Green Coasts and Pintxos: A September Return to Northern Spain

There are places you visit and places you return to. For our family, the green and misty coast of Galicia in northwestern Spain falls firmly into the second category. My husband is from there, which means that every trip back is layered with something that goes beyond tourism. It is homecoming. It is family gathered around a long table. It is the particular smell of the Atlantic air coming off the rias, the deep coastal inlets that give Galicia its dramatic, otherworldly shoreline. It is familiar in the best possible way, and September, when the summer crowds have thinned and the light turns golden and soft, is our favorite time to go.

Galicia

If you have never heard much about Galicia, you are not alone. It tends to fly under the radar of the typical Spain itinerary, which is honestly part of its charm. This is not the Spain of flamenco and sangria and blazing southern heat. Galicia is verdant, cool, and Celtic in its bones. The region shares more culturally and linguistically with Ireland and Brittany than it does with Andalusia. It has its own language, Galego, distinct from Castilian Spanish, its own music rooted in the gaita, a bagpipe that will stop you cold the first time you hear it drifting through a stone village, and a culinary tradition built around the extraordinary seafood pulled daily from the Atlantic. Percebes, pulpo a feira, fresh razor clams, grilled sardines. If you love seafood, Galicia is a pilgrimage.

But what I love most about it cannot be put on a menu. It is the pace of life. The way afternoons stretch out unhurriedly. The way family is the organizing principle of everything. The way the landscape, all granite and green and fog, feels ancient and alive at the same time. Every time we leave I carry a little piece of it home with me, and every time we return it feels like no time has passed at all.

San Sebastian

This year we added a few days at the end of the trip in San Sebastian, just across the border in the Basque Country, and as always it delivered completely. I say as always because this is not our first time here. San Sebastian is one of those places that gets under your skin early and never really lets go. We keep coming back because it keeps rewarding us.

A little context for those who have not been: the Basque Country is one of the most fascinatingly distinct regions in all of Europe. The Basques are an ancient people whose origins remain genuinely mysterious to historians and linguists alike. Their language, Euskara, is what is known as a language isolate, meaning it has no known relationship to any other language in the world. Not to Spanish, not to French, not to any Indo European language. It simply exists, fully formed and entirely its own, spoken by a people who have lived in this corner of the Pyrenees for longer than recorded history can account for. Standing in San Sebastian and hearing Euskara spoken on the street is a quietly extraordinary thing once you understand what you are listening to.

And then there is the food. San Sebastian has more Michelin stars per capita than almost anywhere else on earth, but the experience I look forward to most has nothing to do with white tablecloths. It is the pintxos. For the uninitiated, pintxos are the Basque answer to tapas, small bites of extraordinary food lined up along the bars of the old town, each one a tiny masterpiece. The ritual is simple and deeply pleasurable. You walk from bar to bar through the narrow streets of the Parte Vieja, the old quarter, stopping wherever something catches your eye, ordering a glass of txakoli, the local sparkling white wine, and eating your way through the neighborhood one perfect bite at a time. A slice of bread topped with anchovy and a sliver of pepper. A skewer of grilled prawn. A little round of foie on toast with a drizzle of something sweet. It sounds simple and it is, which is exactly the point. The ingredients are impeccable and the technique is flawless and you end up eating some of the best food of your life standing at a bar with strangers who all look equally happy to be exactly where they are.

We spent our days in San Sebastian doing very little that could be called structured. We walked the beach. We sat in the sun. We ate. We wandered. We ate some more. It is that kind of place.

What Keeps Pulling Us Back

I think about why we keep returning to this particular corner of the world, and the answer is something I try to bring into my work and my life in equal measure. There is an enormous difference between seeing a place and knowing it. Knowing takes time and repetition and a willingness to go deeper rather than wider. The same is true of learning. The students I work with who make the most meaningful progress are not always the ones who cover the most ground. They are the ones who slow down, go back, and keep returning to the things that matter until those things become truly theirs.

Galicia and San Sebastian feel truly ours now. I hope you get to experience both someday.