughout the Basque Country, and the usual standing around talking and drinking till the early hours of the night. A few days earlier, Bilbao’s ‘Noche Blanca’ (White Night), took place, another midsummer celebration of light. There was lots of music, dance, etc., around town – but the highlight was the gaudily illuminated buildings around the city:

We left Bilbao on June 26th. On the evening before our departure, about 15 of Pietro’s colleagues gave us a rousing farewell amidst the empty shelves and packed suitcases in our flat. Next morning, we left a little tearfully on the 8am train from Atxuri Station, and went all the way back home on the train in one day, through San Sebastian, Paris and London, arriving at our little house in East Oxford at 1am.

Within a few hours of getting back, it felt as if we had never been away, but rather had experienced our year in Bilbao in a weird time warp which is in some sense still going on somewhere in another dimension. This is what happens when you go away for a year and come back to a house, a street, a city which have apparently not changed at all, and in which people’s lives (including one’s own) have apparently not changed at all, despite all the extraordinary things you’ve experienced in the intervening time.

It’s great to be home, but leaving Bilbao feels a bit like a bereavement too.  I’ve been keeping the experience artificially alive by continuing to write this blog for a couple of months after our return, but I’ve said most of what I wanted to say now, and it’s time to bring it to a final full stop.

Thanks for reading.  I leave you with  (i) a little 6-minute film that takes you all around the Basque Country and encapsulates the varied landscapes and some of the spirit of the place...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzutvz-eExo

and (ii) a final miscellany of previously un-posted shots of Bilbao.

Agur, Bilbo!  Bye bye, Bilbao!

Keeping Watch by the River

Our weekend trip to Barcelona was a year ago, last September, a few weeks after we had arrived in Bilbao. Somehow I never quite got round to blogging about it then as there were so many things to say about Bilbao at the time. So I’m only getting round to it now in my penultimate post. Perhaps this is what’s called leaving the best till last.

It’s a slow six-hour train ride from Atlantic Bilbao to Mediterranean Barcelona. Things speed up a little once one has crossed the Cantabrian mountains out of the Basque Country and descended into the stunning green Ebro valley of La Rioja. Then there’s the strange grey-brown desert of the area around Zaragoza, and finally into the different, Mediterranean green of Catalunya.

We’d never been to Barcelona before – but we really fell in love with it, with its enticing combination of rich cultural life, extraordinary history, wonderful architectural heritage, Mediterranean climate (warm, warm, warm), fantastic setting (a seaside city with acres of beautiful beach, and mountains behind the city) and great food.

Not that we saw that much of the city, however. We stayed for one night only in a flat in the medieval old town (the ‘Ciutat Vella’) – in the area of Sant Pere, which is on the edge of the ‘Barri Gotic’, the very centre of the city. In a day and a half, we didn’t have time to do more than explore the (extensive) old town and the old port (‘Port Vell’), and wander along the nearby beaches of Barceloneta. But we saw enough to feel certain that this is a place we’d like to spend a lot more time in.

The Ciutat Vella has its touristy centre, of course, especially around the cathedral and the Picasso Museum, but Sant Pere, the area we were staying in, was a slice of authentic old town life, with its narrow medieval streets and a North African and Middle Eastern feel:

Sant Pere is also the location of the Palau de la Musica Catalana, the glorious art nouveau (‘modernista’) concert hall with its extraordinary ceramic decorations inside and outside. One of the highlights of the weekend was a visit here to see a brilliant evening of flamenco:

The ancient core of the old town, the Barri Gotic, stretches back to Roman times:

Within the remains of the Roman walls are the medieval cathedral and royal palace (in which is contained the excellent Museum of the History of Barcelona):

… and the ancient governmental heart of the city, the Placa de Sant Jaume, where the ceremonial buildings of the Catalan Government are still located:

Beyond the Roman core, the old town has two great medieval churches – Santa Maria del Pi near the centre:

… and Santa Maria del Mar in the southern area near the sea, ‘La Ribera’:

North of La Ribera is the atmospheric area of Santa Caterina, with its splendidly rebuilt medieval market:

The pickpocket-infested tourist-trap avenue ‘Las Ramblas’ runs between the Barrio Gotic and the western area of ‘El Raval’, quite down-at-heel in places. Here there is the huge food market, ‘La Boqueria’:

… and the delightful old medieval hospital of Santa Creu which is now the Library of Catalunya:

By the sea is the harbour and the old shipping area, Port Vell, with its famous statute of Christopher Columbus and its complex of medieval shipyards:

There’s also the ‘Palau del Mar’, now the Museum of the History of Catalunya, and the beaches of Barceloneta:

Back in the heart of the Barrio Gotic, there’s the old Jewish area, known as ‘El Call’, with a recently discovered medieval synagogue:

And the charming Placa de Sant Felip Neri:

With more time, we could have gone beyond the Ciutat Vella to see the Gaudi buildings (including the ‘Sagrada Familia’) in the 19th century new town (‘L’Eixample’); the complex of national art galleries, museums and parks in the Montjuic area on the hill above the medieval city; the Olympic village along the coast from Barceloneta; and so on. Or we could have ventured into the Catalunyan mountains beyond the city to see the many medieval towns, castles and monasteries to be found there.

We will definitely be back.

The Biscay coast (stretching from Galicia in the West through Asturias, Cantabria and the Spanish and French Basque Country) contains some of the most remarkable Stone Age treasures in Europe. The most famous are the cave paintings in Lascaux in the French Basque Country, and at Altamira in Cantabria. There are plenty of similar smaller sites in the Spanish Basque Country, the most notable being Santimamine near Gernika. We didn´t actually manage to visit Santimamine, but we did get to Altamira on our weekend trip to Cantabria – and it was a very memorable trip.

Rediscovered in the 19th century after the caves collapsed in the late stone age, the paintings at Altamira were the very first stone age paintings to be found in modern times, and there was enormous scepticism about them at first: people simply didn't believe such extraordinary paintings could be so old.

Nowadays, you can’t actually go into the caves at Altamira (except by special arrangement), since the environment is too delicate to sustain the massive numbers of tourists. The caves were shut to the general public in the 1970. In 2001 a superb life-size fibreglass replica of the caves and all the paintings within was opened:

It was the first time I’d seen Stone Age cave paintings in situ. I was amazed at their richness and the sheer number and extent of them. I was also fascinated to see that the artists were, in many places, actually using the shape of the rock to guide their painting – either using a natural undulation in the cave surface as a kind of ‘boss’, a panel on which to paint, or using the contour of the rock to echo the shape of the thing they were painting:

The interpretation centre built around the caves at Altamira is outstanding, and I was sorry I couldn’t spend more time there. Absolutely up-to-the-minute in terms of the quality of graphic and audio-visual design, it really helped one to understand the kind of society which produced these paintings. So many archaeological displays don’t really explain what those rather dull pieces of bone and clay actually are and what they actually did and how they were actually made, but this one really brings it all to life.

The exhibition is particularly illuminating about the paintings themselves, showing how the paintings were made, as well as speculating on their functions, and illustrating the far-reaching influence of the discoveries of these ancient art works on modern art: Picasso is quoted as saying: ‘After Altamira, everything is decadence.’

Learning about how the paintings were made was perhaps the most interesting bit. I had little idea how sophisticated the techniques used were – not only using the contours of the rock but also engraving the outlines and major details of the figures before painting them in using different pigments and a variety of ‘smudging’ techniques to express movement, light and shade etc. Paint was applied using fingers, fur rags, and sometimes even airbrushing – blowing paint through tubes made from birds’ bones – depending on what effect was required. (Pictures below from the internet).

An equal sophistication is apparent in the surviving artefacts made by these people, left behind when they abandoned the cave for unknown reasons 14,000 years ago – tools such as harpoons and needles, and pendants and other decorative adornments, finely carved from bone and antler as well as stone – and in the techniques they used to turn animals into clothes and food, and so on, e.g. tanning and roasting with herbs. The exhibition draws parallels between this culture and the hunter-gatherer lifestyles of some modern eskimos, aborigines etc.

In fact, one of the revelations of this museum was a sense of how recent these paintings are, relatively speaking, and of the relative continuity between them and modernity, something I’d never quite sensed before. If you’re anything like me, you probably have incredibly little grasp of the chronology of things in the very distant past, before the Greeks and Romans, say. Just how long ago were they? This museum really helped me to grasp the relative time scales concerned. The paintings at Altamira are between 18,000 and 14,000 years old, dating from the last centuries of the Palaeolithic world of hunter-gathering before the Neolithic world of agriculture began around 10,000 years ago – not so long when you think that the late Stone Age (Stonehenge etc.) and the start of the Bronze Age in the near East was only about 5,000 years ago, and the Anglo-Saxons 1,500 years ago.

The museum was also excellent on explaining the archaeology of the caves, and the extraordinary events of the nineteenth century which led to the discovery and interpretation of these works of art which forced a revolution in understanding of history and culture.

We had to do more wrestling with the chronology of the distant past at another exceptionally interesting museum we went to, in Burgos a few weeks later. This was the new Museum of Human Evolution, built as an interpretation centre for the extraordinary Stone Age finds (of 1994) from the nearby archaeological site of Atapuerca 15 miles away. Again, the museum contains outstanding recreations of the caves and the environment of the caves as an aid to understanding their history and archaeology. (Trips can also be made to the excavations at Atapuerca, which are still ongoing.)

Considered some of the most important archaeological finds ever made, the caves at Atapuerca don’t contain paintings, but the remains of the oldest hominids ever found in Europe – the ‘homo antecessor’ of 900,000 years ago – as well as later species such as ‘homo heidelbergensis’ (400,000 years ago).  It’s believed that ‘homo antecessor’ might be the common ancestor of both ‘homo sapiens’ and ‘homo neanderthalis’.

The museum itself, again extremely impressive in terms of its graphic and audio-visual display, and the clarity of its narrative, is a kind of mixture of archaeology, history and science, exploring not only the archaeology of the finds themselves but also setting them in the context of the science of evolution and the history of discoveries about evolution:

Here, one’s sense of time is stretched in a different way. Whereas at Altamira, one realises how recent the late Stone Age was, at Atapuerca one realises how long the Stone Age was, and how long ago the early Stone Age was. The first ‘homo’ is reckoned to be around 2.5 million years ago, whilst ‘homo sapiens’ originated only around 200,000 years ago. Here at Atapuerca we have the hominids of almost 1 million years ago; at Altamira, the stone age art of only 14,000 years ago.