The next morning, after a night at the farm, we headed into the town of San Sebastian. Founded in 1180, the metropolitan area is home to nearly a half million people.
It lies in what is known as Basque Country which is an autonomous region of Spain on the French border. It has its own language and has 3 main cities: Bilbao, Vitoria-Gasteiz, and San Sebastian. In the Basque language, the city is called Donostia (San Sebastian is Spanish).
This beautiful building is the Town Hall.
The city streets were nice and very clean. Although we didn't do any shopping, this city is a shopper's paradise. Street after street of very nice stores.
We saw these little booths all throughout Spain. The lottery is apparently very popular here.
As in Italy, Spain is also known for the siesta time in the afternoons - basically a 3 hour lunch break - keeping in mind they didn't get started until 10 am. This photo is of a retail/optometrist office where on weekdays they open for 3 hours, close for 3 hours, then reopen for 3 and a half hours. On Saturdays, 3 and a half hours and closed on Sunday. Total of 36 hours a week. Not bad if you can afford it (which they can't) and this is fairly typical. Do not even think of going shopping in the early afternoon - everything will be closed because everyone is out eating tapas and taking a nap.
Even in Belgium, places like the pharmacy, city hall, post office, etc will close for an hour at lunch. No lunch shifts. They just lock the doors. And always 12:30 - 1:30. This used to annoy me, but after visiting southern Europe, at least in Belgium it's only an hour.
We walked around the entire cove, called La Concha Beach. Notice the weather in this photo.
This moss was growing on all these rocky jut outs. It wasn't slick and was a bright green.
You can see the stairs on the left side. It was nice to be able to cross this and continue on the beach - safely!
Part of the walk required walking along this mossy area, but it wasn't too difficult.
Notice the clouds again. For a minute it looks like rain then suddenly it's clearing up. This is constant here.
Back to cloud cover! It changes the entire look of the landscape.
This little island, called Santa Clara Island, has a ferry that runs every half hour.
I don't know anything about these rock formations other than that there are a lot of them on this beach!
Here you can see the promenade that runs around the entire cove.
This beach isn't very long, but it is very wide. Clouds rolling in again :)
Here's an aerial view I found online of La Concha Beach with Santa Clara Island. It lies on the Bay of Biscay. Look at all the sailboats!
This is the promenade along the beach. These trees are called tamarisk and sometimes called Old World shrubs. There were a lot of them here and they definitely do look old.
You can see from our jackets that the weather was chilly, but at least it wasn't raining!
Sunny again! Although it was cool and I'm sure the water was freezing, we saw so many people swimming.
A "zoomed in" photo of the island.
This is a combination of hotels, businesses, housing all along the promenade.
We walked around the city a little and were very impressed. This would be a place to stay several days for sure. I can imagine that the summers are crazy with tourists . . . like us!
San Sebastian, Spain
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