diamond geezer

September events diary 2026

2026-09-05T07:00:00.000+01:00

It's September again but never fear, London's putting on a last flurry of events, activities and happenings before the nights draw in and we're all invited. Here's my weekend-by-weekend guide to free September delights.

All month
» Totally Thames (Sep 1-30): Once again a whole month of river-focused events, many ticketed, ranging from art to walks to virtual talks to a folksong singalong. Thankfully the website's events section is easier to scroll through these days, but it's still hard to spot the highlights.
» Lambeth Heritage Festival (Sep 1-30): Dozens of free talks, guided walks and openings across the borough (plus a proper 36-page brochure to flick through, bliss). Hats off to whoever organises this every year. If you live locally you should definitely take a look.

Weekend 1: September 5/6
» Greenwich+Docklands International Festival (21 Aug - 6 Sep): This significant splurge of spectacular performances delivers artistic wonders annually. The GDIF brochure now mostly tells you what you've missed. On this final weekend there's a heck of a lot of dancing in Stratford on Saturday and a street dance finale in Woolwich on Sunday.
» Creative Mile (Fri, Sat): Art in venues across Brentford, a full mile from the canal basin to the Steam Museum.
» Black on the Square (Sat, from 12): The Mayor's latest culturally-themed Trafalgar Square takeover, now in its fourth year. Performers include Triniboi Joocie and Tomorrow's Warriors.
» Brassworks (Sat from noon): A Festival of Horns at Woolwich Works, also noisy parading up and down outside.
» Croxfest (Sat from noon): OK this one's not quite in London, but where else are you going to hear The Silent Rogues, Lickin Stick, Many Bats and Our Friends Electric other than on the Green in Croxley?
» Denmark Street Sessions (Sat, 1-11): A heck of a lot of live performances down former Tin Pan Alley.
» Angel Canal Festival (Sun, 11-4): Waterside gaiety beside City Road Lock, this year celebrating its 40th anniversary. The Mayor of Islington usually arrives by narrowboat. I went in 2023.
» Brompton Cemetery Open Day (Sun, 11-5): Includes opportunities to meet bees, birds of prey and Chelsea Pensioners.
» Palmers Green Festival (Sun, 12-5): All the fun of music on the green, donkey rides and dozens of community stalls in Broomfield Park N13.

Weekend 2: September 12/13
» Open House London (this weekend and next): The grand-daddy of architectural festivals, with hundreds of weird and wonderful buildings throwing open their doors across the capital for two weekends. The online calendar currently includes 819 properties, over 500 of which are "just turn up". It's quite central-London-centric again this year (3 in Havering but 98 in Westminster), although I always think the outer boroughs have some of the genuine treasures. It's possible to search by date, borough, event type and map location and also to filter out events that are fully booked. As ever there's far too much to choose from, but if you need inspiration here are my reports from 2018, 2019, 20 22, 20 23, 20 24 and 20 25. Be there or regret it for the subsequent 51 weeks.
» Heritage Open Days (Fri - next Sun): In an awkward overlap, the nationwide opening-up of historic buildings coincides with Open House again this year. 121 are in the capital, including sculpturetastic Dorich House, 600 year-old Harmondsworth Great Barn and the British Vintage Wireless and Television Museum (many appear in the Open House listings too).
» London Design Festival (continues next weekend): Hundreds of design-er events, many aimed at "the trade" but others more public-focused. I see TfL have an installation at The Pickle Factory all week, for example.
» St Katharine Docks Classic Boat Festival (Sat, Sun): Annual gathering of small boats near Tower Bridge, including Dunkirk Little Ships, dockside entertainment, opportunities to go on board and yachting celebrity Tom Cunliffe.
» The Great River Race (Sat from 10.15am): 300 craft engage in a spectacular paddle up the Thames from Docklands to Richmond.
» Emerge East (Sat, 11-9): Placemaking exercise at Barking Riverside, including DJ AG, sauna sessions, nature workshops and a Luke Jerram inflatable.
» Thames Tidefest (Sun, 6-6): River-based activities scattered between Brentford and Chiswick, with a particular marquee-focus at Strand-on-the-Green, W4.
» Markfield Road Festival (Fri, Sat, Sun): Art, DJs and a carnival procession, spilling out into the streets up N15 way.
» Hampton Court Open Gardens (Sat, Sun): One of half a dozen opportunities annually to explore the palace's historic grounds for free.
» Scadbury Open Weekend (Sat, Sun, 2-5): Archaeological excavations at the moated medieval manor house near the Sidcup bypass. I went in 2022 and enjoyed.
(yes there is far far too much going on this weekend, they should spread it out better)

Weekend 3: September 19/20
» Open House London: Weekend two
» Heritage Open Days Weekend two
» Bermondsey Street Festival (Sat, 11-7): A designery "village fête", plus the obligatory dog show, plus curated live music, plus food and stalls. Now in its 20th year.
» Chiswick House Dog Show (Sun, 11-4.15): With a theme of 'Faithful Hound', celebrity judges give the dogs of W4 the runaround.
» Pearly Kings and Queens Harvest Festival (Sun, 1.30): Cockney royalty offers live entertainment in Guildhall Yard.

Weekend 4: September 26/27
» Woolmen’s Sheep Drive and Wool Fair (Sun, 10-4): The celeb leading this year's first tranche over Southwark Bridge will be revealed shortly, but they'll do well to beat Mary Berry or Michael Portillo. Come too for wool-related trade stalls and lamb burgers.
» Brixton Windmill Harvest Festival (Sun, 1-5): Milling, Morris dancing and making hedgehog buns, as autumn draws in.
» Something Else Probably (maybe): I'm still looking, but there must be something.

n.b. This year the Chelsea Physic Garden Open Weekend is at the start of October...
n.b. ...and the annual Thames Barrier all-day closure is on Sunday 11th October.
n.b. Peckham Festival and the Mayor's Liberty Festival are having a year off.

Route 349 RIP

2026-09-04T03:49:00.000+01:00

London's next dead bus
349: Ponders End to Stamford Hill
Location: north London, outer
Length of journey: 6 miles, 50 minutes
Dies: tonight

Normally when I do one of these write-ups I go for a last ride and then weave all the themes into a seamless travelogue. This time I've split it into separate bits so you can pick and choose.

Past, Present and Future
The 349 was introduced in 2004 to strengthen bus capacity down the old A10, aka the High Road, as Ken Livingstone expanded the network. It's now being removed because that capacity isn't needed and times are tight, along with other cuts and tweaks as TfL take a small axe to services in the upper Lea Valley. If you're heading south currently the 279 starts at Waltham Cross, the 349 joins in at Ponders End, the 149 and 259 are added at Edmonton Green, then the 476, 243 and 76 feed in through Tottenham. The plan is for the 259 to nudge back to Ponders End to fill in the gap left by the 349 and also for the 279 to switch to Stamford Hill at the southern end, all starting tomorrow. In separate plans the 149 will be whisked away later. No journeys become impossible as a result of any of this, you might just have to wait longer for a fuller bus.

Bus Geekery
The 349 is currently one of the contenders for London's straightest bus route. It has a right turn just after the first stop and a left turn just before the last stop, but everything else is straight up (or down) the High Road. That's 94% of the route on the same road (even if that road's not perfectly straight). Other contenders for the title include the 32 (93% along Watling Street with a short bend at either end) and the 116 (91%, wrecked only by the pedestrianisation of Hounslow High Street). From this weekend the 279 will also be 93%, the Waltham Cross bypass accounting for most of the unstraight 7%.

The Withdrawal Poster
It's better than some and less good than others. The map is very complicated because it includes every single bus stop on two routes. It's trying to show that one route is being withdrawn while two other routes are both curtailed and diverted, all on the same map. However the text is about withdrawing just one route and how to cope afterwards. It offers this advice correctly but sub-optimally. Effectively it says "when the 349 disappears use the 279, unless your journey includes Enfield Bus Garage in which case use the 259". What it omits to say is "for any journey inbetween Ponders End and Seven Sisters you can catch either the 259 OR the 279". This is most journeys, but this broad advice has been skipped to focus on edge cases. Basically you can't win when writing bus change posters, they're either too complicated or too simplistic, and this is simultaneously both.

80 things I saw on my southbound journey

» Enfield Bus Garage. A man waiting by the bus stop asking if I have £1 to spare (I do not). Hassidic teenage day out. Long wait to turn right. The QUBE. Sign welcoming us to Ponders End Shopping Centre. The White Hart (former pub, its name falling off). The Kürecikliler Centre. Desserts End. Cycle lanes and copious traffic calming.

» Ponders End Park. Balkan Brew. Shaggy-haired postman scanning a code inside an opened pillar box. Caravan in front garden. Van delivering charcoal to a kebab shop (if you think about it, it must happen). Memzy Barbers. NIW Furniture. Man on mobility scooter following the cycle lane by cutting through a bus stop. ICC House Of Prayer. Jet garage [petrol 155.9p, diesel 178.9p].

» Bounces Road. Nursery based in former pub. Wonky spire atop Edmonton Baptist Church. Woman weaving through traffic wearing pink crocs. Temporary traffic lights with five minute queue. Digger full of soil. Bus station (edge of). Edmonton Green Shopping Centre. Speedy Spud. Overground station.

» Hut called Cafe Nadia. Man yelling outside police station. Hugs & Mags. Tiny front garden at number 341 brimming with tall colourful flowers (hollyhocks included). Edmonton Glory House Revival Centre. Kingdom Life Chapel. Old school launderette. Hot Nuts. Edmonton Labour Party HQ (with postwar signage). North Circular Road at Angel Corner.

» Superloop bus. Big Ben Fisheries. Brazilian flag outside The White Horse. The Gilpin's Bell freehouse. Arch across road marking change of borough. Wire horse outside Florence Hayes Recreation Ground. 'This Is Tottenham' banners. London Beard Co. White Hart Lane. 3 Points Cafe (which is more than Tottenham have got at the moment).

» Shopping parade dated 1829. Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. Pubs and cafes that Spurs supporters go to. Sign pointing to Skywalk. King Ledley mural. Car with N17 numberplate (naturally). Whitbread-topped clock. Winglab. Job Centre Plus. Trampery Tottenham ("a focal point for entrepreneurship").

» Jenny Greetings. A very closed Poundland. Pub called The Elbow Room. Ghost sign for former undertakers. High Cross micropub. College with lots of cars out front because term's just restarted. Very long Tesco. Seven Sisters Market reborn. Flashing sign saying OVERHEIGHT VEHICLE TURN BACK. German container aboard freight train.

» Advert for tuition to get into grammar school. Brazbq (rarely has a six-letter name conveyed a restaurant brand so well). Texaco garage [petrol 161.9p, diesel 186.9p]. Hosiery World. Row of cement mixers for sale outside shop. Megaphone City. Very ropey-looking lone fruit stall. Gitty Pinter Campus. Stamford Hill Bus Garage. Georgian Orthodox church.

The family who sat alongside
Mum and Dad and two boys. Dad with the loud and chatty eight year-old in the front seat. Mum and quieter six year-old behind (inwardly cursing the old man hogging the other front seat). Riding from Edmonton (where they live now) to Tottenham (where they used to live) to visit the school shop to buy uniform before term starts. "I liked our old house more" says eldest son. "But you have your own room now," says Dad. "I'm the psycho one!" says eldest son. "I can't believe the patty shop has closed," says Dad. "If we lived in those flats I would drop apples off the balcony," says eldest son. Good luck to the teacher who has him in their class this week.

Implementation of the changes
As usual the TfL Tile Switching Team have been out early, switching tiles before the date of the actual change. This is great for future journeys and arguably a useful nudge pointing out imminent changes. However it never helps if you're unfamiliar with the area and turn up during the interregnum. In particular there are pairs of southbound stops in Tottenham where one stop is for buses heading towards Stamford Hill and the other for buses towards Manor House. This week the 279 stops at one of them but from tomorrow it'll stop at the other, so swapping the tiles early means you might wait in the wrong place. It's only a small lie but it needn't have happened so prematurely.

Summary
The 349 dies tonight. TfL can take a dozen vehicles off the road as a result.

Dead Buses Since 2023
2023: 271, 332, 507, 521, 168
2024: 455, 549
2025: 347, 497, 118, 414, R6, 283
2026: 472, 533, 349

R is for Roxeth

2026-09-03T07:00:00.000+01:00

LONDON A-Z
R is for Roxeth

The view from Roxeth is very fine. The playing fields of Harrow School, the spire of St Mary's Church and various villas on the slopes below.

However Roxeth isn't the cultured enclave at the top of Harrow Hill it's a suburb at the bottom, originally a village to the southwest, hence arguably Harrow-Under-The Hill. It's another example of somewhere that does have a station, indeed it has two, but ever since the bigger one was called South Harrow in 1903 the original name's been ebbing away. It lingers in streetnames, also the local library, park and two schools, whereas the local authority ward of the same name is a modern invention and doesn't quite match the original Roxeth at all. Let's start on the opposite side of the road to my first photo where we find Roxeth's oldest building, a 17th century weatherboarded farmhouse called Roxeth Farm.

Alas the owners have sought to shield their property behind a very high hedge so all you can see is a hipped roof from the side and a sash-windowed slot at the front, but it does look to be delightfully wonky. I had wondered if the barn out back was another rural survivor but no, it's one of three pavilions for Harrow School's extensive cricket fields, the Philathletic Ground. According to the whiteboard on West Street the last matches played here were against Merchant Taylors' on 20th June, over ten weeks ago, because one thing that termly fees of £21,990 deliver is a very long summer break.

The centre of the village was a four-way junction on the Northolt Road, now a five-way maelstrom called Roxeth Corner. The only building a Victorian would remember is The Half Moon pub, a half-timbered beauty originally named after the shape of the village pond. Its place in history relates to Britain's first fatal car accident in 1899 which, as a plaque elsewhere attests, took place below Harrow School during a descent of Grove Hill. The Half Moon was merely the site of the subsequent public enquiry, hearing how a rear wheel collapsed and two passengers were hurled from their seats, one dying instantly and the other from his injuries three days later. Perhaps unsurprisingly the pub is now an Indian Grill and Shisha Lounge called the Salt Bar, but if you still want a more traditional local try The White Horse a short walk up Middle Hill.

The road rising eastwards here is Roxeth Hill, this the route the 258 bus takes to climb from South Harrow to the upper heights of Harrow School. Full marks to the TfL employee who designated the bus stop halfway up with the letters RH. Roxeth Hill is lined by some of the finer buildings erected as the suburb expanded, from small-scale workers' cottages to Arts and Crafts semis, also rustic Christ Church built to cater to a growing population and set back from the main road. Roxeth Primary still educates pupils in an angular hall built for that very purpose in 1851, indeed it's Harrow's oldest surviving state school. I suspect the triple-bend footbridge shoehorned outside is pupil-related, self-evidently over-engineered when a lollipop lady would do, but the upper span does offer excellent views across the rooftops of Roxeth and the plains of Ruislip.

By contrast the main road south from Roxeth Corner is architecturally grim. Here former pubs and cottages have been replaced by dubious postwar and postmillennial flats, while the former petrol station has become a drab stacked hotel. The largest presence is Harrow Police Station (alas not Roxeth Police Station), an outdated flag-flying office block whose front desk remains at risk of closure. Arguably the big Waitrose is a big improvement on what was on the site before, namely a mighty tall gasholder with the letters 'NO' painted on the side, this because it was a key navigational landmark on the approach to Northolt airfield. The sole attractive building on this stretch is the clubhouse of the Royal British Legion's Harrow branch which was built in 1927 in Dutch style, its bar and function room even busier visually than the twiddly exterior.

Which brings us to the tube station, namely South Harrow, which was opened in 1903 by the District Railway and transferred to the Piccadilly line in 1932. Charles Holden designed the new station building which outside looks to be less of a stunner than usual, but inside has a whoppingly broad ticket hall and a pair of delightful recessed benches halfway up the stairs in case an ascent of 40 steps proves too much. To the north of the station the railway crosses Roxeth Marsh on a low viaduct, hard though it is today to imagine the adjacent avenues as mushy fields. But just down to the left is the source of the River Roxbourne, a minor brook so named because it rises outside Roxeth, and I've previously blogged that in depth so won't dive in again.

More relevant is what's been crammed under the arches immediately opposite the station. This is South Harrow Market, one of London's quirkier retail hideaways, essentially two long alleyways serving a warren of tiny bazaars. Most serve up food, so you may need to push past a delivery driver or two, while others will print you a banner, buy your gold or stab needles in your feet. The curse of AI graphics has struck several of the menus, hence I found the Nepalese and Gujarati pictures less convincing than the proper photos at Syria Food. Again it's a shame it's not called Roxeth Market, given it's right on the edge of the original village, but the nominative pull of the adjacent tube station has proved too strong.

Continue down the Northolt Road and barely any businesses mention the old place, with only Roxeth Library flying the flag. Even the Chiltern Railways station at the foot of the hill was only called 'South Harrow and Roxeth' for the first three years after opening, after which it was renamed Northolt Park thanks to the creation of a neighbouring housing estate, thus Roxeth's chances of long-term renown were scuppered. For a proper commemoration best see the information boards at the entrance to Roxeth Recreation Ground, these a step up from Harrow's normal design. The text confirms that the name "Hroecs Seath" was first mentioned in monastic documents in 845AD, even if nobody's 100% sure what Hroecs Seath meant, also that several trees in the park are leftovers from ancient field boundaries. You have alas missed this year's Roxeth Show, the revival of a 1970s tradition, because that was in July.

Across the railway line from the rec is South Hill Drive, a lengthy avenue whose streetsign has the unusual combination of a 'No Through Road' symbol and underneath "Except by Toll Road". Follow along and all looks normal at first until suddenly the road forks at two white gates, both closed to vehicles unless you have the correct gizmo to open them. The low road enters land owned by the South Hill Estate while the high road enters the Mount Park Estate, another private residential enclave. Both declare that there is NO THOROUGHFARE FOR THE GENERAL PUBLIC but fail to clarify whether pedestrians are included so I strode through a side gate, greeted a resident walking down the hill with a Waitrose bag and chanced my arm.

It feels more Surrey than Middlesex, a sylvan climb where villas and minor mansions still feel the need to hide behind high fences and hedges despite supposedly being private anyway. Some have odd names like The Hut (which definitely isn't) or The Site, while others go for supreme Metro-land bland and call themselves Northmount, Southview, Hillcrest or The Oaks. A dozen have been here since the 19th century, a few are totally-out of character modern flats, and I have no idea how residents successfully held suburbia at bay but it's an extraordinary and privileged residential backwater nonetheless. I exited unscathed through a gate near the top of Sudbury Hill, still historically in ye olde Roxeth, another patch of secret London unlocked.

Unblogged August

2026-09-02T07:00:00.000+01:00

31 unblogged things I did in August

Sat 1: I have never previously tried to get ten days' blogposts prepared in advance whilst also writing posts for current publication. Wish me luck finishing the last few by Thursday.
Sun 2: My favourite London meteorological data resource, NW3 Weather, has finally revamped to a modern mobile-friendly template, maybe 10 years later than it should have done. Naturally I hate the new format because nothing fits on a laptop screen any more, so I'm delighted the old version remains if you know where to look.
Mon 3: I've been playing Threes on my phone for 12 years, that's over 22,000 games, and today I finally got my first 3072 tile. My high score more than doubled to 185,148 as a result. Just one more tile to get (maybe never).
Tue 4: Nipped into Stanfords to buy a road map of the Basque Country (Michelin 144). It cost just £6.99 (and will prove incredibly useful because a satnav can't solve everything).

Wed 5: A squirrel turned up on my balcony attracted by a tub of water in a drought. We engaged in a lengthy staring match, then he came right up to the French windows and I tempted him away with an acorn (because I keep a stash too). Much nibbling ensued.
Thu 6: I realised last week that my EHIC health insurance card had expired so sent off for a new GHIC, the post-Brexit equivalent, not thinking it'd arrive in time. It arrived the day before the holiday, hell yes.

holiday unblogged
Fri 7: When we boarded the plane at Gatwick an important man was sitting in my seat so the stewardess relocated the three of us across the aisle. I may never sit in seat 1A again.
Sat 8: The house where we're staying is firmly shuttered to keep out the heat, thus always dark inside. It's not usually 37°C here but apparently full-on shuttering is normal midsummer behaviour.
Sun 9: I note that tattoos aren't generally a thing in the Basque Country, because if they were in this weather I'd have had an eyeful by now.
Mon 10: Other cities' transport networks are often baffling and allow you to make a complete mess of things. I thought I'd done really well at the Txik Txak terminal in Biarritz, successfully buying a group ticket just before the bus departed. However when I showed it to the driver he gestured me off the bus with a Gallic shrug, this because I'd merely shown him my receipt and the ticket was still in the tray. Thankfully he waited while I ran back to collect it.

Tue 11: Portugalete metro station in Bilbao is the furthest west I've been this year. I thought it was a lot further west, but on checking it's merely due south of Lyme Regis.
Wed 12: I was expecting total eclipse day to be a manic panic checking weather forecasts, traffic news and contour maps. Instead the forecast was so perfect that I relaxed all afternoon watching Netflix with the shutters down, then sauntered over to a bar safe in the knowledge that a full solar bite would be unobscured from the precise spot I'd chosen to holiday in. Still can't believe my luck.
Thu 13: Things we saw on TV: several gossipy studio-based shows with half a dozen manicured hosts, very very long ad breaks, Basque TV channels promoting local culture (watch live here), a 2 hour-edition of First Dates (Spanish version), various potboiler dramas, Doc Martin dubbed.
Fri 14: Since 2000 all Spanish numberplates have comprised four digits followed by three consonants, e.g. 9183 LZG. Registrations have been issued sequentially, first 9999 plates ending BBB, then BBC, then BBD, etc. We're currently up to the N's. The earliest number plate I saw was 3123 BDZ on a motorbike and the latest was 2844 NRW on a new white van.
Sat 15: We nearly went to Biarritz today but thankfully checked for local events and discovered it was the day of the big Assumption fireworks so traffic would have been monstrous from mid-afternoon and much of the beachfront would have been sealed off. Monday was much quieter (and much better weather).

Sun 16: As soon as I got home from the airport I made myself beans on toast and had a proper cup of tea. I do miss the cheesy ham pintxos though.
Mon 17: Having successfully taken my laptop to Spain and back, today it awoke with a blue screen of death I'd never seen before, demanding a 32-character BitLocker code. Eek. I didn't have a 32-character code, nor did any of my verification attempts uncover one. Eventually I solved the problem by clicking on 'Skip this drive'... and haven't dared turn off my laptop since.
Tue 18: Just before 11pm my niece gave birth to her first child, instantly making my brother a grandfather. I merely became a great uncle which doesn't feel anywhere near as scarily generational.
Wed 19: The baby's name was revealed, and as expected yes it has been used for a Disney character.
Thu 20: I don't think I've ever seen grass in London looking so dry. This is Wanstead Green looking more like a threadbare carpet of straw.

Fri 21: I loved re-watching the Housemartins documentary London 0 Hull 4, as seen on BBC2's Paul Heaton Night, because the first time I saw it in 1987 I was living half a mile round the corner from 70 Grafton Street where the band formed.
Sat 22: The spout of my kettle has furred up so I decided to give the gauze a scrub. I did this very gently but still managed to break the gauze, hence the kettle now pours much more smoothly but also lets chunks of limescale through, dammit.
Sun 23: The westbound waiting room at New Malden station now has a sign on the door saying 'Calming space' alongside an autism infinity symbol. SWR's Calming Spaces "are waiting rooms which incorporate calming features to create a more inclusive space for customers who are neurodiverse or may have non-visible disabilities." It's a lovely idea, should you be planning on travelling to Surbiton rather than Waterloo, but only brief respite before the utter hubbub of a train carriage.
Mon 24: Today is 40 days after St Swithin's Day, which was dry. I've done my usual check since and can confirm that 33 of the subsequent days were dry, which is the saint's best prediction since 1989 and 1990 (which were also both 33☀️ 7🌧️). It would have been 35 if only I hadn't gone to Norfolk and Romford and been hit by rogue showers.

Tue 25: The long-standing motor vehicle service centre at 169-173 Bow Road has closed and is up for sale. This is because ATS Euromaster Ltd is winding down its UK operations. A sign attached to the gate says "Closed Until Tomorrow", and somebody really should cross out the last two words. The site has a guide price of £1,750,000 and I expect it to be sold for housing. You could easily cram several dozen flats onto this brownfield quarter-acre, and in five years' time I bet somebody has.
Wed 26: I did not open the bottle of champagne given to me when I moved into my flat 25 years ago, a possible option having evaporated, so the wait for a suitable moment continues.
Thu 27: You may remember that last year, rather perversely, I set foot in every London borough at least 40 times. This year I've reached the same total but in August, so who knows how high I can get it by New Year's Eve.
Fri 28: Today my Dad and I got to meet (and hold) the newest member of our family. He's so small, also his nails are surprisingly long, also he wriggles a lot, also I'd like to think that was a smile, also thanks for filling your nappy five minutes before we arrived, also by the time he's my age there still won't have been a total solar eclipse in the UK.
Sat 29: Christmas puddings, festive bakewells and panettone are back on the shelves in Tesco, and obviously I bought six mince pies to celebrate.

Sun 30: Radio 4 Extra repeated an episode of The Grumbleweeds from 1986 (blimey, as late as that?), and I can't believe we found it funny and listened every week.
Mon 31: On Instagram I watched reels of people having a great bank holiday abroad, at festivals, up mountains, at restaurants, on rivers, at airports, at weddings etc and all I did was walk across Selsdon Woods and Southwark Bridge. Must try harder.

TfL FoI requests in August 2026

2026-09-01T08:00:00.000+01:00

25 things we learnt from TfL FoI requests in August 2026

1) In the first half of 2026 TfL earned £2,374,283 from 90,511 Penalty Charge Notices for bus lane infringements.
2) The TfL bus fleet comprises 6528 double deckers and 2454 single deckers, of which 2357 are diesel, 2937 electric, 3668 hybrid and 20 hydrogen.
3) The estimated cost of replacing the platform canopies at Barons Court station is £10.3m.
4) The three junctions responsible for the greatest number of yellow box penalty charge notices are i) West Hill/Wandsworth Fire Station SW18, ii) Homerton High St/Homerton Fire Station E9, iii) Vauxhall Bridge Road/Rampayne Street SW1.
5) So far this year, 12% of bus damage incidents have involved a Wrightbus Eclipse Gemini 3, 10% have involved an ADL Enviro 400H MMC and 9% have involved a Wrightbus NRM.

6) With regard to automatic numberplate recognition, TfL operate 4243 enforcement cameras and 181 monitoring cameras.
7) Since fares restarted on bus routes through the Silvertown and Blackwall Tunnel, passenger numbers on route 108 are down 15% compared to the same time period in 2025. On route SL4 numbers are up 4% and on route 129 up 0.5%.
8) Last year in the borough of Greenwich, while crossing the road, 9 pedestrians were seriously injured on a pedestrian crossing, 6 within 50m of a pedestrian crossing and 10 elsewhere.
9) Between February and July on the Northern line, 9% of timetabled trains failed to serve the Battersea extension.
10) The four criteria used to assess tube seats following a deep clean are i) Dust or debris in crevices ii) Dust or debris on seats iii) Grime or dust on panels iv) Gum residue. The required pass mark is 80%.

11) Last year on the Underground there were 5149 reported incidents of passengers possessing an open container of alcohol but only 203 of passengers consuming alcohol.
12) Employee headcount at the eight operational control centres for the tube is 8 for the Waterloo & City, 48 for the Bakerloo, 50 for the Victoria, 65 for the Central, 69 for the Piccadilly, 76 for the Northern, 92 for the Jubilee and 247 for the combined Circle, District, Hammersmith & City and Metropolitan.
13) The new signage on the bus lane on Westminster Bridge Road incorrectly omitted motorcycles from the list of permitted vehicles so has been removed pending replacement.
14) In the last year the drivers of 63 TfL maintenance vans have been caught exceeding a 20mph speed limit.
15) Since the start of last year the tube line with the greatest number of reported robberies was the Central line, while theft of public property was most prevalent on the Piccadilly line. The Northern line was top for violence, sexual offences and public disorder.

16) If you'd like a copy of all the in-carriage line diagrams used on the tube, DLR and trams, here's a zip folder.
17) TfL's total expenditure on taxi services during the 2025/26 financial year was £6,968,396.
18) In the last financial year 3,335,464 passengers on 190,439 buses were checked by revenue staff, leading to 17,947 penalty fares being issued and 2892 successful prosecutions.
19) Over the last three months 25% of Elizabeth line services at Acton Main Line departed at least three minutes late.
20) In the week starting 29th June a bus on route 70 knocked a motorcyclist off his bike in South Kensington and another bus on route 70 crashed into a house in Notting Hill. The same driver was not responsible for both incidents.

21) There are no current plans to introduce any new weekend-only Night Services on the tube, Overground or buses.
22) When planning for a possible Rotherhithe to Canary Wharf footbridge, a report estimated that a 15m high bridge would require opening 1-4 times an hour in the navigational peak, whereas a 20m bridge would have 95% availability.
23) 43,641 London addresses are registered to two active 60+ Oyster photocards, 864 hold three and 116 hold more than three.
24) In the last twelve months the vehicle with the highest number of ULEZ Penalty Charge Notices is a Ford Focus Titanium X TDCi with 361 fines. The vehicle with the highest number of Congestion Charge PCNs has a diplomatic plate (290 fines).
25) If you ask TfL to use their office printer to print out every tube map ever produced in colour on A3 paper, along with guidance on how to fold them, they will refuse.

Belated transport news

2026-09-01T07:00:00.000+01:00

Belated transport news

I missed reporting on several transport stories while I was away so here's a brief catch-up.

🚦 This Saturday the gyratory at St Paul's is being tweaked. The southern end of King Edward Street is being pedestrianised (to create Greyfriars Square) so traffic will have to go a different way and so will local buses. Precisely where the 4, 8, 25, 56, 76 and 133 stop will be altering, and route 100 has already been extended to St Bart's. TfL have produced a ridiculously complicated map to try to explain things (my head exploded), so if you need to catch a bus the City of London's vastly oversimplified version should be clearer.

🚡 It amazes me that every time I do one of these round-ups there's a new thing at the cablecar but there always is. This time it's an interactive audio guide you can listen to on the way across with different stories in either direction. It's narrated by Engi-Bear, the cablecar's lumpen mascot, and produced by an Italian software team called POPGuide. You need to bring your own headphones (and indeed your own phone). The unusual thing is that it costs £1, just £1, when they could have given it away for free or tried to make more money out of it. Upselling has never been so flaccid.

🚇 TfL have added another weekday closure of most of the Piccadilly line to their already excessive roster of downtime, specifically Wednesday 28th - Friday 30th October (immediately before a full line closure at the weekend). Whatever is wrong with the new trains must be proving intractable, given it'll be at least next spring before any member of the public gets on board, fingers crossed.

🚌 London's next dead bus is the 349 which is being withdrawn on Saturday. Expect bloggage. On the same day the latest Superloop route is being introduced, the SL12 from Gants Hill to Rainham. The good news that it'll be free to use for the first week, should you happen to live in the area. TfL have produced a route diagram and a long list of stops in both directions, but not a map because that would be too useful. I cannot overemphasise enough how remote the Rainham terminus is, so expect bloggage there too.

📽️ In mid-August TfL published their Advertising Annual Report, a glossy 49 page compilation of all the showiest campaigns of the last year. It reads like a bunch of talented professionals congratulating themselves on a job well done, but unfortunately that job is to make their advertising more and more difficult to miss. Key phrases include "empowering brands to unlock creativity and turn heads" and "innovation remains central to our shared focus". The scariest project is a "plan to deliver world-first, ten-metre-long digital corridor wraps in selected Elizabeth line stations", i.e. huge moving screens you can't take your eyes off. It's so controversial they've made a full-scale mock-up at UCL "to evaluate how digital corridor wraps might impact the experience of customers who are neurodivergent or disabled". See photo.

They hope the research will show any potential impacts can be mitigated, but I hope someone will grow a conscience and halt the introduction of these massive digital intrusions. Advertising targets shouldn't be fixated on increasing distraction, forever designing formats it's more and more impossible to take our eyes off.
📱 The report also suggests you could be seeing a lot more adverts on TfL Go in future. At present the app generates 76 million page views a month but only made £5,000 in revenue last year, thus "TfL Go represents a significant long-term growth opportunity".

🚌 If you enjoy those free heritage bus days when the London Bus Museum floods a historic route with vintage vehicles, the list of planned events has extended. Route 106: 3rd October 2026. Route 6: 20th March 2027. Route 107: 13th June 2027. Route 85: 2nd October 2027.

Basque Country

2026-08-31T09:00:00.000+01:00

THE BASQUE COUNTRY
Bilbao & its transport [70 photos]	San Sebastián & cideria [50 photos]	Biarritz France [40 photos]
VITORIA-GASTEIZ & total solar eclipse [60 photos]		DLR trains
salt valley	La Rioja [←40 photos→]	Pamplona

the Spain/France border

2026-08-31T08:00:00.000+01:00

This blog loves a boundary and the border between Spain and France is one of the more significant. It's 425 miles long, was finally settled in 1856 and mostly follows the drainage divide of the Pyrenees. At its western end it divides the towns of Irun (Spain) and Hendaye (France), or more precisely the Spanish town of Hondarribia and the French suburb of Zokuburu. If you stand in Hondarribia's main square and look down the hill you can see where the border ends at the mouth of the river Bidasoa. Spain's on the left, France on the right.

There are many ways to cross the border here.

By road
European route E5 crosses the border four miles upstream at the Zubi Nazioartekoa. On the Spanish side the autoroute is designated AP-8, then morphs into the A63 to Bordeaux in the middle of the bridge. The French side immediately welcomes drivers with a toll booth, or if viewed the other way charges drivers for leaving the country. There are no passport checks or customs, nor at the two non-motorway bridges between the two sides. We returned via the more minor Santiago Bridge, freely crossing thanks to EU accords which have made the former queues obsolete. That said we did pass French gendarmes setting up beside the road ready to spot-check inbound traffic, so maybe be careful what you choose to take in or out.

By rail
A 120m-long railway bridge links Spanish railways to France, which is awkward because the countries have very different gauges. There are thus a heck of a lot of marshalling yards on either side to aid transfer of rolling stock. A parallel bridge carries the Euskotren metro train from San Sebastián but this travels only 400m into France before terminating at Hendaye station. Long distance rail travellers need to transfer to the Euskotren to make their connection, or else lug their luggage for a mile and a half via the Santiago Bridge. We had hoped to visit Biarritz by train but the connecting faff (and oddly infrequent services on the French side) made it far better to drive instead. [The Man in Seat 61]

By boat
The lowest crossing of the border is the ferry that's been shuttling between Hondarribia and Hendaye since 1993. The service crosses Txingudi Bay in seven minutes flat for the ferry reasonable fare of €2.50. The jetty was only a ten minute walk from where I took today's first photo so I was sorely tempted to make a pointless border crossing just for the sake of it. My travelling companions instead prioritised lunch so we settled at Mika Jatetxea for pintxos and pork rib with orange and cheddar sauce and I missed my chance. Also best not risk a trip to a foreign country when your plane leaves in three hours, so Hondarribia's lovely walled town was a far safer bet.

By air
For reasons of flatness San Sebastián's airport is 10 miles east of the city in Hondarribia, built on reclaimed land in the Bidasoa estuary. For reasons of space the runway is short so gets only a handful of flights daily, all in small planes including a few weekly returns to London City Airport. For reasons of geography the runway is incredibly close to the mid-stream national border, the centre of the runway barely 100m away, indeed only a few seconds after take-off you've already entered French airspace. If you remember the very first photo I showed you at the start of my holiday travelogue, taken from the window of my departing plane, that had Spain in the foreground, France in the background and the Santiago Bridge inbetween. One holiday, two countries, and somehow it's taken me longer to write up than I spent there.

Saint-Jean-de-Luz

2026-08-31T07:00:00.000+01:00

If you've driven all the way to France you might as well stop somewhere else on the way back.

✉ A postcard from Saint-Jean-de-Luz

On my summer holidays we went to Saint-Jean-de-Luz which is in France but only just. It is six miles from Spain on the coast and it has a big bay and ice creams. It is not a fun place to park but we managed.

The place to go is the beach, it is long and very sandy. A lot of people were playing beach volleyball because there is a lot of space. The sun was starting to set over the fort and lighthouse at the far end of the bay and it was very pretty. But nobody was in the sea because the purple flag was flying. The purple flag means JELLYFISH! or in this case Portuguese men o' war because they had invaded. I have never seen a purple flag before it is serious, if one stings you in precisely the wrong place you could die. The lifeguards sounded a big horn when they saw someone wading in. It must be gutting if you come here for a week's holiday and a blue bag of venom stops you going in the water.

The biggest building on the promenade is the casino, there is always a casino although this one closed a while back. It has a boardwalk and a pergola and little shops. We bought ice creams from a Glaces Lopez van on the promenade, they've been going since 1924. I had citron in a cornet, it was yummy and only €1.70 which is a total bargain. We also bought Gâteaux Basques from Maison Adam in the high street but only the small ones, I liked the custard filling best. Maison Adam are most famous for their macarons, they once made them for the wedding of Louis XIV and Marie Theresa of Spain which took place here in Saint-Jean-de-Luz in 1660. Now that's an origin story!

The high street is proper characterful, all narrow with brightly-painted shutters. It's also a bit designer in places, such is the tourist clientele, although if you buy surf gear you have to go out of town to use it because the bay doesn't get big waves. At the lower end are a lot of outdoor bar tables, London has nothing on this, also the marina where the nice boats are. The smart dockfront museum is the House of the Infanta, this because Marie Theresa spent the night before her wedding here (Maison Louis XIV is just round the corner). The harbour is also the mouth of the Nivelle but it is not a famous river.

On the way back to the car we passed the public fronton, which is the place where they play pelote. I first learned about pelote in my Tricolore textbook and now here I was watching two Basque lads hurling a ball really hard against a wall using their long curved xistera. Then they had to stop playing because a truck arrived with tree trunks for tonight's Basque Strength event, a display of athletic sawing, bale lifting, sack racing and tug of war. We didn't have time to stay but what with the pelote, games and gâteaux we had learned that Saint-Jean-de-Luz is just as Basque as towns the other side of the Spanish border. [10 photos]

Biarritz

2026-08-30T07:00:00.000+01:00

A Nice Walk: Biarritz (1½ miles)

Sometimes you just want to go for a nice walk, nothing too taxing, plenty of variety, seaside chic, trois plages, lifeguard-assisted, Belle Époque architecture, multiple refreshment opportunities, rocky promontories, Atlantic rollers, walking in the steps of Napoleon, occasional lizards, stripy parasols, warmer than home, a bit of a stroll, won't take long. So here's une belle promenade along the coast of southwest France from Biarritz's old lighthouse to the Virgin's rock, nowhere near enough to make a day of it but a nice walk all the same. [30 photos]

Biarritz is an iconic seaside resort 20 miles round the Bay of Biscay from the Spanish border, still technically in the Basque country if less conspicuously. It grew in popularity during the 19th century, first as somewhere to bathe in the waters and then as somewhere to be seen, attracting notable summer residents including kings and emperors. Officially it's a city but in reality a coastal suburb of more-sprawling Bayonne, part of the departement of Pyrénées-Atlantiques. For today's perambulation we'll be hugging the shore from one headland to the next, technically doable in half an hour but far better to take your time. If you want to follow along here's a map, or else you can let my Flickr album lead you through by choosing the 'slideshow' icon and imagining you were there.

The walk starts by the lighthouse atop Pointe Saint-Martin, a sandstone headland at the northern end of the bay. This is the dividing line between the rocky Basque coast and the much flatter sandy beaches of the Landes region which can be seen stretching off into the far distance, but only if you think to walk round the back of the toilets. The more obvious view is south across the town and the various rocks which dot the bay, sone of which are actually arches, just not from this angle.

The screw propeller in pride of place in the upper gardens belongs to the Franz Hals, a trawler bound for scrap in 1996 which slipped its moorings and ran aground on the beach below. Local hoteliers feared they were in for a direct hit. The lower gardens cling to the rockface and look extensively scenic but alas are all fenced off, either temporarily for maintenance or more likely permanently for safety. You could spend €5 and climb the lighthouse before departing but the views are probably good enough from the clifftop, also a Nice Walk shouldn't kick off with 248 unnecessary steps.

A short walk at street level is required before the first beach access, this via a steep set of steps called Descente de l'Océan. A big plus in strolling north to south is that this is downhill but be warned, a reverse price will need to be paid at the end of the walk. The first beach is Plage de Miramar, a quieter strand than the town's main drag but still with a narrow stretch watched over by red and yellow coastguards. There's that arch I promised you, an offshore sandstone hump called Roche Ronde which from the right angle resembles a heeled shoe. You are however a century too late to spot Edward VII, who used come to Biarritz every year so he could spend a month with his mistress rather than his wife.

Edward stayed just up top in the enormous Hôtel du Palais, a 5* luxury pile in extensive private grounds. It was originally built by Napoleon III in 1855 as a summer villa for his new wife, the Empress Eugénie, so she didn't too feel homesick for her native Spain. Beyond the protruding hotel is the Grande Plage, the most prestigious of the beaches, probably because it's the easiest to reach. It has perfect sand, a broader patch overseen by lifeguards and a very chic row of striped beach parasols in primary colours. Towel density increases the further south you go, or at least it did in mid-August, as did the number of beachgoers taking a paddle or dip.

If you fancy heading up into the main town this is best place to do it. Firstly it's immediately above and secondly the slope here is the gentlest, which you may appreciate later. The prime interstitial spot is taken by the town's casino, a fin de siècle gambling fortress which these days allows anyone inside to play its slots. Keep climbing to reach the Hôtel de Ville, the tourist information palace and all the smart shops you'd expect to find where sophisticated tourists gather. It's also the best place to spot the tram-buses and teensy navettes operated by Txik Txak, the local transport operator (whose very-Basque name represents the noise made by a double bounce in the game of pelota).

We stopped for an hour at a cafe beneath the casino because sometimes it helps to immerse yourself in the landscape, not just walk through it. I had croque monsieur and a bottle of Orangina to reflect the fact we were briefly in a different country, and watched every example of smart beachwear pass by on the promenade.

The southern end of the bay is rockier, the first of a dozen offshore lumps being the Roche des Enfants (the one children shouldn't swim past). The boulevard now climbs to duck below more hotels and a Gothic church, the occasional footbridge providing access to a separate rocky viewpoint. The small cove here was once used by the town's fishermen to unload sardines, the jetties more recently appropriated by small white motorboats. To explore properly would require negotiating a lot of stone steps and minor scenic deviations, but if you're keeping it short head through the tunnel beneath the Aquarium and give the headland benches a miss.

The Musée de la Mer started out as an oceanography museum, thus a bit dry, before diversifying into sea creatures in the 1960s. More recently they've introduced sharks and then a full-on aquarium extension, so the Art Deco frontage now hides a tourist attraction more worthy of €17 admission. Instead our headland-to-headland walk concludes at an iron walkway which crosses potentially stormy waters to another offshore islet. This is the Rocher de la Vierge, or Virgin's Rock, so called because a bronze statue of Mary was plonked on top in 1865. The seagull on her head I believe was temporary.

What everyone in Biarritz likes to do is walk out to the rock and back, especially at sunset, passing through a tiny tunnel to gather in the larger space at the far end. Use of the coin-op telescopes is optional. The whole thing has a feel of fairyland about it, the chunky sandstone seemingly artificial as if Bournemouth's municipal engineers had a hand in it. The very tip of the rock might be too crowded to allow you to sit down, but do take the opportunity to look back onto the shore from mid-sea. The chateau-like house across the bay is called Villa Belza and is almost as photographed as the Virgin, but although it looks like you should be able to go inside it's actually a private residence.

The next beach round is a U-shaped cove formerly used by the town's whaling fleet, now a pristine tongue of sand. It's Plage du Port Vieux and its tiny strand is crammed with sunbathers packed into rows facing the water, exactly as you'd imagine a beach in Biarritz should be. A lido-like terrace curves round to provide important facilities, almost forming a recreational amphitheatre, and all accessed via the slipway they once used to pull the boats up. Meanwhile adolescent exhibitionists queue to dive acrobatically off the long jetty below the Eden Cafe, before clambering out and going round again. And we're done.

To return to the main town best take the Rue du Port-Vieux direct. We continued round the headland past Villa Belza to the next bay in the hope of seeing it thronged with boarders, this being where the sport of surfing first came to France in 1956. Unfortunately it was high tide when access is banned due to lack of sand, so we had to continue unsatisfied and find a way back up the cliff. The zigzag path proved knackering and although we saw lots of charming lizards during the ascent my companions were barely talking to me by the time we reached the top. Never push a Nice Walk too far, even if you're in Biarritz and it's not just nice, it's très très beau.

» 30 photos on Flickr (all along the Nice Walk)

The London Café tube map

2026-08-29T07:00:00.000+01:00

Slim Summer Saturday

Since 1999 the London Café in Vitoria-Gasteiz has attracted punters with its London-themed decor, including a red bus behind the bar, a sign pointing to Earl's Court Station and the door of a red telephone kiosk a stuck to the wall. The food offering is more standard and the front pump merely serves Guinness at non-London prices, but there's clearly been an attempt to make Britons feel vaguely at home. BestMate'sOtherHalf remembers coming to gigs here when the bands in the back room were all ska and punk, these Basque favourites rather than a nod to London in the late 70s, but these days the cafe's more somewhere to come for beer and a burger in a wood-panelled room with a faux-London vibe.

While we were ordering at the bar I became intrigued by a sign pointing towards the toilets which said SUBWAY, a slight mis-step. So I followed it to the back room and there on the wall I found a giant tube map mural stretching up into north London. Oh that's good, I thought.

But the more I looked the more intrigued I became. The layout looked suitably reminiscent of the pre-Crossrail era but some of the stations didn't quite match reality. All those you'd expect to see were there but also at least ten extras, also lines that aren't part of the existing network, but all perfectly woven into the diagram so as to look entirely normal to the unfamiliar eye.

A check against my collection of tube maps, specifically the spread of step-free blobs and daggers, suggests this is fundamentally the 2012 tube map but with some subsequent modifications. I couldn't quite get the perfect photo because there was a man sat eating his lunch in the sweet spot, sorry, so I had to chop Alexandra Palace off the top. But you might enjoy looking as much as I did to see if you can spot the peculiarities within because I've never quite seen a tube map like it. A slightly bigger version of my photo is here and I've put the full-sized version on Flickr.

We ordered kalimotxos instead of a pint of Guinness and pintxos rather than a bag of pork scratchings, but it's reassuring to know that tube geeks are alive and well even in places as far flung as the Basque Country, and the London Café has the map to prove it.

Basque cuisine

2026-08-28T07:00:00.000+01:00

Basque cuisine

🥓🫒🦐 The quintessential item of Basque cuisine is the pintxo (pronounced pincho, the 'tx' representing a 'ch' sound). A pintxo is a small savoury snack, bigger than bite-sized and generally breadier than tapas. They're displayed on the counter in bars to be eaten alongside a drink, sometimes a choice of umpteen and sometimes just the specialities of the house. Think cheesy ham or spiked olives with tomato or anchovies with truffle or sliced tortilla or stacked jamón chunks or cod croquettes or battered chorizo or stuffed mussel or lamb sweetbread or squirts of foie, even scooped-out sea urchin with a creamy mix of squid and mushroom, lightly grilled. There are no set combinations so you either have to ask exactly what they are or just dive in and take pot luck, a gamble you're very likely to win. It takes two or three to satisfy an appetite, alternatively you can bar hop and cherrypick from each, making this the most sociable of feasts. Prices are extremely reasonable too, maybe 2.40€ for something any London cafe would screw you over for, were they even making something delicious on the premises in the first place.

We dined on pintxos every day, so engrained are they in the culture, sometimes from a homely corner cafe and sometimes from a specialist outfit with a regional reputation. In Vitoria the top venues include Sagartoki, El Toloño and perretxiCo, all offering creations with extra pizazz rather than just a dollop of seafood squirted on half a roll. The busiest place we tried was Bar Sport in San Sebastián where the queue at the bar was four deep even at the end of the lunchtime rush, such is their reputation. A large team worked a rustic production line to process the orders, to carry the plates and (out of sight) to assemble and cook, eventually delivering us half a crab with cheesy sludge in, the aforementioned sea urchin and a rather safer mushroom croquette.

Not only are there dozens of pintxo bars in town centres but most have the same layout, a long (long) bar down one side and a row of small tables on the other, with barely room to walk between. One side offers choice, the other somewhere to perch. In the suburbs land is cheaper so there's often more space, also many tables outside where the community gathers. These bars are generally open from dawn until well after dusk, evolving through the day from breakfast coffee to lunchtime snack to evening beers... like a coffee shop, cafe and pub rolled into one. We started all our mornings at the Viena Café where a selection of home-made pintxos sat under a cloche, always served with a smile, and I very much regret that the double decker tuna and cheesy-ham sandwich never made a reappearance.

🐙 I wasn't sure how I'd get on with my somewhat restricted palate but thankfully ham was everywhere, also cod and cheese but mainly ham, also I successfully dodged olives and everything squidlike, also whenever chicken came it was invariably a thin dry fillet, also on Day 1 I survived a starter of black pudding which turned out to be enormous, also Basque cheesecake is considerably tastier when it's genuinely Basque and I very much approve.

🥬 Vegetables are generally not a thing, potatoes excepted. The very idea of a side of something green is anathema in a cuisine more heavily based on meat, fish and sometimes a sauce, but often not.

🍔 Fast food is generally banished from city centres. For example Vitoria-Gasteiz (population 250,000) has only four McDonalds and five Burger Kings, all in the outer suburbs beyond the ring road.

🕑 Mealtimes are later than Britons might expect, the evening meal more of a late evening event. As for lunch we generally took this in the gap between 2pm and 4pm when a lot of shops and museums are closed, this also the perfect opportunity to sit down in the shade in the hottest part of the day. Checking the times on five of our restaurant receipts: 14:53, 15:15, 15:58, 16:32 and 16:45.

🍷 Wine is dirt cheap, which is one of the perks of living in a country that makes it. Bottles are barely 3€ in the supermarket, also when you order from the set menu a bottle of red wine is generally included. My three course lunch by Bilbao's transporter bridge cost 14.50€ and although all I really wanted was a glass, that came with a full bottle as well. Nobody even blinks if you leave some. Dining out in London now feels even worse value ever before.

🥛 A popular drink to order in a Basque bar is a kalimotxo (pronounced calimocho). It's a mix of red wine and cola and could be considered the cheap and cheery northern equivalent of sangria. In hot weather it's very refreshing, hence I enjoyed several over the holiday. I also downed a few glasses of the local aniseedy liqueur patxaran, to widespread social approval.

🍵 I struggled to make a cup of tea, first because the family home where we were staying didn't have any teabags, then because they didn't have a kettle, and ultimately because the only cups suitable for hot liquids were tiny and coffee-sized. I ended up making myself two small cups every morning.

🍎 On the last night of the holiday we treated ourselves to a night out at a cider house (or sagardotegi), a true local gastronomic tradition. Basque cider is a non-sparkling brew fermented from local apples, most of which comes from the hills above San Sebastián. The season begins with great festivity in mid-January and lasts until April, with aficionados often taking the opportunity to sample cider (and food) from different houses. Things are quieter in August but we booked in advance at Petretegi in Astigarraga, one of the more famous orchards where production dates back exactly 500 years to 1526.

The scale of things was evident by the fact they have a 420-seater restaurant, a rustic timbered affair backed by rows of huge cider barrels. They keep the food simple by serving up a very set menu: first salt cod omelette, then T-bone steak, then local cheese with quince jelly and walnuts. But it's the cider where the theatre is, served not from a bottle on the table but direct from the barrels round the back. Whenever you want a drink you wander off into the nether regions, initially gasping at the scale of the operation, and hunt around for the cellarkeeper with his finger on the tap.

The approved method is to fire the cider out of the barrel and for each drinker to catch it in their glass. The distance the liquid has to travel helps to aerate it, and also adds a great deal of fun to the evening. Ideally you hold your glass on the slant, then remove it when you have about an inch of liquid so that another drinker can swoop in from behind and catch the flow. Across the evening the chosen barrel regularly changes, so you might follow up a fruity blend from cask 18 with a drier sample from silo 46 in the backroom. And if you end up chatting to everyone else while waiting for a drink, that's all part of the experience.

The Basque word for this is txotx (which if you've been paying attention today you should know how to pronounce). In many cider houses you have to wait for a shout of "txotx" before heading to the barrel but at Petretegi you can wander in at any time, ensuring more self-control is needed. We finally stumbled out just before midnight, very much appled-up, having sensibly booked accommodation at the foot of the hill.

⚖️ I have put on three pounds since going to Spain and it's not shifting.

San Sebastián

2026-08-27T07:00:00.000+01:00

San Sebastián is the jewel of the Basque coast, a classy city sweeping around a perfect sandy bay bookended by two high hills. It has top gastronomy, a well-spread cultural offer and a promenade to preen yourself on. Sure there's a modern urban centre tucked behind but tourists focus on the coast and the old town, which as ever is a compact nugget of narrow streets in a medievally-strategic location. The Basque name of the city is widely used, but the world knows Donostia as the famously attractive resort of San Sebastián. Imagine how many more photographs I'd have taken had the sun come out. [40 photos]

For a prime view of the city head to Monte Igueldo, the 180m peak at the western end of the bay. It's such a good spot that a casino and amusement park were built up here in 1912, the funfair still present and attracting large crowds daily. Find a decent viewpoint (away from tall trees and selfie-snappers) and the entire curve of La Concha bay will be arrayed beneath you. On the far side is the castle-topped peak of Monte Urgull and mid-bay is Isla Santa Clara, a green hump which helps dampen the waves which reach the shore behind. The horseshoe panorama is stunning, a creation worthy of Magrathea, although we only saw the beach either side of high tide so I'm not sure how low it extends.

The funfair isn't huge but retains several rides that were thrilling in 1912 including a carousel, a coaster and a water ride called Mysterious River. This invites you to board a boat for a brief circuit below the hotel walls, an entirely tame loop except that one side is adjacent to a sheer drop, thus its queue gets very long. Even longer is the line for Swiss Mountain, a rollercoaster mild enough not to require restraints, which intermittently takes riders on a scenic loop around the summit. Even loftier views can be had from the Lookout, a fairytale tower rising from the upper terrace which started life as a wooden lighthouse. Not everyone likes hiking up a hill for their entertainment so to maintain patronage the funfair is linked to the bay below by a wooden funicular, also pre-WW1, although at 5.50€ return that's a bit steep.

The chief attraction at the foot of the cliffs, if you exclude the 'Wimbledon English Pub', is a trio of iron sculptures by the Basque artist Eduardo Chillida. These were placed at the very far end of the bay in 1977 and are an early triumph of site-specific art. One of the gnarled claws is attached to the cliff, another to an offshore rock and the third in the near distance beyond the end of the walkway. Apparently they represent past, present and future, though not necessarily in that order. More fun are the seven holes in the promenade through which air (or sometimes water) is forced by the action of the waves underneath. I watched as people stood on them thinking "this won't..." and then suddenly the updraught sent their hair flailing upwards generating the broadest of grins. The collective installation is called Peine del Viento, or The Comb of the Wind, and I imagine looks far more dramatic in stormy conditions.

It takes an hour to walk the curve of the bay, which I know because we walked it twice, once to the Comb and once back. Most people don't get that far as you can tell from the density of sunbathers at one end of the beach and the scarcity at the other. One section at Ondaretta is officially private with stripy blue and white parasols furthest from the waves, then hundreds of white chairs stacked in rows at the regulation distance apart. Various points of interest ensure a stroll along the promenade doesn't become a slog, including the brief tunnel beneath the grounds of the Miramar Palace (the summer home of one of Queen Victoria's great-grandchildren, the Infanta Marie Cristina). You'll also pass an abstract sculpture entitled 'Tribute to Fleming' (Alexander, not Ian), a luxury seawater spa called La Perla and a thin white clocktower that's actually a barometer. I apologise to my companions for stopping and photographing the view every few minutes but the ever-changing perspective was entirely beguiling.

The edge of the old town is heralded by tropical gardens and the ostentatious splendour of City Hall. No government money was wasted on its construction, this because it used to be a grand casino until a military coup in 1923 saw Spain outlaw gambling altogether. The divide between old and new is a boulevard called Boulevard, a broad stripe where street-food is sold, buses terminate and buskers in bunny costumes attempt to cadge money off tourists before they overheat. Narrow streets bear off to the north across the neck of the headland, a wonky grid of bars, cafes, high-brand shopping, more bars and more cafes. Most of it's only 200 years old, the walled city having been burnt to the ground in 1813 when the French garrison was stormed by angry British and Portuguese troops. The only street still standing is called 31 de Agosto after the date of the pillaging, where these days the foreign invasion is mostly for pintxos and wine.

Down by the marina you can eye up some of the smart craft moored there, join a boat trip round the bay or see inside the Aquarium. For 16€ this tells the maritime history of the city (including a fair amount of whaling) before concluding with a walk past 30 fishy tanks. We didn't go in because we were prioritising exploring over experiences, also time was short after the two hour beach walk, also we skipped the Basque-focused San Telmo Museum for the same reasons. Instead we completed the beachfront walk around the foot of the eastern headland, which is Monte Urgull, and definitely didn't walk up to the summit because that would have been knackering. A succession of waves crashed into the outer rocks, a yacht bobbed out into the bay and a garish Mr Bean amusement ride slotted into the gap where a car park would have been were it not festival week.

It turned out we were visiting at the end of Semana Grande, the annual 'Great Week' when the city goes all cultural and fills its streets with entertainment. Chief amongst these are the fireworks that light up the sky each night at 10.45pm, part of an international competition peaking this year on the Feast of the Assumption with a particularly big offshore bash. We'd left by then so all we saw were the participants setting up in the tropical gardens, which were annoyingly fenced-off, and testing the sound system by playing Dire Straits exceptionally loud on big speakers. Maddeningly we also missed the daily parade of the Basque giants...

"Another indispensable attribute of the Great Week is the march of giants and cabezudos. These characters are seen from afar and are easy to recognize. Giants are huge dolls that are several metres high. They are dressed in national Basque costumes and depict fishermen, shepherds or cooks, with the puppeteers hiding in the traditional folds of dolls' clothes. Noble giants are always accompanied by cabezudos. Their outfit is simpler: a Basque peasant dress and a big papier-mache head with a sly expression. They carry inflated sacks of pigskin that they gladly use to spank passing by people. Don’t worry, it does not hurt whatsoever and brings a lot of joy, especially to kids that often run along and pucker them."

...despite being in the old town at precisely the right time, I guess just not in the right place on the processional circuit. San Sebastián's not really a city you can cover in five hours flat, and although we had a damned good try there is a limit to how much of a sparkling jewel you can admire in nowhere near enough time.

» 40 San Sebastián photos on Flickr (while stocks last)

25 years a Londoner

2026-08-26T07:00:00.000+01:00

It's exactly 25 years since I became a Londoner.

It all became inevitable in July 2001 when I scored myself a job in the West End after years of living in the sticks. I could have found digs in the Home Counties and commuted but instead I wanted to grasp the capital and take advantage of everything it offered. The more my Mum asked "You don't really want to live in London do you?" the more I realised I did. And so it proved.

At the start of August I took the train to Stratford and starting asking letting agents what they had on offer. They showed me flats in Canning Town, Manor Park, Bethnal Green, Bow and the Isle of Dogs, some of which were absolutely horrid, as previously blogged. I had to make my mind up really fast and plumped for the E3 option with the filthy toilet, which thankfully a few limescale tablets fixed. I often congratulate myself for picking the right place because not only was the rent reasonable but the landlord was too, hence I'm somehow still in the same flat 25 years later.

The day I came to Bow to collect the keys was 25 years ago yesterday. I turned up at the letting agents to sign the paperwork and to pay the deposit, which I did by cheque because 2001 was a very different era. I was surprised to be given a bottle of champagne for my trouble... which I still have because opportunities for sharing a bottle have been thin on the ground ever since, so I should probably open it today to celebrate the 25th anniversary, although I suspect it went flat years ago.

I caught the bus to my new front door, which shows just what a newbie I was because I could easily have walked. First I emptied the letterbox which was rammed with flyers, free papers and all sorts of mail the previous tenant hadn't redirected. Then I unlocked my new front door with my new keys, once I'd worked out which was which, and stepped inside. Blimey it was dark because there were no windows in the hallway, also those weren't the lampshades I'd have chosen, but the rest of the flat was a blank canvas I was about to make my own.

I didn't hang about. I opened the kitchen cupboards to see what I'd been left and wrote myself an inventory because the letting agent hadn't... which one day they're going to be very embarrassed about not doing. I tried to decide which of my belongings would go where and whether or not to switch the bedroom round. I nipped out to Tesco to buy some grocery staples, including milk for the fridge and those all-too necessary limescale tablets. But I didn't stay overnight because I hadn't moved my stuff down yet, so I wasn't a proper Londoner at that point.

The next day I woke up back in Suffolk surrounded by a lot of boxes. The removal men arrived in a white van at 9am, two blokes called Geoff and Nigel who helped pile half my life inside. They then drove everything down the A12, somehow acquiring my AA road atlas in the process which I never got back. I was more grateful of their help at the other end because that involved lugging everything upstairs, also they switched the beds which are so heavy I've never been able to move them since.

At 1pm on Sunday 26th August 2001 they drove off and left me in my new home, my centre of gravity now switched. I did a lot of unpacking, reshelving and cleaning of sticky surfaces, also I managed to cook some pasta on an unfamiliar hob. I discovered that TV reception was appalling and that BT hadn't connected my phone yet, which was far more of a communications disaster then than it would be today. I also realised that the flat had no fitted cupboards other than in the kitchen, so either I'd have to go minimalist or have a lot of stuff on display.

By the end of the day I had all my shelves filled, my clothes hung up and the jumbo prize crossword completed, this because I'd had very few external distractions. I started wondering how the previous occupant had survived without curtains and put that on my urgent to-do list. Without a shower in the bathroom I noted it would now be baths or nothing, and so it still is 25 years later. And with fresh sheets on my bed I was able to stay in my own flat overnight, and I reckon that's when I finally became a Londoner.

My first full day in London was a bank holiday so I took full advantage. First I dashed to Argos for a TV signal booster and a bath rack from Woolworths. In my diary I described Stratford as 'very Luton-y', which I guess it was at the time. My second outing was much more on-brand - I rode the number 8 bus all the way to Victoria, excited to be living somewhere with ubiquitous public transport rather than in a village with six buses a day. I spent time mooching round bookshops and record shops (because you could do that then) and eased my communication issues in an internet cafe. And for my final round trip of the day I took the tube to Tottenham Court Road, was propositioned by a prostitute and drank some beers I could safely travel home from. Hell yes.

I still had four weeks of my old job left, so after the bank holiday weekend I took the train back east and started using my new London pad for weekends only. The first weekend I found a new barber, BT connected my phone and I rolled back home on the nightbus at three in the morning. The second weekend I started visiting London friends and spent £130 on things they didn't sell in Suffolk. The third weekend I ventured to Canary Wharf and got a photo taken for my new London Travelcard. And on the fourth weekend I finally vanned the other half of my belongings down to Bow and abandoned my former life altogether. I've been a London resident ever since.

I was very nearly a Londoner by birth having been born within 400 yards of a tube station, except it was 10 miles outside the capital at the time because Greater London wasn't invented until I was three weeks old. I then grew up two miles beyond its boundary thus am very much a product of Hertfordshire rather than the capital, so complete was the administrative divide. It took until I was 36 years old before I finally managed to move to London, which feels late in life but might also never have happened if the cards had fallen a different way. How lucky am I?

London is a very different kind of community to where I was before. With 9 million neighbours it's easy to blend in with everyone and to walk down even a local street without ever being addressed by anyone you know. E3 doesn't have the same level of social organisation as a village, nor a network of societies everyone belongs to, nor an urban centre you can't avoid using. I couldn't even tell you how many people live nextdoor to me, let alone what their names are, because in London it's so much easier to be anonymous.

And living in London doesn't come cheap. Unless you were born into property here, house prices are ridiculous and rents are extortionate compared to what you could get for the same money elsewhere. I'm extremely fortunate to still be in the same flat, my packing boxes tucked away where I left them 25 years ago, but I've had to make 300 rent payments for the privilege. Many of my London neighbours haven't been able to withstand the financial pressure so have moved the other way. And yet it's still true that anyone can be a Londoner, you just have to live here, which diverse people at all levels of society somehow manage to do.

My adopted city has kept me busy in ways that the county towns of East Anglia never could. London has a dense cultural heart, extensive suburbs and a wide range of landscapes. It has world-class cultural highlights that tourists travel round the world to visit, also centuries of history on the doorstep, also every kind of global cuisine. More importantly it has a public transport system second to none which is why I sold my car 25 years ago and have never looked back.

Since 2001 I've explored London more than most, indeed that's an understatement, from the council estates of Hounslow to the deep woodland beyond Orpington. It took me a year before I started a blog to tell you about it, relating the capital's minutiae in ever increasing detail, a creative output I could never have sustained where I'd previously lived. After quarter of a century I reckon I've been everywhere in London, yet simultaneously barely scratched the surface.

I have now spent 40% of my life in the city that I love, increasingly convinced it was the best decision I ever made.

25 years, and absolutely no plans to move away unless they drag me out.

Spanish quiz

2026-08-25T13:00:00.000+01:00

Spanish quiz
Here are clues to the names of 30 Spanish cities, towns and islands.
The first column are all anagrams, the rest are cryptic.
n.b. I've taken liberties with pronunciation and ignored accents.
How many can you identify?

  1) Noel
  2) cat alien
  3) our canal
  4) bird omen
  5) crab alone
  6) a Goa razz
  7) beans stains
  8) morons loiter
  9) goat-size trivia
10) revue fun treat

11) nuts-free
12) six depart
13) post-Abbey
14) proper house
15) friend mother
16) £10 prevalent
17) ITV northwest
18) large California
19) small California
20) scoundrel I last

21) soldier Bon Jovi
22) thus food returns
23) all and do in legit
24) cable no graduate
25) Mum learner stove
26) more atomic bonds
27) notes hand because
28) southeast French town
29) receipt for steamed bun
30) Southeastern train operator

(all answers now in the comments box)

Bilbao

2026-08-25T07:00:00.000+01:00

Bilbao is one of mainland Spain's ten largest cities, also the most populous in the Basque country. It's on the country's north coast facing the Bay of Biscay, hence the local province is called Biscay (or Bizkaia in Basque). The metropolitan area mostly follows a long estuary flanked by hills, with the city centre about ten miles from the sea. Bilbao used to be a industrial town linked to a busy port but has reinvented itself in recent years as a serious tourist draw. And the building which kickstarted this incredible revolution is this.

It's the Guggenheim Museum, an explosion of shiny metalwork which opened beside the Nervión river in 1997. The Basque government had seen the transformative power the Olympics had brought to Barcelona and were keen to wave a similar wand over Bilbao. They approached the Guggenheim Foundation with a proposal to build their third great museum (after those in New York and Venice), and they in turn approached the architect Frank Gehry to design the building. He responded with an extraordinary construction of seemingly random curves clad in glass, titanium and limestone, inside which were nineteen gallery spaces of irregular proportions. Not only did the project come in on budget and on time, it had also paid for itself in terms of economic uplift within the first three years. They call it the 'Bilbao effect' and it's proved exceptionally difficult to recreate elsewhere.

The building simply dazzles from whatever angle, whether you're up high on the approach or low down by the river. Stepped public realm creates room to step back and appreciate its beguiling form from all sides, the laminated plates never quite making cohesive sense. The entrance is central but on the lowest level, thus accessed down a long ramp where on-spec visitors hope that not all of today's tickets have sold out. They hadn't the day I went but I chose not to buy one, leaving the mysteries of the internal spaces for another day. My travelling companions had seen it all before and were happy for me to go in but it would have taken a serious chunk out of our day. I thus prioritised 'seeing more of other stuff' over 'seeing some modern art', also the museum was by far the most expensive attraction on my holiday and it would have been hard to justify 18€ for a mere quickfire visit. I did however poke briefly into the cafe, just to say I'd been inside. And I also made sure I met this chap.

This is 'Puppy', an artwork by Jeff Koons which has been standing guard outside the museum since it opened. It's a 13m-high statue of a West Highland Terrier entirely covered in bright flowers, perfectly manicured and the focus of almost as many cameras as the building itself. The other enormous creature hereabouts is down on the riverside promenade close to a shimmering silvery pool. It's 'Maman' by Louise Bourgeois, one of her massive bronze spiders that regular visitors to Tate Modern should have seen at least once. If nothing else this menagerie creates interest for those who simply wander around the building rather than explore inside, which I didn't. I've reassured myself that the art would have looked abstractly familiar anyway, plus it's saved you from having to look at a dozen more photos of the extraordinary architecture.

I made a terrible error walking from the Guggenheim to our next destination, the Artxanda Funicular. I knew the terminal was across the river so headed up the long staircase to cross via the La Salve Bridge. The steps ultimately led to the far side of a six lane carriageway, alas on the wrong side for the classic view of the museum, the pavement then curving at great height onto the eastern bank. To reach the suburb beneath we had to find a walkway underneath the viaduct, then double back to descend a massive tower of steps and hunt for the elevator that would ultimately take us down to the correct level. What I should have done was stick to the riverbank and cross the attractive Zubizuri footbridge instead, a simple-step-free route, and such are the perils of using a contour-free map in an unfamiliar territory.

Other museums we didn't visit include the Basque Museum, the Maritime Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts. The latter has been overshadowed somewhat by the snazzier Guggenheim and, although we walked past and it's free, it's always closed on Tuesdays. But we did visit the Azkuna Zentroa, or Atrium of Cultures, indeed we parked our hire car underneath it. This former wine warehouse was hollowed out in 2010 and filled with a cinema multiplex, leisure centre (including pool), library, auditorium, refreshment and retail. The clever bit is that the interior structure is supported on 43 columns, each of a different artistic design and each made of a different material. One's spiral terracotta, one's crystalline steel, one's swirly marble and the other 40 are just as intriguing, should you be in the area.

More likely you'll be in the old town where the real character is. The Siete Calles, or Seven Streets, date from the 14th century and form the nucleus of the Casco Viejo where the tourists throng. The first time I stumbled into one of these tight medieval warrens I was inordinately impressed - the narrow period streets, the high balconies, the pavement tables, the tiny bars serving pintxos and somewhere in the midst of things a huge cathedral crammed beside a compact irregular square. By the end of the holiday I was still impressed but I'd seen several of them, one in each city, because that's the way the Basque Country hangs. Bilbao perhaps more than most is a truly successful merger of ancient and modern.

» 70 Bilbao photos on Flickr (kicking off with today's touristy stuff)
» Quiz later...
» Then I reckon another four or five posts should finish it

Bilbao transport

2026-08-24T07:00:00.000+01:00

Today's the photo-heavy day, also the most transport-focused, so if you're target audience can I encourage you to head over to Flickr and gorge on 48 photos of public transport in Bilbao.

I was pleased to discover that Citymapper works in The Basque Country. It also offers some fairly unusual transport choices.

Metro Bilbao

Bilbao's Metro is the third busiest in Spain and was many decades in the making. Money and engineering eventually came together in the late 1980s with an existing railway line bolted onto a new underground section through the city centre. Line 1 opened in 1995, followed in 2002 by a bifurcation along the opposite bank of the estuary. Line 3 is much shorter and operated by a separate company, all three lines interchanging in the old town at Zazpikaleak/Casco Viejo. There are currently 48 stations along 31 miles of track, fares are cheap and if you want more background than this brief summary may I direct you elsewhere.

What makes the Bilbao Metro stand out is that its stations were designed by Sir Norman Foster, also most of them look identical. At ground level access is via glass/steel entrances called 'Fosteritos', these resembling dazzling larvae burrowing into the ground. The downside to the gorgeousness is that station names are often very hard to spot. On the outer parts of Line 1 the entrances are less rounded, often with a prominent lift, because the stations are less deep below street level. The new underground stations were generally built by 'cut and cover' methods, which caused years of disruption, but the uniform design does mean that you instantly become familiar with the layout.

Stations are generally double-ended, improving access, with a bank of escalators (and perhaps a long passageway) to shepherd you towards the platform. A few of the stations are quite deep so should the escalators be out of commission and the queue for the lifts long, changing level could really tire you out. The bank of ticket gates comes just before the platforms, also a rack of information including maps and actual pocket timetables. And then you step out onto a mezzanine which hangs directly above the tracks, with short staircases down on either side to platform level. It almost always looks like this.

Trains run roughly every 10 minutes on each line, so every 5 minutes over the shared section in the centre, with indicators showing the next two trains by time and destination. Annoyingly they don't show the number of the line, also there are no maps anywhere on the platforms, only upstairs, so I nearly got on completely the wrong train when an unfamiliar short-stopping terminus was displayed. The trains themselves are fairly standard European 4-car models with more standing room than seats. Above the doors are analogue diagrams which light up to show the progress of the train, although these have restricted sightlines so if the announcements are muffled it can be hard to determine which identical-looking station is up next. A big thumbs up for simplicity, though.

The Metro is the ideal way to visit the next unusual means of transport which is located six miles down the estuary. We took the train to Portugalete on Line 2 and returned from Areeta on Line 1.

Transbordador de Vizcaya

Bilbao has the world's first transporter bridge, a dramatic aerial transfer system built in 1883 to cross the mouth of the Nervión river. Very few transporter bridges were ever built worldwide and hardly any still operate, for example in the UK the Newport and Middlesbrough giants are closed for hopeful renovation and Warrington's is seriously disused. But the Vizcaya bridge not only still works but is a key part of the Bilbao transport network, shuttling usefully every eight minutes, indeed its usefulness and cheap fares put the Dangleway to shame. It was thus very much at the top of my list of must-sees when I came to the Basque Country. UNESCO also officially approve.

The bridge is 160m long, 45m high and made of iron. The structure is supported by 70 steel suspension cables, truly pioneering for its time, and was designed by local engineer Alberto Palacio, a student of Gustave Eiffel. The gondola is rather more recent and can carry six vehicles as well as dozens of pedestrians in two side cabins. One side is in the ancient town of Portugalete and the other notionally in Getxo, although more properly in the more recent suburb of Las Arenas. We arrived on the old side while the town was setting up its annual summer fiesta, stepping down to the waterfront to gain our first view of the enormous span. It's certainly a majestic sight, comfortably to scale in its riverside landscape, on this occasion with several ocean liners visible underneath at the far end of the estuary.

There are two ways to cross the bridge, one on the gondola (0.60€) and one via the elevated walkway over the top (11€). I'd long been mulling whether I'd have the nerve to cross at height, walking within the iron structure with a sheer drop beneath and the gondola mechanism rolling by every few minutes. I understand there's even a sign which says Please don't all jump every 0.8 seconds else the bridge will swing or words to that effect, which doesn't help. Obviously I should have gone up having come all this way, but... hmmm, why was the upper walkway entirely empty? Also hmm, the steps to the lift were securely locked and the souvenir shop selling tickets was closed, this apparently because only the lift on the opposite bank was operational mid-afternoon. So we took the lower option.

If you don't have the local transport card you buy a ticket from the machine, then pass through to a waiting area and file aboard the gondola when it arrives. It's not a glamorous cabin, neither are there any seats, but you won't be aboard for long and there is a good view through the windows as you cross. We had mild drama as an American man was rebuked for attempting to jump aboard just before departure, aghast his wife had boarded without him, so vaulted the turnstiles in an attempt to sneak in via the side entrance. Our attendant was having none of it and gave him a proper earful, banishing him to wait shame-faced for all of the next eight minutes, and we nearly applauded.

On the Getxo side we took lunch in the nearest cafe because it was the height of the afternoon and because its set menu was far cheaper than the tourist traps in town. I thus spent an hour on the terrace watching the gondola shuttle back and forth while working my way through steak and chips and a bottle of red wine, which is one of the very finest ways to experience a transporter bridge. In all that time the elevator never moved and no visitors ever appeared on the upper walkway, even though the website would have happily have sold me a ticket. I concluded the bridge walk had never been an option on this particular day and was simultaneously peeved and relieved. Only much later did a message appear online saying "Due to a technical problem the elevator will operate temporarily from 10am to 2pm and from 4pm to 8pm", so there had been an opportunity except by chance we'd arrived at 2.05pm and left at 3.55pm. If there's ever a next time, hmmm, maybe.

Citymapper features three Basque ferries, one of which crosses the Nervión just south of the transporter bridge every 5 minutes for those who can't be bothered to wait for the gondola.

Artxanda Funicular

Bilbao has two funicular railways, the most central of which climbs a steep hill not far from the Guggenheim. It opened in 1915 as access to an elevated viewpoint on Mount Artxanda, the upper level now also home to a hotel, recreational facilities and a very minor suburb. The two current vehicles date from 1983 and comprise five staggered cabins with a maximum capacity of 70, one starting at the bottom and one simultaneously at the top with a tiny passing place halfway. The journey takes just three minutes, the maximum slope is 45° and we thought it'd be a jolly little excursion. Unfortunately lots of others had had the same idea, it was an unusually hot day and we spent longer than expected in a diagonal oven.

The timetable's notionally every 10 minutes but seemed to operate only every 15, hence the queue at the lower terminal nudged forwards less frequently than we hoped. You had to pity anyone who lived or worked up top but found themselves caught in all this tourist hoo-ha. When finally a service arrived with sufficient space we all crammed on, then stood in close proximity for 12 minutes while the stuffy compartment heated up. A better-staffed operation would have kept us on the platform before ushering us aboard. So bad was the heat that on the journey back down someone in our carriage actually fainted, which put TfL's endless messages about carrying water in perspective. This won't happen to you unless it's a hot day so don't let me put you off, but suboptimal transport procedures can of course be found everywhere.

The view from the top was thankfully spectacular, the swooshy viewpoint located a very short walk from the upper terminal. The city is spread out below in front of a mountainous backdrop, at least once you get past the chain of thick red letters spelling out 'Bilbao'. It's not perfect because a rim of trees part-obscures several of the best bits, including half-the Guggenheim and the nearby river, but best not complain. Also the exposed setting could be a shock to the system in poor weather, but we loved the breeze that helped steel us for the journey back down.

In a deliberate act of selective pricing a return trip on the funicular costs 6€ if you pay at the terminal but only 1.46€ if you turn up with a Barik card, the local equivalent of Oyster. This is such good value that the lady at the Tourist Office tried to warn me off buying the 10€ Bizkaia Card that permits free travel in the city for 24 hours. Even after making three Metro journeys, two tram rides and a funicular return I was still 3€ down, but as a tourist in an unfamiliar city all I wanted was a magic card that let me travel everywhere for the day rather than a mysterious top-uppable product.

The tram network is fairly restrictive but we rode it twice, mainly because it was hot and we were being lazy. We didn't ride any buses, although I was intrigued that several had four-digit route numbers. We left the suburban rail service alone.

I thank BestMate and BestMate'sOtherHalf for their patience while I explored more transport options than they would normally choose and took far too many photographs. You can see a small fraction on Flickr, so do take a look.

» 48 Bilbao transport photos (more touristy stuff tomorrow)
» 48 photos of transporter bridges (includes Bilbao, Middlesbrough and Warrington)

Pamplona

2026-08-23T07:00:00.000+01:00

Pamplona is the capital of the Autonomous Community of Navarre, a semi-Basque province to the south of the Pyrenees. Pamplona is the Spanish name whereas the Basques call it Iruña - both names are used on signs. It has a very long and tumultuous history, as befits a strategic border city, but is probably best known for its bulls. Every July the notorious San Fermin festival sees the beasts let loose to charge through the city centre from the riverside to the bullring, and thousands come to prove their machismo by dodging alongside, eight days running. A large bronze memorial called Monumento al Encierro depicts a group of six bulls and ten runners in mid-flow, both as a dynamic celebration of the event and a tribute to the fifteen participants who've been fatally gored over the years, the last in 2009.

At 8am a firecracker announces that the bulls have been released from the corral, then the 850m dash starts with a fast uphill run towards Town Hall Square. A hormonal mêlée dressed in white and red is then pursued up a sidestreet and rounds Dead Man's Corner before a fast 300m straight along Calle de la Estafeta. The safest place to watch is from a balcony, many of which are hired out for the morning, or from the seats overlooking the arena in Plaza de Toros where the surviving participants end up. Only the bullrings in Mexico City and Madrid are larger. A digital clock outside a t-shirt shop counts down the time until the next bullrun takes place, in our case 326 days 20 hours and 41 minutes (or if you find the entire event wholly questionable displays how much longer remains for normal shopping).

The man who brought Pamplona's horned exploits to a wider audience was the writer Ernest Hemingway who attended San Fermin three times in the 1920s, on one occasion running himself. The experience inspired his novel The Sun Also Rises. The city celebrated his passion by erecting a grizzled statue outside the bullring, arms folded, and also named the adjacent street after him. A second statue, this time in bronze, can be found propping up the bar inside Café Iruña which faces the city's largest square. Hemingway liked a drink in the dazz ling fin de siècle interior, but we had a lunch booking elsewhere so only got as far as the terrace out front where a grizzled old maid holds up the menu for tourists to peruse.

If bulls aren't your thing then the chief attraction in Pamplona is its fortifications. Ancient walls continue to defend the hilltop from approach by river, with all sorts of walkways and triangular bastions to explore. A much larger star-shaped fortress was built to the southwest, with five enormous points and a deep zigzag moat. It's called the Citadel and was initiated by King Philip II in the 1560s to defend, ultimately unsuccessfully, against the French outpost of Independent Navarre. 400 years later locals voted to turn it into a park, of which the lushest part is the interior where the old granary and 'oven' can still be seen. The zigzagging moat between the outer bastions is entirely separate, a peripheral hike of three-quarters a mile with minimal connectivity, so if the sun's beating down best stick up top.

One walled outpost of the Citadel now forms the centrepiece of Takonera Gardens, an elevated park created in 1830 in Belle Époque style. The sunken centrepiece is a menagerie stocked with female deer, swans, turkeys and also several peacocks (some of whom we assumed were dead but it turned out they were just sprawled on the grass having a siesta). From the northern terrace there's a decent view of the elevated walls of Casco Antiquo and a much better view of the urban sprawl ancient Pamplona has evolved into. Like many Spanish cities the old boundaries restricted growth for centuries, in Pamplona's case until WW1 proved its defences were obsolete, after which substantial suburbs grew in all directions. For the best tourist experience stick to the centre where the bulls run.

We didn't get as much done in Pamplona as intended because it was bloody hot. Back in London that day people were whingeing about it being 38°C but we had 39°C and it was too fierce to be doing much. Apparently it's not normally like this, high temperatures being more the hallmark of the Spanish interior and the south, but that's climate-change tourism for you.

» 40 Basque Flickr photos (The first 20 from Pamplona)

Pamplona is one of the stopping points on the Camino de Santiago, the extremely-long-distance pilgrimage route that ends at the great cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in western Spain. Not every pilgrim comes this way, there being multiple routes across the Basque Country, but if you head inland along the Camino Francés rather than take the coastal Camino del Norte you'll pass through Pamplona 400 miles before reaching your ultimate destination. The Camino's not for the faint-hearted, but a proper pilgrimage never should be.

The Camino's symbol is the scallop shell, a common sight on the Galician coast, either the older literal version or the more modern yellow abstract. The pilgrimage only operates one-way so the shell acts as an arrow, always pointing in the right direction. In the countryside the markers might be a long way apart but in cities you spot them more frequently, even if you're not deliberately walking the route. My tally in Pamplona included two streetsigns by the Taconera Gardens, a fingerpost outside the Citadel and a scallop where the route enters the city at the Gate of France.

Most of the route is in deep countryside so when it hits a major urban centre many of the pilgrims make the most of the chance to stock up, stay somewhere that isn't a hostel and eat something less rustic. Up the hill by the cathedral I spotted a Camino supplies outlet (or maybe just a small souvenir shop cynically offering wares to travellers), into which tired souls weighed down by rucksacks were dribbling. It might also have been one of the eleven places in the city where you can get your Credential stamped, this the document you must get marked daily if you seek to complete the pilgrimage properly.

I'd hoped to walk some of the Camino while I was in Spain but precise routes are hard to find online, search engines generally offering instead the websites of tour companies over-keen to organise your pilgrimage. I thus only checked the routes properly after I got home, discovering that I had in fact walked eight short sections across four cities. The scallop above is from a 500m path through Parque Florida in Vitoria, one of my more intentional stretches. Vitoria is however only on the less-trodden Inland Basque Way which connects the two better-known trails across a high sierra.

Camino Vasco del Interior (in Vitoria-Gasteiz): 900m + 500m + 600m = 2.0km
Camino del Norte (in San Sebastian): 2.3km [my longest consecutive stretch]
Camino del Norte (in Bilbao & Portugalete): 100m + 500m = 0.6km
Camino Francés (in Pamplona): 50m + 50m = 0.1km [map]

My Pamplona contribution is particularly pathetic but it did bring my total to 5km precisely. You have to have walked at least 100km to claim your final Compostela (pilgrim certificate) at the cathedral so technically I only have 95km more to go. Don't hold your breath.

» 40 Basque Flickr photos (second plug)

Route 592

2026-08-22T07:00:00.000+01:00

Slim Summer Saturday

Last Saturday a temporary bus route was introduced in North Cray while water main replacement works block the main road. It's the 592, it supports a few hundred people who'd otherwise be busless for three weeks and it's not been introduced very well.

Route 592: Sidcup Station to Mount Mascal Farm
Location: southeast London, outer
Length of journey: 3 miles, 15 minutes

Normally you'd catch the 492 from Sidcup from North Cray Road but no traffic can get down the narrow northern stretch while it's being dug up so TfL have devised the 592 instead. Other than providing two double deckers they haven't thrown much effort at it. There are no bus blinds, only sheets of paper stuck to the front window. There are no tiles at bus stops, only poorly worded yellow posters. There are no timetables, seemingly anywhere. There are no live updates on apps so you have to guess when it's coming. There's no mention on the normally obsessive Bus Changes webpage. And there are no maps because TfL hate maps, but you knew that already.

The lack of a map is a right pain - where does the bus go, and more particularly where can you catch it? There's more than one stop called Sidcup Station, not all of which are served by the 592, so with no tiles on bus stops it's a bit of a guessing game. The yellow posters contain 250 densely-packed words but none of them define the start point, display the route or state that the service runs every 30 minutes. Thankfully Citymapper was able to chip in with a scheduled departure time, but the traffic on Station Road was mostly stationary thanks to roadworks on The Green so that time proved essentially fictional. With a bit of patience I did get eventually get a ride, but I'm not sure I'd have appreciated the ambiguities had I been trying to get home.

The traffic eased as not many of us rode down through Foots Cray and turned left at Ruxley Corner. Ahead lay the mile-and-a-half the 592 exists to serve, half of it built-up and the remainder almost rural. At the first stop the driver waited for a minute while a woman panted slowly towards us, she precisely the 592's intended clientele, although it turned out later she actually wanted to go the other way. This is usually a busy dual carriageway but there was virtually no traffic because there was no exit at the far end so we fair sped along. Only one other genuine passenger made it to the roundabout, where the driver dutifully turned back and dropped us 200m in the opposite direction because rules say only proper bus stops count.

It took almost 15 minutes to walk through the closed-off part to the heart of Old Bexley village, thankfully past Thames Water operatives doing actual digging. Here I just missed a 492 heading north, now back on line of route, which because it too runs half hourly was a further misjudged loss. So whilst it's great the 592 exists its implementation has been sub-optimal to say the least, almost like peripheral Londoners don't matter, and if you are the TfL manager responsible for disseminating the relevant information perhaps stop obsessing with pernickety written instructions and try to get the basics right.

DLR Hide and Seek

2026-08-21T09:00:00.000+01:00

If you were wondering why you haven't seen any new DLR trains recently, I think I might have found them.

Last week we were driving from Vitoria towards Pamplona on the Autovía del Norte (or A-1), a key Spanish motorway. The scenery was typical, a dual carriageway carving down a valley flanked on either side by towering mountains. Big blue arrows marking exit number 392. A sign welcoming us to the province of Navarre. Middle of nowhere. A sudden (and somewhat uncharacteristic) burst of rain.

And just one mile past that particular junction, in an industrial park beside the main road, I spotted this.

WTF, I said to BestMate, is a DLR train doing in the middle of the Basque countryside?

It was indeed a new 5-car DLR train, approximately 600 miles from where it ought to be. The white and turquoise design was unmistakeable, as were the TfL roundels on the side, also the serial number confirmed it was unit number 247. That is absolutely ridiculous, I said. But not entirely improbable.

In 2019 TfL contracted Spanish company CAF to build 43 replacement trains for the DLR's oldest rolling stock before it reached the end of its useful life. The order was later bumped up to 54 trains to boost capacity, with the first train expected to enter service in 2023. But Covid seriously impacted the start of production in Spain, then the collapse of the company building an enlarged depot in Beckton held things up even further. There thus isn't yet room for all the trains to come to London, the latest FoI request suggesting only 12 have so far made it across the Channel. And at least one of them is stuck in a marshalling yard beside a Spanish motorway.

CAF's manufacturing centre is at Beasain another 20 miles up the motorway, i.e. not here, so this looks more like storage than rolling stock under construction. The site belongs to Transportes Vicuña, a logistics company, whose facility here at Ziordia specialises in the storage and safekeeping of trams, trains and other rolling stock. In this case that includes trains that should be rattling around East London but as yet aren't.

I could only see the one DLR unit from the motorway, the trains behind it being different because they had a purple front. So I checked the site using Google's aerial photography and blimey, there appear to be a lot more units stashed behind.

The imagery is dated 2026 and shows several distinctive 5-car trains - I counted at least 16 in the photo. There are also several individual units that could be potentially combined to make several more trains, if indeed they are actual DLR components. Things have definitely shifted since the photo was taken because it doesn't show a train where I saw one, but I think we can conclusively say that a substantial number of the 40-or-so undelivered DLR trains are here.

The main reason you haven't seen any new DLR trains recently is because the first were withdrawn from passenger service in November due to slippage issues. One train failed to stop in wet weather and ever since TfL and CAF have been engaged on "a focused package of improvements including braking software upgrades to improve performance in the type of specific low rail adhesion conditions experienced during the incident." The latest date for the reappearance of trains in public service is 'late summer', but this could still be missed because slippage with dates has been almost as persistent as slippage on the tracks.

Only when the braking issue is sorted AND the Beckton depot is complete will the full complement of DLR trains enter service, bringing more frequent, more capacious journeys to all routes. In the meantime a lot of trains that don't yet quite work properly are stuck in Spain with nowhere else to go and nobody to ride them. Delivery could be a long way off, but next time I see unit number 247 I hope it's at Bow Church rather than beside a motorway in the Basque country, just outside Ziordia.

Basque transport observations

2026-08-21T07:00:00.000+01:00

Some observations on Basque transport
(could be Spain-wide, could be Basque-wide, could be one-offs)

Main roads
» A lot of Basque main roads carve through a hilly landscape at great height, the concrete viaducts arguably despoiling the landscape but far better than wending at ground level.
» This can mean a lot of tunnels through hillsides. Most Basque tunnels are of a similar design (twin-bore half-cylinders with a concrete shell). Each has a sign at the start saying how long it is (could be 106m, could be 3377m).

» All main roads have posts every kilometre stating which road it is and how many km along you are.
» Motorway junctions aren't numbered consecutively, instead matching the number of kilometres along the road. Thus exit 379 might be followed 6km later by exit 385. This also makes it easier to calculate the length of a journey, e.g. junction 12 (San Sebastián) to junction 115 (Bilbao) is 103km.

» Speed limits change a lot, often in steps of 20km/h, especially on the edge of town or approaching junctions. You might thus pass signs saying (80) then (60) then (40) to encourage slowing down.
» Some sections of road have permanent signs suggesting lower speed limits during wet weather, e.g. normally (120) but 🌧️(100).

» About 30% of Spanish motorways are toll roads, but annoyingly a much higher percentage in the Basque Country.
» Some tolls are a set amount, others variable (you pick up a ticket on entering the tolled section and pay on exit depending on how far you've travelled).
» Tolls can be petty (1.20€) or expensive (we got charged over 16€ for going partway from Vitoria to San Sebastián)
» There's always a (slower) untolled alternative.

Airports
» Bilbao is by far the busiest airport. Its millennial terminal was designed by Santiago Calatrava. We flew in.
» San Sebastián's sleepy airport is 10 miles east of the city, a few metres from the French border. We flew out.
» Vitoria's airport deals mostly with cargo traffic.

Urban centres
» The pedestrian countdown includes a green phase so you know how long you've got left to cross but also a red phase so you know how long until you can cross.
» At some crossings the animated green man speeds up his running during the last 5 seconds. Cute.
» Delivery bikes/mopeds/scooters exist but are not common.
» All three major Basque cities have trams. Leeds looks on enviously.
» More about the coastal cities next week.

Rail
» Trains are infrequent, indirect and generally inconvenient. Between the major cities express buses are by far the better option.
» There's no direct rail connection from Vitoria-Gasteiz to Bilbao. With a change of trains the journey can take hours.
» The direct rail connection from Vitoria-Gasteiz to San Sebastián is cheap but slow (2 hours) and there are less than ten services a day.
» Bilbao to San Sebastián is only 50 miles but the hourly trains take 2 hours 40 minutes because there are 37 stops.
» An express rail service between the three cities is planned (the Basque 'Y') but is implausibly far from completion.
» It's a miracle the local economy copes when a few meandering fast roads are the only feasible means of communication.

Rioja Alavesa

2026-08-20T09:00:00.000+01:00

Rioja Alavesa

One of Spain's most famous wine regions is Rioja, a large area spreading down the valley of the Ebro, the country's longest river. Most of it forms its own province (La Rioja) but the northern part comes under the administration of Vitoria-Gasteiz and is known as Rioja Alavesa. It produces more concentrated wine than elsewhere but in smaller quantities due to the acidity of the soil. On the Sunday before the eclipse we went for a quick whizz round, seeing all kinds of places in not much detail. There were five of us in the car, namely me, BestMate, BestMate'sOtherHalf, BestMate'sOtherHalf'sBestMate and BestMate'sOtherHalf'sBestMate'sOtherHalf, so the trip wasn't especially conducive to focused sightseeing. Here's what we saw anyway.

Treviño enclave: On the drive south from Vitoria-Gasteiz the road to La Rioja passes through an administrative anomaly on a grand scale. The Treviño enclave is part of the province of Burgos but entirely surrounded by the province of Álava, this for complicated historical reasons and because the government of Castile and León absolutely refuses to give it up. The Basque Country thus contains a mountainous hole covering 100 square miles but with a population of just 1500, which is just the kind of territorial aberration people on YouTube like to make videos about. We didn't stop.

Balcón de la Rioja: The mountain road crosses the Sierra de Cantabria at a height of 1100m. Just beyond the upper pass is a viewpoint called Balcón de la Rioja, essentially a balcony from which to view the Ebro valley below, which thankfully has convenient parking. Staring downwards what looked like a patchwork of green fields was in fact almost all vineyards, an abundant grape-y landscape blurring off towards mountains far beyond the river. A few hours later the entire range was brimming over with fog so we got lucky.

Labastida: This fortified hillside town was celebrating its three-day summer fiesta when we arrived so was somewhat busier than normal. I'd like to have climbed the main street for the medieval architecture and for elevated views but we were actually here for a lengthy lunch so I was perfectly happy with stewy potatoes, saucy cod and Basque cheesecake. Had I realised that 'flan' is the Spanish word for creme caramel I would have been even happier with that instead.

Marqués de Riscal City of Wine: We had to visit a winery and picked perhaps the most ostentatious, the Marqués de Riscal in the heart of the town of Elciego. Admittedly we only had time for the gift shop and cafe but that was long enough to sit down with a glass of the local red and a small plate of chorizo and pretend to be connoisseurs. The extraordinary ribbon-like building isn't the winery, it's a luxury hotel designed by Frank Gehry who's better known for a building in Bilbao I'll get to later. Those who stay here are also those who buy the ridiculously priced wines, for which the local economy is very grateful.

Baños de Ebro: A quick house visit because BestMate'sOtherHalf wanted to visit the family's rural second home before they sell it. Extraordinarily Basque inside, also extraordinary value by London standards, also packed with memories so hard to give up.

Laguardia: And finally to the jewel of Rioja Alavesa, the fortified city of Laguardia. This grew atop a strategic hilltop in the Middle Ages, is still surrounded on all sides by its walls and retains a cramped street pattern within. We parked below the cliff and ascended to the upper level in a thin eleven-storey elevator, entering the old town through a gate below a medieval belltower that was once part of a castle. We were six weeks too late for the town's bull-run but did see the wooden gates they close to keep the angry beasts within a single circuit. The marionettes beneath the clock in the main square instead come out four times a day, but annoyingly the mechanism runs two minutes fast so we almost missed their jolly dance.

Had we had more time we could have gone down into a wine cellar or two, or looked inside the two bookending churches, or visited the ridiculously corrugated Ysios winery designed by Santiago Calatrava, but instead made do with the splendid views across the plain from the town's battlements. A glittering citadel amid a sea of vineyards, Laguardia is really very special indeed.

» Today's 20 Flickr photos (8 from Laguardia)

Valle Salado

2026-08-20T07:00:00.000+01:00

Valle Salado (Añana Salt Valley)
Location: Salinas de Añana, Álava 01426, Spain (20 miles west of Vitoria Gasteiz) [map]
Open: tours from 10am (some in English)
Admission: 10€
Public transport: best not, only five buses a day
Five word summary: harvesting salt the Roman way
Website: vallesalado.com
Time to set aside: an hour
10 photos: on Flickr

This is quite the place, a valley stacked with pure white terraces where salt has been produced for over 7500 years. Today they use more modern production methods, i.e. how the Romans did it, but salt scraped from these pans still finds its way to kitchens, cooking schools and top-class restaurants.

Five salty springs rise around this small triangular valley, overlooked by a small village whose residents have exploited them for centuries. The briny liquid is seven times saltier than the sea, hence its suitability for economic production, and is irrigated around the site in narrow gutterlike channels. From here it's scooped into small rectangular pans to a depth of a few centimetres, brushed flat and then left to dry out in the sun. Production tends to take place between May and September when evaporation is at its peak and before autumn rain gets a chance to reverse the process. If the temperature's right then by Day Two the salt crystals can be swept up into chestnutwood baskets and moved to storage under wooden arcades, and then the procedure restarts. Simple but laborious work, and all with a tasty outcome.

Valle Salado remained productive until the mid 20th century when competition from other sites encouraged the workers to cut costs. The clay pans were replaced by cement and the wooden structures around the site were insufficiently maintained so began to deteriorate, ultimately leading to the abandonment of salt production. Thankfully in 1984 the Spanish government declared this a culturally important site and pumped in money, leading to a recovery process that's thus far restored about a quarter of the valley. A cluster of pans at the lower end is used to make salt for restaurants and the shop, while the rest is less stringently maintained and left for tour groups to walk through. Ridiculously the river that runs between the salt pans comes from a different spring so isn't salty at all.

Parking isn't signposted so we missed the turning, cursed a lot while trying to turn the car round and only narrowly made the start of the tour. The others in our group included Americans, Brits and those from other European countries who thought they'd cope better with a guide speaking English than Spanish, Basque or French. It was a stonkingly hot day so we should perhaps have taken up the offer of a parasol rather than spending an hour baking across a highly reflective white surface. Our guide led us up one side of the valley and back down the other, pausing occasionally to explain in detail how everything worked. We were also encouraged to dip our fingers in the salty gutter (hell yes, that's strong) and to ask questions (which extended the tour by a good ten minutes). Our guide need not have apologised for her language not being up to scratch.

Towards the end we reached the commercial pans where today a staff of ten keeps things ticking over, rather than employing the whole of the village. We got a chance to peer in at the ladies packing the flakes for sale, a job which continues all year round, and obviously ended up in the shop where various salty products were available. But before that came a chance to dip our feet in the hypersaline waters of the Salt Spa, even to go for a paddle, remembering afterwards to rinse everything below the knee before heading off. For an additional fee you can visit the springs, go for a tasting or become a salt worker for yourself because the site tries to turn a profit, which quite frankly isn't bad going for a neolithic site employing Roman production methods.

» A fresh album of 20 Flickr photos (10 of the salt pans, 10 a spoiler for the 9am post)

20 places of interest in Vitoria-Gasteiz

2026-08-19T07:00:00.000+01:00

20 places of interest in Vitoria-Gasteiz
(assuming it isn't festival week)

1) Catedral de Santa Maria
What marks out Santa Maria Cathedral as special is that it very nearly fell down, hence even ten years ago you could only visit in a hard hat. It was built in the 13th century at the highest point hereabouts and along one edge doubled up as part of the city's defensive wall. Unfortunately the design failed to take into account the slope, the underlying geology and the importance of supports and by the 16th century problems with subsidence were already evident. In the 1960s architects made things worse by removing several internal arches and in 1994 the preponderance of cracks saw the cathedral closed to the public. Structural rehabilitation began in 1999 on a painstakingly broad scale, and only in the last few years has all the scaffolding come down permitting normal worship and helmet-free tours to resume. A few tours are delivered in English and if you're lucky you'll get Xuban running yours. [11€, 90 mins]

The tour starts in the crypt, a vast excavated undercroft that was once occupied by a medieval cemetery. Here thick concrete pillars were added early in the project to provide resistant capacity sufficient to keep the walls up, which is suitably reassuring as you walk through. None of this subterranean support is visible in the cathedral proper which now looks like any other magnificent religious space, although the lofty vaults still wiggle in an unstraight manner where compression has done its worst. Oddly for a cathedral tour the ground floor is the least visited space because next it's off up the back stairs to climb narrow passages to the triforium. This is the pillared gallery along the side of the nave, many metres up, and although the high walk wasn't quite enough to trigger my vertigo it did require considerable faith in the consolidation project.

Some reassuringly chunky stairs have been built up the belltower where the tour concludes with 360° views across the city. Closest are the red roofs of the old town, with Vitoria's three other significant towers proudly on view. Beyond that are increasingly modern flats, the city having built up in concentric rings over the last century, a planning masterstroke which means there's always room on the periphery for further accommodation. What you won't find up the belltower are any bells, this because the last thing a potentially unstable building needs is heavy weights at its highest point, hence they're all lined up outside at ground level. More weirdly the bronze statue alongside is of Welsh author Ken Follett dressed in a suit and sensible shoes while stroking his chin. The follow-up to his most successful historical novel The Pillars of Earth was heavily inspired by the restoration project at Santa Maria, and the praise he's heaped on the cathedral has seen the city take him to their hearts.

Perversely the tour ends at the cathedral entrance, an enclosed portico with much intricate decorative stonework. Much was originally painted until foolish conservators in the 1960s scraped it off and in doing so damaged the statues underneath. Only Mary herself survives in her medieval finery, the 2020s plan being to project the original colours onto the walls instead. We were treated to an initial lightshow before being despatched after a fascinating ninety minutes, because sometimes the best tours of a cathedral barely touch on anything religious at all.

2) Fournier Museum of Playing Cards
Here's a splendidly niche attraction, a card-based offering based in a Renaissance palace in the old town. It's here because one of the world's largest playing card companies was founded here in 1870 by Heraclio Fournier González, with the word VITORIA displayed prominently on the design for the Ace of Spades. His son Félix started the collection which now comprises 20,000 decks from around the world, a selection of which appear across three floors around a central arched courtyard. Downstairs is an original press with a sheet of Latin-style cards, the four suits being cups, coins, swords and batons. Upstairs the cases contain historic and thematic examples, also displays where identical denominations are laid out for comparison.

The old designs could be either simple or complex but with no digits in the corner, thus the illustration had to convey all the meaning (count the swords!). Various royal figures appear in the European cards, also some fairly intricate aces, also Jack-Cavalier-King was sometimes numbered 10-11-12. From India comes a Kamasutra set you wouldn't use with minors, and from Vitoria some gorgeous childish sets you definitely would. Also on display are factual cards which were the Enlightenment version of Top Trumps, and of course tarot cards which are a whole different illustrative genre altogether. Throw in a temporary exhibition on the 1860 eclipse, this because one of the De La Rue playing card dynasty came to see it, and you have a free museum that's a really good deal.

3) Arabako Arkeologia Museoa
The city's archaeological museum fills a modern building alongside the playing card museum to form a cultural duo known as BIBAT. Unfortunately both close mid-afternoon (as many Spanish institutions do) and by the time we'd finished the playing cards they were already sounding the 1.50pm chimes. I thus missed many floors of old things from Álava, a lunch of pintxos now the only viable option.

4) Artium
This subterranean gallery showcases the official Collection of Contemporary Art of the Basque Country. It's a millennial project thus all postmodern up top, with a lengthy labyrinth of white-walled chambers concealed underground. I liked the variety of the works on display from abstracts to architectural blueprints and lumpy sculptures to comicbook illustrations. One half covers the permanent collection while the other arm is for temporary exhibitions, the emptiest of which was a huge room of video installations exemplifying "a genealogy of practices influenced by decolonial thought, cybernetics and feminism". Basque artbolx is just insufferable as the British version. Visiting the Artium costs 5€ if you come in the 11am-2pm session but is free if you come 5pm-8pm. We visited in the post-siesta slot and could sense the discontent in the cashier's tone as she issued a free ticket with no optional donation.

5) Museo de Bellas Artes
The Basque Capital also has a museum of fine arts covering classic Basque and Spanish works. I didn't go in because if you visit a city with friends and want to keep them, sometimes you cut your losses.

6) Salburua
On the northeast outskirts of the city is a large reclaimed wetland area called Salburua. Formerly drained for agriculture, the 400 acre site now again has three lakes and a considerable wildlife population. We didn't spot any mink but in the shady borders we saw lizards, from the bird hides we saw deer and on the way to the hides perhaps a dozen storks circling in the sky. Alas drought conditions have shrunk much of the damp area to cracked mud else we might have seen more. On the farthest edge is a visitor centre with a lengthy cantilevered arm shooting out over the smallest lake, oddly inaccessible from the cafe, and just beyond is the city's basketball arena which resembles a silver crown. A 20 mile Green Belt walk encircling the city starts and finishes at Salburua.

7) Palacio de Montehermoso
8) Palacio Escoriaza-Esquivel
Napoleon's brother stayed in the first of these before losing the key battle of Vitoria in 1813. It's now a cultural centre with nice gardens. The latter was the home of Henry VIII's doctor Fernando and his sweetheart Victoria, both of whom are depicted above the door presenting each other with a rose.

9) The city walls
A lot of Spanish cities demolished their walls when they expanded. Here short sections of the 11th century defences remain, some chunky and others reconstructed in cedarwood to show how tall they would have been.

10) The old town (Casco Viejo)
A lot of my report yesterday came from the old town, a truly atmospheric almond-shaped nucleus which merits lengthy wandering. Its narrow streets are named after the trades once carried out in each, for example knifemakers, cobblers, blacksmiths and painters. Changes in elevation are dealt with by long steps, a long arched colonnade and in a few places covered escalators, upwards only. Bars and cafes are endemic.

11) Virgen Blanca Square, 12) Plaza de España, 13) Parque Florida, 14) Catedral Nueva, 15) Basque Parliament, 16) Arms Museum of Álava, 17) Viena Cafe, 18) Errekaleor

19) Centro Memorial de las Víctimas del Terrorismo
In 2021 the former Bank of Spain building was converted into the Victims of Terrorism Memorial Centre, a place of reflection in a territory where violence and terrorism lingered longer than most.

20) Euskotren
Like many Spanish cities Vitoria-Gasteiz has its own tram network, in this case two overlapping lines connecting the suburbs to the city centre. The first of 23 stops opened in 2008 with the latest extension to Salburua opening in 2023. Some of the earlier platforms are too short for the new 7-car trams. It's 2€ a ride or 0.74€ if you have the special Barik card which obviously everyone does, which is a bargain. Trams run only every 15 minutes and skip several areas, so we found it quicker to walk, but many British cities of a similar size would look on with jealousy at such a transport facility.

» 60 photos of Vitoria-Gasteiz (half of them illustrating today's post, do have a look)
» Vitoria-Gasteiz on Wikipedia
» Vitoria-Gasteiz tourist brochures

Virgen Blanca Festivities, Vitoria-Gasteiz

2026-08-18T08:00:00.000+01:00

Vitoria-Gasteiz is the second largest city in the Basque Country and also its administrative capital. It's located between the coastal cities of Bilbao and San Sebastian but 30 miles inland, so a long drive away. Travellers thus generally ignore it in favour of the better known tourist traps but that would be a mistake, especially if you turn up at festival time like I did. I have rarely seen quite so many people having quite so much fun for quite so long quite so late, and I merely turned up on Day Four.

From the smallest village to the largest city, all Basque communities have a festival of some kind. Vitoria-Gasteiz has two, kicking off at the end of April to celebrate San Prudencio, the patron saint of the province of Álava. But they go really big in summer for the city's patron, the Virgen Blanca, whose six day bonanza sees everyone hit the streets for an imbalanced mix of religion and revelry. Day 1 is always August 4th (whatever the day of the week), and not a lot of work gets done in the city until the man with the umbrella returns to the sky.

This is Andre Maria Zuriaren plaza, or Virgen Blanca Square, but not at time of maximum merrymaking. The green letters are to celebrate Vitoria-Gasteiz being chosen as European City of Culture in 2012 in recognition of its unusually ecological suburbs. During festival week they shift the letters round the corner where they won't get knocked, so everyone ignores them, whereas I spent at least five minutes waiting for families to stop posing in front and/or guzzling from the adjacent water fountain.

The official start to the festivities comes at 6pm on August 4th, at which point the square is absolutely rammed with Basque youth and sturdier members of the community. I watched on YouTube from the safety of home and was glad not to be in the hormonal wine-soaked crush. As the bell of San Miguel strikes six a mannequin is set loose from the top of the tower and starts a slow descent by rope across the full width of the square. He's called Celedón, always sports a beret and an umbrella, and represents the spirit of a local peasant conjured up by the first organisers in 1957. His precipitous journey eventually ends at a first-floor window above a bank, disappearing through a curtain to reappear as a human actor who then proceeds to make the reverse journey across the square on foot. Mass drinking ensues, but elsewhere because within minutes the street cleaners have moved in to clear the square ready for a religious procession. Mad but brilliant.

By the time we arrived the citizens of Vitoria-Gasteiz had been partying for three evenings and three nights, some of the hardier souls surviving round the clock. And yet there were still crowds in the street, specifically a snaking procession of cuadrillas making music and making merry. The cuadrilla is a collective peculiarity of Basque society, a group of friends who stick together for socialising almost to the exclusion of all others. Some are formed at elementary school where the class essentially becomes the social unit for the next three decades, others evolve in geographical locations. At festival time 23 cuadrillas with musical prowess or a particular penchant for hijinks come out to play jovial brass tunes they must have spent months practising, and/or to drink from the backs of vans as they wander the streets and generally entertain the crowds. For some reason there is almost always a tuba.

It's all about the dressing up with each cuadrilla having a different style. Some go black and yellow, others go red or turquoise and a fair few go all-out Basque in light blue with a beret. Many women are out on the streets in a blouse and long skirt (which makes them "neskak") whereas males sport a blue blouse, trousers tucked into white socks and clog-like shoes tied with high laces (which makes them "blusas"). Neckerchiefs are extremely common, either the blue and white check of Eusakia or the prouder bright red of Vitoria-Gasteiz. A lot of male youths have visited the barber recently for a half-shorn haircut some might describe as daringly inadvisable, perhaps as a collective rite of passage. Come any other week and everyone's in shorts and t-shirts but during Virgen Blanca a full-on Basque stereotype prevails and it is joyous.

The serious drinking takes place in the old town, a compact zone generally described as having an almond shape. Four concentric streets are so rammed with bars that they can cope with the most serious influx of boozers, but also so narrow that a single group of partygoers can force very slow progress. There are also cultural events scattered throughout, so for example a heavy metal band might play in Machete Square (where beheadings were once sanctioned) while a 70s covers band in spangly silver entertains the oldies in Spanish Square. So engrained is the gratification that you can even find tuba processions in the middling suburbs in the early hours, where any resident likely to be disturbed has already fled the city for an annual holiday.

At 11pm nightly a firework display takes on Monte De La Tortilla, a raised grass oval to the south of town. A crowd gathers to enjoy 15 minutes of bright flashes (if nothing flash), then makes its way down the hill to the enormous funfair in what's normally a car park. As well as the usual rides and sideshows the offering includes dozens of stalls dispensing food and refreshment, for example two stomping automatons notionally pressing the season's grapes for a glass of mildly-warmed wine. The most Spanish stall I saw was a meat tombola offering prizes of huge haunches of ham, also hunks of pate, chorizo and cheese as consolation. Watch your phone if you visit because dozens get stolen, whereas the worst crime we suffered was being charged 15€ for a plate of chips. And they were still singing along to Boney M in the city centre after we schlepped back at 1am, and who's to say we shouldn't have stayed out even longer.

The UK has no equivalent to this six-day Basque festival. The Notting Hill Carnival perhaps comes close in terms of all-out dressed-up on-street revelry, even if the food and music are completely different, while Pride is as colourful and as boisterous but too much of a rally and too commercial. The joy of the Virgen Blanca is that the festivities are pure with no agenda, just a population letting its hair down in midsummer with as much alcohol, culture and collective glee as it can muster. The trick is to stay resilient and pace yourself until Celedón returns to his tower late on 9th August when the city mutes again, at least until next year.

» 60 photos on Flickr of lively Vitoria-Gasteiz (so far)
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