30th Apr HENDAYE PLAGE - VITORIA GASTEIZ

We’re back in Spain and I swear it’s feeling warmer already!

Vitoria Gasteiz is the Basque capital  and quite a big city; to reach it we drove through mountains (there’s still snow on some).

The square, Vitoria Gasteiz

And just off the square, alongside ancient cobbled steps leading to the church, THIS monstosity a moving walkway!!

 We cycled into the city to have a look around and got back to the van just before this magnificent thunderstorm struck. It was really close, the lightening lighting up the inside of the van seconds before the thunder clap; I shut all the blinds – I’m a bit like a ostrich if I can’t see it it can’t hurt me, (one night when we were in bed in the Barn there was a thunderstorm and I made Brett get up and go down stairs to hide from it! He of course thinks I’m mad.).

After the thunderstorm we kept hearing these huge bangs, we had a look around but couldn’t see anything, it went on for ages (it sounded likegun fire and bobs, a war zone, but as there weren’t any police cars racing around we didn’t think it was actually anything sinister); then we heard a few fireworks going off – but nothing particularly visual, it was the noise that was the point of the whole display.

When we were in Hendaye Plage yesterday, and on our way here today, we observed that many road signs and place names were written in two separate languages; the second language looking rather like Russian with lots of k’s, z’s and x’s – it dawned on us, after a while, that this was the Basque language.

All I knew about the Basques was what I’d heard on the news (i.e. about ETA violence etc) I didn’t realise that Basques aren’t French or Spanish at all, in fact “they may be the last surviving representatives of Europe’s aboriginal population” (The Rough Guide to Spain),  a study of their genes has shown that they predate all European settlers. They are “a distinct people, generally with a different build from the French and Spanish and a different blood group distribution from the rest of Europe” and “Skull fragments of late Cro-Magnon man believed to date from the Palaeolithic era, around 9000BC, have been shown to be identical to present-day Basque cranial formation” – so we spent the day looking for a Neanderthal man type person, but we didn’t see one!