Personal accounts of the lifestyle, farming traditions and local fiestas in the Basque Country villages of the Spanish Pyrenees.
My beautiful friend from Manchester (with the equally mancunian name of Zosia) has lived in the city of San Sebastian for the past 25 years. As an English teacher she always complains about the X-pats in Donosti (the Basque name for this most beautiful sea-side city) who, after years married to Spaniards/Basques, and totally integrated
(Here is an except from Corporate Woman Magazine 2003 on the first humble origins of my company, ´Pyrenean Experience’). Re-edited in 2016. The Humble Origins of the Pyrenean Experience At 34, I left my Danish lover, determined to make a few changes in my life: firstly my sense of direction – I had always intended to
Ask Koikil what he does for a living and he will say that he is an unemployed smuggler. Like many of the people here on the Basque/Spanish – French border Koilki was a very young child when he first accompanied his father on his night smuggling missions over the Pyrenees into France. Born in 1955, Koikili’s family had a tradition of horse breeding and so he has
One of the striking things I have learned in this Basque farming hamlet of Ameztia, is just how much of daily life is affected by the moods of the weather and the cycles of the sun and moon. Amatxi, (our adopted grandmother of 83), always says that the full moon heralds a change in the weather. Yesterday there was
The Basque Carnivals of Ituren, Zubieta and Lantz in the tiny mountain villages of the Spanish Pyrenees have now been officially recognised by UNESCO as an invaluable part of Europe’s cultural heritage!* (The mysterious nature of the Basques, their inscrutable language and impenetrability of the Pyrenees has long kept the prying eyes of the 21st
