Basque Country: Gaztelugatxe, a Gastronomic Society and a Ball Game in France

Bermeo first, one of the working fishing ports on this coast. It still smells like one, which is a recommendation.

Then the hard bit, said plainly. San Juan de Gaztelugatxe is a hermitage on a rock in the sea, joined to the shore by a stone bridge and 241 steps. Getting there is a steep path down from the road, the bridge, the steps, and the same climb back, about two and a half hours in all. A television series once put a dragon's castle on top of it. The real thing is smaller, first written down in 1053, looted by Francis Drake in 1593, and it has a bell.

That is the good bit. At the top you ring it three times and make a wish. Nobody tells anybody else what they wished for.

On the way to Lekeitio, Elantxobe, a village so steep that the bus turns round on a turntable built into the road, in 45 seconds. Tonight you sleep in a fishing town and eat dinner in it.

Lekeitio in the morning. If the tide is out you can walk across to San Nicolás, the island off the beach. If it is in, the island is a very nice view, and that is all it is.

At Zumaia the cliffs are layers of rock tipped on their side like a fallen stack of plates, and a small boat takes you along underneath them. Somewhere in that stack is a thin dark line laid down when an asteroid hit the other side of the planet and ended the dinosaurs. Geologists have put two golden spikes into these cliffs to mark where two ages of the Earth begin, which is as close as geology gets to a medal ceremony.

Lunch in Getaria, 2,887 people and a lot of fish on grills. Juan Sebastián Elcano was born here. In 1522 he brought the first ship all the way round the world, with 18 men left of the more than two hundred who set out. San Sebastián by evening, and dinner is yours.

Up Monte Igueldo in the wooden cars of a funicular more than a hundred years old, to an amusement park on the top with the whole bay underneath it. The roller coaster was built in 1928 and still has a person riding along to work the brake. You will be glad they are there.

Back down, at the far end of the bay, three pieces of steel by Eduardo Chillida are bolted into the rocks, about ten metric tons each, and the paving beside them has holes that breathe out spray when the waves come in.

Then dinner, and this is the one. San Sebastián invented the gastronomic society: a private club with a kitchen, where members cook for each other and settle up at the end of the night. The oldest still going was founded in 1870. Nobody agrees how many there are now, somewhere between fifteen hundred and two thousand. Tonight members of one of them cook for you, in their own kitchen, as their guests. On day 1 you introduced yourself by job title. Tonight somebody will try to teach you a sauce. Let them.

Over the border into France and up La Rhune, in the wooden carriages of a rack railway that has been climbing it since 30 June 1924. An empress walked up in 1859, which is more than anybody asks of you. The top is at 905 meters, and France and Spain share it.

Then Saint-Jean-de-Luz and its jai alai: a court about fifty meters long with a wall at one end, built for cesta punta, the Basque ball game played with a long curved wicker basket strapped to your hand. The professionals here hit the ball at more than three hundred kilometers an hour. You get a coach who used to be one of them, the real basket, and considerably more patience from the wall.

Farewell dinner tonight. In July and August you stay on for the professionals' match, with a Basque men's choir warming up the hall first, and a few hundred people flinching at the same moment every time the ball comes back.

A morning, not a day, across the bay at Pasaia. In 1565 a Basque whaler called the San Juan went down in Red Bay, Labrador. Archaeologists found her in 1978. In 2014 a shipyard here started building her again with the old methods, from about two hundred oaks and the excavation report, and she went back into the water in November 2025. She is meant to sail for Labrador in 2027, so she may be at the quay or somewhere in the North Atlantic. The yard that made her is here either way.

Then back to San Sebastián and the goodbyes. Six days ago you were introducing yourself by job title in Bilbao. Now there is a group chat named after a roller coaster, a wish nobody will repeat out loud, and a camera roll that is mostly cliffs. Ring something on the way out. It worked at Gaztelugatxe.