Chris and I went to the town of Tolosa this week for our Wednesday entertainment. Tolosa is to the south and slightly east of Zarautz, about 30 minutes by car, about an hour by public transportation, which is how we went.
When we rolled in on a chilly, grey morning, Tolosa looked a bit grim. It didn’t help that everything was closed except for a few bakeries. We couldn’t get into either of the main churches or visit the nuns at the Santa Clara convent. Even the tourist office was shut tight at 10 AM. We roamed the old quarter of the town reading the plaques on the buildings, had a cafe con leche and some sweet rolls and waited for the tourist office to open at 11 to see what else we should see in town.
While the gentleman at the tourist office, who spoke English with a Scottish Spanish accent (which was wacky to listen to), was very excited to show off his city, it turned out we had seen just about everything already, at least what is available on a grey Wednesday morning in the winter.
The pride of Tolosa is the location of their old town in a narrow valley on what was once an island in the Oria river. Peaks surround the town on two sides, mountains from which we were told the Duke of Wellington rained cannon shot down on the city during the Napoleonic wars. At this point, the Tolosans recognized that the city walls weren’t really going to help them and tore them down, completely buried one branch of the river in an underground canal, and got on with expanding their town. Being at a crossroads connecting several main roads of the Iberian peninsula to France allowed the town to grow, and the buildings from the 14th to 18th centuries show the money that must have flowed into the town. They were even the capital of the province where we live, Gipuzkoa, briefly in the mid-1800s.
However, that was the highwater mark. As our Scottish-speaking friend told us, “some Spanish queen was staying here, and her doctor told her she should go to the sea because bathing in the waters was healthy, so she moved the capital to San Sebastian, which was just a bunch of pirates and smelly sardine fisherman at the time.” And that was that. Tolosa’s time was done.
To be fair, there was a little more to San Sebastian in the middle of the 1800s than pirates and sardine fisherman, but it did blossom into the Belle Epoque beauty that it is and a stop for the 19th-century jet-set about the same time the capital moved. Sour grapes may be justified in this case for Tolosa.
In addition to this history, we also learned about a famous sweet shop we should visit and the Tolosa International Puppet Centre.
We took the tourist office up on the sweet shop, that of Rafa Gorratxategi, where we were helped by a kind young woman who had done a semester abroad at Boise State University in Idaho. Apparently there is a thriving Basque community in Idaho, and they teach the Basque language at the university. Who knew? We bought some of Mr. Gorratxategi’s cookies to take home to the children, and our helper gave us some of his homemade chocolate and cheese turron to sample as we roamed Tolosa. Only after tasting the cookies later this weekend did we realize we should have bought a few pounds of that turron.
Chris and I are not really puppet people, but the tourist guy was so excited about this puppet center/museum that we walked by it given that there wasn’t much else to do. One word: creeeeeppeee! We’re not talking about Oscar the Grouch here; we’re talking about realistic-looking puppets and marionettes that I can only imagine cackling and dragging a cleaver in one hand. Even worse, he specifically said, “You won’t believe it; it’s like they come to life.” Umm, we’ll pass.
On the nothing-to-do front, the tourist guy suggested we come back on Saturday when they have their market of local produce and goods and apparently the town comes to life like the puppets. Since that wasn’t going to happen, we instead opted to hike up one of the looming nearby mountains to the Ermita de Nuestra Señora de Izaskun, because who doesn’t love a good hermitage? We had some lovely views on our walk to the hermitage, which was a small chapel and was open, unlike the churches in town. Across from the church was a small restaurant where we stopped to have caldo (a hot broth served with bread) and a Spanish tortilla (not the flatbread like a Mexican tortilla, but the Spanish omelet), both made for us in a kitchen we could see by someone’s grandma.
Since the place was mostly empty, I was able to engage the proprietor in Spanish conversation that consisted of more than, “the check please.” We learned that many Basque left Spain to go fishing in the Americas during the Spanish Civil War and many of them never moved back. He had relatives in the US and in Argentina and had visited both. He even has a friend who moved with his wife to North Dakota two years ago to work in the wind farms, and now they have a child who was born there. I said, “El es un Americano ahora (he’s an American now),” and he said, “Quizas (maybe).”
In the afternoon on the way home, Chris and I were standing at a train station halfway between San Sebastian and Zarautz where we often find ourselves standing, when we were mistaken for locals, and a man and woman asked us which train would take them to Orio, a tiny town just to the east of Zarautz. We were pleased to know the answer, shared it, and this lead to another extended Spanish conversation as we all waited for the same train. They were as surprised to learn that we were Americans living in Zarautz as we were to learn that he was Egyptian and she was Chilean and they lived in San Sebastian.
So two things came of this outing: 1) I may have spoken more Spanish on Wednesday than I’ve spoken the entire time we’ve been here, and 2) when you start moving around the world and talking to people, you really start to realize just how much people do move around the world and how most of them are quite nice. And then I have to wonder, why is it that the not-nice ones seem to be in charge in so many countries at the moment? Sometimes it seems as random as towns rising and falling because some queen wants to go bathe in the sea.