Bilbao and the Basque Country

Northern Spain is a misty land of green hills, low russet rooflines, and colorful fishing villages, and is home to the formerly industrial city of Bilbao, reborn as a center of art and architecture. Santander, once the main seaport for Old Castile on the Bay of Biscay, is in a mountainous zone wedged between the Basque Country and, to the west, Asturias. Santander and the entire Cantabrian region are cool summer refuges with sandy beaches, high sierra (including part of the Picos de Europa Mountains), and tiny highland towns. The semiautonomous Basque Country, with its steady drizzle (onomatopoetically called the siri-miri), damp verdant landscape, and rugged coastline, is a distinct national and cultural entity within the Spanish state. Navarra is considered Basque in the Pyrenees and merely Navarran in its southern reaches, along the Ebro River. La Rioja, tucked between the Sierra de la Demanda (a small-to-midsize mountain range that separates La Rioja from the central Castilian steppe) and the Ebro River, is Spain's premier wine country.

Called the País Vasco in Castilian Spanish, and Euskadi in the linguistically mysterious, non-Indo-European Basque language called Euskera, the Basque region is more a country within a country, or a nation within a state (the semantics are much debated). The Basques are known to love competition—it has been said that they will bet on anything that has numbers on it and moves (horses, dogs, runners, weight lifters—anything). Such traditional rural sports as chopping mammoth tree trunks, lifting boulders, and scything grass reflect the Basques' attachment to the land and to farm life as well as an ingrained enthusiasm for feats of strength and endurance. Even poetry and gastronomy become contests in Euskadi, as bertsolaris (amateur poets) improvise duels of sharp-witted verse, and male-only gastronomic societies compete in cooking contests to see who can make the best sopa de ajo (garlic soup) or marmitako (tuna stew).

The much-reported Basque separatist movement is made up of a small but radical sector of the political spectrum. The terrorist organization known as ETA, or Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (Basque Homeland and Liberty), has killed nearly 900 people in more than 35 years of activity. Conflict has waxed and waned over the years, though it has never affected travelers. When ETA declared a "permanent cease-fire" in April 2006,hope flared for an end to Basque terrorism until a late-December bomb at Madrid's Barajas airport killed two and brought progress to a halt.As of March 2008, ETA has stepped up its violence with three more assassinations, even as Spanish, French, and autonomous Basque police crack down on ETA's support apparatus. Basque Lehendakari (President) Ibarretxe has called for a Basque referendum on independence that, under the Spanish Constitution, is illegal.

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