Hotel de la Poste Oust France

At this point I propose to construct a French itinerary, not none starting out in Paris, but rather on the assumption that one flies in Barcelona and drives north. I chose this route for the very idiosyncratic reason that there are some parts of France that I like a lot better than others and these are where I tend to travel. Others will doubtless have different preferences.

The French, as a people, are serious eaters. Typically, they will spend a larger proportion of their disposable income on food than either Americans or Brits do. This obviously leaves them with less to spend on their housing. This translates itself into the hotel world in a noticeable manner. While the five star palaces are as elaborate and luxurious as anywhere in the world, these days they range in their prices from the merely outrageous to the effectively ruinous, To cite but one example, the cheapest double at the Hotel du Cap on the Cote D'azur goes for $ 680 for the night, a suite will cost you $2,200. At the lower levels the prices, while still high, are at least in the range of many travellers. However, one often finds that an establishment that boasts of a truly marvelous restaurant will have rooms, that while certainly scrupulously clean and adequate to one's needs, may well be small and furnished in a glaringly outmoded way; the bathrooms, while always serviceable and clean, will tend to be oldfashioned as well, a pull chain toilet is often still encountered. (A word of caution here, in the southwest, in cafes and gas stations, one still often finds oneself confronted with a Turkish toilet, unlike in Spain, where the toilet culture is at a very high level). One should not let oneself be put off by any of this: one is there to eat and to see the country, not to wallow in luxury.

Oust is a tiny, picturesque village on the northern slope of the Pyrenees. The Hotel de la Poste is an old fashioned, late nineteenth century building, the rooms are quite small, the furniture seems to be original, the usual French wardrobes which, in most French hotels take the place of closets, tend to be hard to open and close. But it's extremely quiet at night and the mattresses are good. There's a pleasant garden in which, in good weather, one takes one's meals and a small outdoor pool. But the food is absolutely superb. It's not your ultra fahionable nouvelle cuisine, but nor is it grandma's cooking. What it is rather, is first rate French cooking as it was half a century ago, and to my taste nothing surpasses tha level. There is a very fine fixed price three course menu that goes for under forty dollars and I've never tried anything on it that I didn't like: I recall having a duo of slightly sauteed goose and duck foie gras as a first course which to this day brings tears to my eyes. And if one isn't up to two big meals on the same day, for lunch there is a bakery nearby which makes the absolutely best croissants I have tasted, the most buttery, the most crisp. Next door there's a butcher shop with a very decent assortment of lunchmeats and cheeses and there is nolack of pretty spots to picnic in within easy reach of Oust. A room at the hotel goes for about $75 for the night, including a very nice continental breakfast with a generous assortment of homemade jams. The surrounding countryside has great charm, there a re good hiking and biking trails and, for the more adventurous,one can rent kayaks for white water boating.

Parador Argomaniz; Parador Soria; Parador Lerma Spain

The parador of Argomaniz is a former Renaissance palace in an isolated location, overlooking the plain of Alava. It served as the Napoleonic headquarters during a portion of the Peninsular War. The public rooms are large and sumptously decorated, a considerable number of the standard bedrooms are, while very nice in themselves, unfortunately overlook a garbage dump but, except in the high season, you can generally book a "superior" room on one of the online discount sites for not much over half price. Nearby lies the city of Vitoria-Gasteiz, nowadays the seat of the Basque government, under whose walls Wellington defeated the French. Any number of Riojan vineyards in the region offer free wine tastings.

The parador of Soria, a newbuild, lies to the south, across the border in Castille. It sits high above the town on a hilltop with splendid views of town and coutryside. There's a pleasant park surrounding it and, a rarity in paradors, an indoor pool. The rooms are spacious and well furnished. In the city there are three Romanesque churches. Santo Domingo is in the French style, with a magnificent twelfth century portal; San Juan de Rabanera is remarkable for the Byzantine influences it displays; the cloister, which is all that remains of San Juan de Duero down by the river, has intersecting arches which derrive straight from Moorish art. Soria, in the time of Alfonso VIII and his consort Eleanor Plantagenet, served as a capital of the realm, which may well account for these cosmopolitan elements.

Lerma, to the west, is a smallish town where, in the early seventeenth century, Philip III's favorite, the extravagantly corrupt Duke of Lerma, built a palace to receive his master along with a plaza surrounded by stone houses for the large number of retainers he maintained. The whole makes for a very imposing complex. The palace itself, with its severe stone facade, is now the parador. Everything on the interior strives for a majestic effect, the bedrooms are large and sumptuously furnished. For whatever reason, the food in the dining room struck me as not up to parador standards, but there are excellent restaurants within easy walking distance. Nearby is the city of Burgos, the capital of Castille in the middle ages, with its splendid Gothic cathedral, the third largest in Spain, and the foremost example of the Spanish Flamboyant style. Madrid is little more than an hour's drive from Lerma, a straight shot down the A1 motorway.

Parador Cervera de Pisuerga; Parador Santillana del Mar; Parador Limpias Spain.

The Pisuerga is a remote, wild, thinly populated region in the northern part of the province of Palencia, on the southern flank of the Picos de Europa range. The parador, a newbuild that resembles an oversize hunting lodge, is, on the interior, a mix of massive stone walls and huge wooden beams. It sits on a ridge in the midst of a forrested area, overlooking the Picos from the front and a distant reservoir from the back. The views on both sides are spectacular, even though you are somewhat farther from the mountains than at Fuente De. This is a very peaceful place in which to rest up from some hard days of touring, the grounds encompass some very pleasant footpaths.

Santillana del Mar is a small Cantabrian town, little more than a village, perched atop a hillside near the Mar Caqntabrico. The place was an important pilgrimage center in the middle ages, being the burial place of St Juliana (Santillana). As a result a number of nobiliar mansions, all bearing the nobiliar coats of arms of their owners was built there in the fifteenth century so that these gentlemen might reside there in comfort once they had finished their pilgimmage. These all still stand, along with a considerable number of smaller houses of the period and, having been conscientiously restored, give a museum like impression of what a late medieval Spanish town looked like. The twelfth century church has some very fine Romanesque carvings. The parador, built around an inner courtyard, is actually two separate paradors. Depending on the time of the year, one or the other or both might be open. The original one is a newbuild constructed to resemble the aforesaid mansions; the newer one, surnamed Gil Blas, occupies a seventeenth century nobiliar mansion. Both are well furnished and comfortable. A short drive will take you to the beach, but the main attraction here is undoubtedly the cave of Altamira. This is one of the genuine wonders of the world, containing marvelous paintings dating from 15,000 to 12,000 B.C. The cave is called the Sistine chapel of Prehistory, when the numerous bison on its ceiling are suddenly lit up by the guide a frisson of awe inevitably goes through the visitors. But be sure to reserve your tickets on line at least a couple of months ahead of your visit, entries to the cave are limited to a certain number each day and are snapped up fast.

Limpias is a small Cantabrian fishing village. The parador is a summer palace built for Alfonso XII in the nineteenth century, in the summers the court resided here. There are pleasant gardens surrounding the structure, there's a tennis court and several beaches are within easy reach.

Quirks & Quips II

Spain in the summer is a hot country. Madrid lies on the 4oth parallell, roughly the same as New York, without the moderating effect of the Atlantic which the latter city enjoys at least occasionally. To counteract the effects of the heat the Spanish long ago devised the sensible expedient of the siesta. This can vary from region to region, but in general what happens that all but the largest department stores and most offices, both public and private, and a great many of the museums close their doors and pull down the shutters at half-past-one in the afternoon, not to reopen until five, when everyone goes back to work for another three hours. At siesta time people go home for a long lunch, generally stopping off at a corner bar for a quick glass of wine first, and after lunch lie down for a nap. This state of affairs has two consequences for the tourist: he is left to fend for himself over the long noon hour, practically everything is closed. This is a good time of day to do one's driving, the roads are deserted, the truckers have all pulled off to the side to have their lunches in roadside restaurants. And it means that the dinner hour is very late, much later than Americans are accustomed to. No city restaurant opens its doors until nine in the evening (many but not all of the paradors try to accomodate their foreign guests by starting service in their comedors at 8:30). But of course no self respecting Spaniard would dream of showing up anywhere for dinner at nine. On more than one occasion I have been finishing up my dinner in a provincial restaurant at around eleven in the evening, at which time a family with small children would walk in to start theirs. I suppose this must have been on a Saturday night when the kids didn;t have to be in school early the next morning. We have found it expedient to have a small snack with our pre dinner drinks to ward off the worst of the hunger pains. The ubiquitous bars are a Spanish institution in themselves. One stops in there for a morning coffee, usually laced with a shot of the local brandy, before going to work, and, as I've mentioned, before going home to lunch. The regulars all know one another, conversations are animated and often carried on in carrying voices across the whole length of the room. (There are two rules to be followed when speaking Spanish in public: speak as loudly and as quickly as you are capable of doing). Tapas, small portions of local delicacies such as raw ham, fresh anchovies, Russian eggs, artichoke hearts, roasted red peppers, tortillas (slices of omelet in which potatoes have been worked in) are consumed along with one's wine and beer. These used to be free, "un regalo", which was your inducement to stop in for the wine. But I last encountered complimentary tapas in a bar in Pisuerga, in the Province of Palencia, in the 90's.( My Charming Dinner Companion has just informed me that I'm suffering from a serious memory defect -- we got free tapas with our wine and beer in a bar in Avila last fall. So it would seem that, at least in Spain, there is still such a thing as a free lunch.

Something else that a foreigner has to get used to in the bars is that all manner of debris, crumpled up Spanish undersize napkins, candy wrappers, even stamped out cigarette butts litter the floors, which are swept only at closing time. The air is thick with smoke, Spaniards being inveterate smokers, so much so that some people in my circle of friends resist having lunch in a bar although it's by far the cheapest, quickest and most convenient solution to the lunch problem when one is on the road. Lunch in a restaurant can easily take up to two hours and I, for one, don't really want to eat two heavy meals a day, three if one is having a parador breakfast. Earlier this year a new law was introduced in Spain, banning all smoking in public places, bars included. I look forward very much to experience the benefits of this law when we shall be travelling in Spain in November.

Quips & Quirks

Every country has its foibles. Travelling in Spain, you eventually encounter a good many of these and I propose to describe a few of them here. I'll begin with what, in our times, is undoubtedly a universal nuisance but has bitten Spain particularly badly: graffiti. In the States one sees them in every large city but they seem to be governed by an unwritten social contract. They're painted on railway trestles, warehouses, inner city tenements, abandonned buildings and the like, but not generally on public buildings. And most of them have some small pretention to artistic merit, being the totems of youthful gangs which compete with one another in creating eye catching symbols. In Spain, as in many European countries, graffiti are a form of political expression, no more, no less. No surface is spared from being scrawled on on behalf of some cause or other. I have seen the sides of twelfth century churches in this manner, it's as if we went in for writing on the walls of the Jefferson monument. The local authorities do their best to clean these up, but graffiti when erased leave ugly smears, the only solution is to repaint the entire surface and that only encourages the daubers to start over again. No cause is too arcane to become the subject of a graffiti campaign. I recall driving through the northwestern part of the country in the 80's and encountering smeared signs everywhere that read "Ocalitos No!" ,with the addition of a hammer and sickle. I had little Spanish at the time, my little travel dictionary didn't define ocalitos, I thought it might be the Spanish acronym for NATO or some other hated Western institution. I eventually found out that it referred to eucalyptus trees. From the middle ages onward Spain had undergone a gradual deforestation. The clearing of wooded areas to create additional grazing for the immense herds of sheep that roamed freely over the land, the need for firewood, the demands of the construction and shipbuilding industries all combined to denude the land. The building of the Spanish Armada in the sixteenth century by itself was responsible for the deforestation of a whole district in Andalusia. By the 1900's this had reached critical levels throughout the country, the typical results of deforestation, erosion and chronic landslides were devastating the countryside in society which was still largely agricultural and could not counterbalance these losses by stepping up industrial exports. One of the few positive elements of the four decades of Franco's rule, along with the building of a large network of artificial lakes for irrigation, was a massive reforestation program. Someone found out that the Australian eucalyptus tree is hardy, grows very fast, requires little water to survive and reproduces itself at a rapid rate, so whole groves were planted in Galicia and Asturias. But, as is the case with many alien species, as we have experienced with carps and the like, the eucalyptus tree is invasive and rapidly replaces native trees. The groves soon turned into forests and there is no denying that, at least by European esthetic standards, compared to oaks and birches, it's an ugly tree. But I couldn't help but wonder which was uglier, the eucalyptus forests or the proliferation of smeared graffiti denouncing their existence?

Then there is the matter of separatism. In theory Spain is a unified country, but there is hardly a province that doesn't have its own separatist movement. (The one exception is Andalusia, the largest but also the poorest of Spain's provinces, which is supported mostly by contributions from the industrial North. There the inhabitants have the good sense to realise that, cut adrift, they'd rapidly starve.) The most notorious case is that of the Basques who for decades conducted an armed rebellion which only ended fairly recently when the central government agreed to widespread concessions. Long before that, it had been agreed that all road signs in the Basque region be in two languages, Spanish and Basque, the latter being totally unrelated to any other European language. This was taken up as a challenge by the militant separatists who proceded to paint out the Spanish texts on all the signs. The result was that a situation might arise in which you came upon a road sign which, if you happened to know Basque (which very few non-Basques do) informed you to stop at once, the road went over the side of a cliff a quarter of a mile further on. The results were predictable. That never quite happened to me, but I well remember driving around in circles trying to find my way out of the large city of Vittoria-Gasteiz and not finding a single sign that I could read. Catalonia too is dominated by separatist sentiment. The Catalans however have the advantage of possessing the lion's share of Spain's industrial productive capacity and have long used that as a lever to extract concessions from the central government. All instruction is now in Catalan, Spanish is taught as a second language, all road signs are in Catalan only (Catalan is a halfway house between Spanish and French so that if one knows one or the other of these languages one can puzzle out their meaning). A certain proportion of the taxes collected in Catalonia must, by law, stay in the province. The separatism goes so far that these days the Catalans even have their own ice hockey team, separate from the national one. (If the rivalry between Real Madrid and F.C. Barcelona descends any further into the open antagonism that has been the hallmark of recent matches, this will be happen in soccer as well, which will certainly end the era of Spanish domination of the sport). Galicia also is a hotbed of separatist sentiment. The local dialect is closer to Portuguese than it is to Spanish and there are close cultural affinities with that country. The Galicians however are not stupid. They have a reputation for being both canny and crafty (Franco was a Galician) and they're perfectly capable of recognizing that, even by Spanish standards, Portugal is an extremely poor country so that while the Galician separatist do their best to extract concessions on the part of the central government, their ambitions stop well short of actually breaking away to affiliate with Portugal. The most ludicrous example of Spanish separatism that I encountered though was in the Bierzo, a small, remote, primitive mountain area in the western part of the province of Leon, on the border with Galicia. It contains one overgrown village, Villafranca del Bierzo, the entire district has a population of under ten thousand, the main industry seems to be a parador, the worst I've ever stayed in, with wallpaper peeling off the walls in the guest rooms, dripping sinks and non functional toilets. But every available surface in the area was covered with graffiti that proclaimed "Leon No! Galicia No! Bierzo Independiente!" An independent Bierzo would be lucky to survive for one week.

This will be continued anon.

Parador El Ferrol; Parador Ribadeo; Parador Vilalba Spain

Here are three more Galician paradors. (Why some regions of Spain are thick with paradors while they are few and far between in others ia a mystery to me.) El Ferrol is a pretty harbor town close to Cape Finistere, the westernmost part of Europe and across the bay from the major city of A Coruna. The parador, a newbuild, is constructed to resemble a Galician urban mansion, some of the rooms have the traditional glassed in balconies. The harbor views are pleasing. If one arrives from Santiago a problem arises because one has to drive through all of the town and there isn't even one of the usual parador sign posts. I was told that this was the result of an ongoing dispute between the regional and national governments.

Ribadeo, on the Asturian border, is another smallish harbor town. The parador, another newbuild, is situated to overlook the estuary of the river Eo and has an impressive view of the Cantabrian sea. There are numerous beaches nearby and in midsummer the water briefly gets warm enough to swim in. There is a nearby bird sanctuary and any number of of indentations of the coast (rios), many of which remain uninhabited and present a wild, primitive aspect that eerily recall the time when cavemen roamed these lands.

Vilalba is a small inland town. The old part of the parador, a massive stone tower, was originally the keep of a large castle. There are only eight guestrooms in it and they cost rather more than those in the new part, which is built to resemble a rich merchant's residence, but if you want to experience what sleeping in a medieval castle must have been like, treat yourself to one of these. The city of Lugo, which was the capital of Roman Galicia, is nearby. It has fine third century Roman walls, Roman baths, and a twelfth century Roman cathedral.

Parador Leon Spain

The parador, one of the two with a five star rating in the chain, is a former commandery of the Order of Santiago. This is a religious/military institution, founded in the twelfth century, for the twin purposes of protecting the Pilgrimage Road and providing medical services to pilgrims. Like the crusading orders it requires that its members be of noble birth, and like the Templars and Hospitalers it did not stint itself when it came to creature comforts. The building is a splendind sixteenth century palace, the public rooms are numerous, vast and sumptuous. The bedrooms in the old part are huge and have four poster beds but are considered to be suites and are priced accordingly. If you are willing to book a room in the new part (these are standard parador rooms) you can usually get one for $150 for the night. The only possible minus is that there is generally some sort of function scheduled and the bar, in particular, can get pretty crowded. Leon, once the capital of an independent kingdom, is a bustling city. There are two churches of outstanding interest. The huge Gothic cathedral is built in the French style. Spanish Gothic has a tendecy to be muscular, even squat, but not here. The cathedral soars upward in the style of Chartres and Notre Dame. There is a profusion of stained glass windows, the finest in Spain. And then there is the church of San Isidoro. Originally Romanesque, it was later Gothicized with, however the significant exception of the Pantheon, the burial place of the Kings and Queens of Leon. This is possibly the earliest Romanesque in the province, with beautifully carved capitals. The twelfth century frescoes are absolutely outstanding, depict the usual biblical motifs and, much rarer, scenes of daily life. The Treasury contains two of the finest objects of eleventh century religious art in the world, the chalice of Dona Urraca and a carved ivory reliquary. A twenty mile drive brings one to San Miguel de Escalada. This church, dating from 1050, is the best preserved Mozarabic building in Spain and incorporates an early tenth century chapel, a fascinating blend of Visigothic and Mozarabic styles.