EUROPE NEWS

TUPNews recently went on an international pub crawl, starting in the Old Town of San Sebastian, in Northern Spain, and finishing in St Jean de Luz, in Southern France.

San Sebastian is the tenth largest city in Spain, and is located in the heart of the Basque country. In the course of my travels within this region, TUPNews has developed a deep affinity with the Basque people, their traditions and their plight. They are a proud, ugly people, whose fierce sense of nationalism is finely balanced between dark and light components – the dark being their caustic, if justifiable, hatred of the Spanish; the light being their passion for their own culture – particularly their cuisine, and to a lesser extent their sport.

TUPNews started the evening in the Parte Vieja, a lattice of paved alleyways heaving with cosy, inexpensive bars of a style popular in Western Europe: narrow, brightly lit, simply furnished places. The bars are largely identical and in close proximity to each other, which lends itself to bar-hopping, or as the locals call it, txikito. All Basque words contain at least one X, which leads to some very high Scrabble scores, as you can imagine.

Old Town bars are all about the pintxos, the Basque version of tapas. But pintxos is to tapas as, er, something brilliant is to something rubbish. No lacklustre offerings of stale bread and olives here, we’re talking about an entire bar surface covered in plates of prawn brochettes, fried octopus, Serrano ham, langoustines on a stick, anchovies, crab cakes, little bacon and egg things, melted cheese things, as well as many things TUPNews didn’t even recognise but scarfed down anyway. Every single bar is filled with this stuff – they have to hand you your drinks because there’s no space to put the glasses down on the bar. You just eat what you like and tell the bartender what you had at the end – it’s fantastic, and pretty cheap.

At about seven, walking from one bar to another, we came across a large group of people in one of the courtyards. They were preparing for a Basque ritual I had witnessed on my last visit but completely forgotten about. Taking a break from the eating and drinking, they collected white placards with the faces of Basque political prisoners – primarily members of the Euskadi ta Askatasuna (ETA) terrorist group – and set off on a march through the city centre. The crowd numbered a couple of hundred and was comprised of Basques from all ages and walks of life. After about half an hour, they all came back and carried on with Friday night.

Amazingly, this has happened every single Friday night in San Sebastian for as long as anyone can remember. Imagine going on a protest march every Friday night!

This time it was peaceful and dignified – the last time I was here, an important parliamentary vote on Basque autonomy had just gone the wrong way, and bins were set alight. A chap came into our hostel clutching a rubber bullet he had picked up off the street – it was the size and shape of a tennis ball, slightly smaller maybe. But this was carnival season, so people were in high spirits anyway.