Thirty-One Bars and a Cold Bay

The standing instruction in Donostia is that you do not sit down. You enter a bar, you stand at it, you eat one thing and drink a small glass of something, you pay, you leave, and you do this seven times in an evening. It is a system for eating a great deal while appearing to eat almost nothing, and after six days I can report that it works right up until it does not.

I kept a notebook. Thirty-one bars over six evenings, which is fewer than it sounds because on the fourth night I managed only two before conceding.

The thing nobody tells you about pintxos

They are not tapas. Tapas arrive because you ordered a drink. Pintxos are already made, already sitting on the counter under fluorescent light, and the good ones are not on the counter at all — they come hot off a plancha you have to know to ask about. The counter display is the menu of the second-best food in the room.

So the whole skill is arriving, reading the room, and asking for the thing being cooked. In practice this means listening for a Basque word you do not know and repeating it badly, then receiving, in one case, a slab of kokotxa — hake throat — in a green sauce of oil, garlic and parsley emulsified into something with the texture of very expensive paint. €4.80. I went back twice.

The famous ones deserve their fame and their queues. But my notes keep returning to a place on Calle Fermín Calbetón with nine stools, where a woman put a single seared scallop on a spoonful of leek purée, said something brisk, and turned away before I could react.

The best meal I have eaten this year cost €4.80 and took ninety seconds, standing up, with my coat on.

The txakoli pour is not showing off

They pour the local white wine from a height, in a thin stream, into a flat tumbler, and it looks like a party trick. It is aeration: the wine is high-acid, slightly petillant, and grim if you drink it flat. Poured properly it tastes of green apple and salt and costs €2.40 a glass. Order it with anything from the sea. Do not order it after 9pm, at which point everyone switches to something serious and you should too.

March in the Bay of Biscay

La Concha in high summer is a hard beach to love — a perfect shell-shaped bay with towels laid out edge to edge. In March it is one of the best urban beaches in Europe, because it is empty and cold and the light does something silvery that photographs badly and looks extraordinary in person.

The water was 13.4°C. I swam on four mornings, badly, for between six and eleven minutes, alongside a group of locals in their sixties and seventies who swim daily year-round and treat neoprene as a moral failing. There is a municipal changing facility at the Ondarreta end with hot showers for €2.10, which is the single most valuable piece of information in this post.

Getting out is harder than getting in

Donostia sits in an awkward corner of the rail map. The narrow-gauge Euskotren topo to the French border is charming and slow; the Renfe line east goes the long way round via Zaragoza. Doing this without flying costs you the better part of two days and roughly €94 in tickets, and forces an overnight in Barcelona that I did not plan and do not regret.

Six days here, three more in transit. The Mediterranean next, which will be warmer and, I suspect, considerably louder.