Four years, two months, one pandemic and a house sale later, we found ourselves packing our dog-eared road atlas of Spain and returning to sail across the Bay of Biscay to Bilbao.
Galicia is a gas-powered ship, made in China. Being only half full with 600 souls on board, she was spacious and still-new feeling at 18 months old. Brittany Ferries are operating their Spanish crossings as ‘eco-friendly’ which makes for good PR as long as the crossing is sunny and calm.
At 36 hours on board, it is a very slow sea voyage. Leaving Portsmouth on Thursday evening at 7pm and arriving at Bilbao on Saturday morning at 8am gave plenty of time for resting, planning and preparing for six weeks’ travelling on the road.
This new slower ferry crossing offers Brittany Ferries an extra eight hours to sell meals, booze and duty free. In the event, the crossing went quickly and was enjoyable on a blessedly calm sea.
Arriving into the port was made easy and efficient by an army of ground crew cheerily semaphoring directions for us to join a short queue at passport control and customs.
Passports checked, scanned and stamped, we were on the ring road around Bilbao just 20 short minutes after driving down Galicia’s ramp onto the dock.
With news reports of ‘travel chaos’ at Dover, as the great half term getaway got grindingly underway, it was with rueful smiles that we whisked up and out of the modern city on the empty four lane highway, the A8.
Saturday morning gifted us a cool and quiet journey along the elevated straights and viaducts of the impressively engineered motorway.
A series of long winding tunnels carried us through the hillsides, skirting the coastal capital of Donastia San Sebastian, to the small Basque town of Elorrio. It was a welcome return to the place of our last stop in Spain, four long years ago.
Keen to see how it had fared since the Covid crisis shut down all of Europe and most of the world for two strange years, we headed back into the historic centre, home of medieval dukes and bishops and Romans before them.
It was a joy to meander the narrow, cobbled streets of stone terraces, heavily shuttered up against the, now hot, sunshine and with lines of washing hanging above iron balconies.
The air smelt reminiscent of the Mediterranean – garlic and fried fish, strong tobacco, fir trees and clean laundry. Spanish chatter bounced between the carved stone porticos of former palaces lining the central plaza.
It was six pm and the cathedral bells called the faithful to church setting a bobbing mass of young families, elderly women and old boys tottering together up the wide stone steps into the impressively gigantic Basilica of the Immaculate Conception.
At 50 meters long by 25 meters wide it is considered one of the finest examples of Renaissance religious architecture in the Basque Country.
Elorrio’s heyday was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when most of its ancestral homes and palaces were built and decorated with 69 sculptured coats of arms.
The main road crossings still hold 16 ‘cruises’, stone crosses dating back to the sixteenth century and featuring figures of Jesus and the saints.
During the 19th century the town shrewdly cashed in on its reputation as a place of ‘healing waters’ and we joined the early evening crowd at the riverside pintxos bars for sparkling white Txakoli, the famous Basque wine poured high from the bottle into freezer chilled glasses.
The sun set on the verdant green Madura valley presided over by the rugged limestone massif of the Udalaitz. It was a welcome return!
