We are offering a special on one of our most popular culinary trips in Catalunya: Catalan Cooking in the Empordà. Our September 5-10 trip will be $200 per person off the regular price for bookings made by August 1. Come along for 6 days in a little-visited region of Spain north of Barcelona.

You will have private cooking classes with a Catalan chef, take a private sailboat trip on the Mediterranean where a chef will cook a fisherman’s lunch for you, visit wineries of the Empordà appellation, taste olive oil at an olive oil mill, spend time in medieval villages near the Costa Brava, eat at traditional Catalan restaurants and dine at acclaimed two-Michelin starred El Celler de Can Roca. Minimum number of travelers needed for guaranteed departure is 4. See the description here.

Other restaurants in Spain on the top 50 list include Martin Berasategui–the benchmark in contemporary Basque cooking (33rd place)–and Asador Etxebarri in 39th place. Asador Etxebarri near San Sebastián is barbeque turned art form, or so they say. I know where I’m eating next time I’m in San Sebastián.

See The World’s 50 Best.

Article © Gerry Dawes

The exotic, once Moorish-dominated Comunitat Valenciana— which encompasses the provinces of Valencia, Alicante and Castelló—and its capital, the ancient, but suddenly ultramodern and rapidly growing Mediterranean port city of Valencia, have long been known for its namesake oranges, its sunny beaches that have become nirvana for northern Europeans who flock to Valencia like Americans do to Florida, and its wild end-of-winter, rites-of-spring fiesta called Las Fallas.

The Culinary Institute of America has awarded its Chef of the Year Award to Ferrán Adrià, chef of elBulli Restaurant in Cala Montjoi, Catalunya, north of Barcelona. Ferrán Adrià is famous for his avant-garde cooking, resulting in surprising flavors, forms and textures at elBulli. Restaurant magazine has named elBulli the World’s Best Restaurant four times in six years.

elBulli is open from June 16 through December 20 in 2009. There are no longer bookings available for 2009, but you can try your luck for 2010 by contacting elBulli after December 20, 2009. Suerte!

Ronda’s bullring is said to be the oldest in Spain, and is certainly among the prettiest. The spectacular, vertigo-inducing 120-meter sheer drop of the gorge splitting the old and new parts of Ronda and the old fashioned narrow streets and whitewashed buildings make a visit to Ronda a must for anyone traveling in Andalucía.

This article in the Washington Post is food for thought on the art of the bullfight–and the ever-present danger of the sport.

See our two Andalucía trips that take you to Ronda. A Taste of Andalucía with Gerry Dawes and Food & Wine in Andalucía, available year round for 2 or more. 

I just returned from Spain’s (and Europe’s) largest spring festival in which fireworks play a central role. Las Fallas in Valencia, on Spain’s eastern coast, is celebrated from March 15 through March 19 every year. A riot of fireworks explodes throughout the city at 2:00 PM daily from March 1 until March 19 in the mascletàs–fireworks displays orchestrated by pyrotechnics experts and huge artistic creations called fallas (over 700 of them) dot plazas throughout the city until the night of March 19 when the cartoonish creations are set alight, unleashing the fireworks contained in their interiors and destroying the year’s creation. All of the festivities continue well into the night, or morning. Let’s just say it is a week when few in Valencia get much sleep.

Join us in 2010 for our Valencia Food and Wine Tour during Las Fallas. We will as usual focus on the fantastic food and wine of the region, tasting the best foods, have a paella-making demonstration in the Albufera lagoon area, visit wineries and meet some of Valencia’s most renowned chefs. We will stay in Valencia city center, close to the main centers of Fallas activity, in a luxury hotel.

Don’s Place

In his wonderful, seminal essay “Why We Travel,” Pico Iyer writes: “We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again – to slow time down and be taken in, and fall in love once more.”

Tasting & Talking Your Way Through Spain & Italy will take place March 12, from 6:30 to 8:30 at Peace Frogs Travel/Outfitters in the Barracks Road Shopping Center, Charlottesville.