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Bilbao, the capital of the province of Vizcaya (Bizkaia) in western País Vasco, is Spain’s fourth largest city, accounting for almost half of the entire population of the País Vasco. The city straddles the Río Nervion in a depression framed by hills a few kilometers from the Bay of Biscay.
San Sebastián – from the old, character-laden Parte Vieja with its copious pintxo bars to the elegant Belle Époque neighborhood that developed around the turn of the 20th century as the city came into favor among Europe’s high society – follows the arc of a serene bay sandwiched between two wooded hills with a sweeping expanse of sand running between them.
Today, for five months each year, Ibiza is the undisputed king of Europe’s party scene, wilder on a slow night than Mardí Gras at its wildest, as unrelenting and extravagant as Rio’s Carnival festival, but for months on end rather than just days. Ibiza is nothing like it was just 15 years ago, before the world’s best DJ’s had begun to spin here in the late 1980s, before the word began to leak beyond the islands, before people started flamboyantly dressing up only to get dressed down sometime in the night, before MTV and E! brought the attention of Ibiza to young Americans, who then began to join the young Europeans waiting outside discos with a heavy wallet and a light head.
Cádiz is the capital of the province that spans southward from the Sevilla plains and the western foothills of the Serranía de Ronda to claim the last sweep of the Mediterranean coast. And in February, when the country’s wildest celebration of Carnaval is at full throttle, Cádiz is the happiest place in Spain.
Sevilla is the quietest big city in Spain, aloof, melancholy outside of festivals. She – for there is a subtle femininity to this city – is the leading lady in a country of swooning gentlemen and knows it; self-assured, imbued with a legacy of artists that found inspiration in glorifying her, Jews and Moors who shaped her graceful ambiance through custom and architecture, and Semana Santa, the Christian world’s preeminent religious spectacle. “Sevilla is the most romantic Spanish city” is the bold, probably misguided, but nevertheless common refrain.
Cuenca (the old city that overlooks a newer city built 300 or so years ago) is small and modest. It has beautiful monuments but it is not all beautiful monuments. Two rivers, the Júcar and Huécar, flow through nearby pine forests of the Serranía de Cuenca into gorges that wrap the medieval city above in a protective armor of vertical rock and water. Centuries-old houses cling to the high rim, hanging their shadows on the cliffs from protruding balconies and patios that seem to defy gravity.
Tourists in droves? Yes. With reason? Sin duda, as the Spanish like to say. Toledo was the cradle of indoctrination for Spain long before the Catholics ever thought of Madrid as a capital. It is a bulwarked city, the color of dry straw growing atop a giant, mangled piece of rock. Streets are harrowingly narrow, with sights of mixed styles attributed to the Christians, Islams and Hebrews who shared the city and earned its nickname, “the City of the Three Cultures."
On a short outing from Madrid there are three favored destinations, San Lorenzo del Escorial, Toledo and, lastly, Ávila de los Caballeros. This lofty city, Ávila, is the highest provincial capital in Spain, crowning with its Herculean wall a rough landscape strewn with granite boulders. In the city, the remarkable condition of the walls, and the wealth of Renaissance palaces and Romanesque churches placed in and around them along a maze of cobblestone streets makes for a modern-day medieval crusade.
Stately Segovia is perched high on a rocky promontory overlooking the rivers Erasma and Clamores at their convergence. In the distance 12 km (7.5 miles) away is the silhouette of the Sierra de Guadarrama, bringing forth a cool breeze that filters through the streets, sending the afternoon scent of Segovia’s famous oven-baked suckling pig with it. The confines of the walled city do, as many have claimed before, look like a beached ship.
Barcelona is a city that immediately calls to mind great art and architecture (here one and the same), music, nightlife, walks, a great many things, as well as a great deal of misunderstanding. As Catalans poignantly point out, “We are a complex people living in a thousand places at once.” Such a maelstrom of commerce, culture and idealism is not easily correlated, often leaving visitors with the feeling that, while they may have seen a Gaudí façade, they were never invited inside to see what was holding it up.
