I’m up at all hours in the night, but around nine I feel steady enough to leave the hotel room. I sip ginger tea, gingerly, while Arne has breakfast. We scroll through Google maps to find a quiet activity or two on the road to our next destination. We give the mountains a final wave and drive towards the sea.
The mountains tumble down towards it, getting lower but not less fierce. We stop briefly at Butrón castle: it looks almost too pretty and indeed, though it was a medieval fortress before, it was rebuilt entirely just to sit there and look pretty.
We drive on and stop at Gaztelugatxe. It’s one of the highlights of the region and, as it turns out when we get there, an extremely popular place on a Saturday. We pay 3 EUR for a parking spot, then find out you need a reservation to be able to enter the area. Unfortunately, all spots are taken for today. I look down at the island and am kind of relieved, it seems like a long hike down (and then back up) and I’m feeling pretty weak in the knees. We set off again.
We drive eastward, try and fail to find a parking spot in Bermeo and Mundaka, finally end up somewhere near Sukarrieta. I’m not up for lunch, but Arne still needs to eat. We sit among the locals at Taberna Toña, enjoy the sun. We do a walk around the nearby island, the Txatxarramendiko parke botanikoa (the last two words mean botanical park, and mendiko is Basque for mountain), then move on again.
A bit further along the shore of the bay we stop to visit the ecomuseum. This whole area is a UNESCO protected, known as Urdaibai Biosphere Reserve, it all looks very interesting, but the text is only in Spanish and Basque and that limits our understanding a lot.
Onwards, back to the highway. I fall asleep almost immediately and don’t wake up until we arrive in Donostia-San Sebastian.
Febe writes 