Learning from a Lovely Local

0 Miles Walked

Hello from Cadaqués, Spain!

Spring has sprung and that means Pam and John are out on an adventure and we are bringing you along! As always, we don’t want to be intrusive so you can unsubscribe at any time by clicking this link. If you don’t unsubscribe, you’ll get our ramblings from May 27-June 16. We thank you with all our hearts for reading.

Last year Pam wanted to go someplace where she could speak the language, so we had a great hike through central Wales. This year, Pam said because I (John) had a mumble, sigh, get-off-my-lawn, milestone birthday, I got to pick the destination. While survival is a “good thing”™, I think I earned the trip destination pick because (humble brag incoming…) I graduated the University of North Carolina Asheville with a double major in Mathand Spanish! Yay, me! (Sorry, I’m kinda proud of finishing. ☺️)

The J & P 2024 Adventure! (Sorry for the weird picture captions but Substack threw out the ability to do picture captions in the last year. Yeah, it’s stupid).

I’ve always wanted to see and smell the Pyrenees mountains and Basque Country of Spain. The map above shows where we will be staying across the area. Like all our adventures, there’s going to be a lot of hiking, but if you know anything about the geography of this area of Spain, it looks like we might be walking 200-300 miles a day. Super Trooper Pammy is hardcore, but not crazy.

Given the terrain and national parks in the area, we’re going to do this adventure a little differently than our normal inn-to-inn walks: we’re going to have a car. That will allow us to try all sorts of different hikes across the region. Also, we are working in some museums and other cultural attractions since we have the car to get to them. We thought it would be fun to shake up the vacation plans a bit.

As we did on our last Spanish adventure, we are using the wonderful folks at Pura Aventura to work all the logistics. We can’t recommend them enough because of their kindness and extraordinary effort to help us craft a great vacation.

As we had to fly into Barcelona, getting flights out of Asheville were a challenge. We ended flying into LaGuardia and had to transfer to JFK for the over the pond jaunt. It also came with an 8.5-hour layover and that was perfect! I can feel the eyes rolling now, but it really was almost too short of a layover. Pam’s lovely cousin Elizabeth and her partner Rick were at their place in the city, and we met up with them at Bruno Ristorante Italiano in Howard Beach. It was such a treat to catch up and share a ton of laughs with them. We are already planning to come back to NYC so we can enjoy those laughs with Elizabeth and Rick some more.

Also, Bruno’s is a gem! We walked in with backpacks, luggage and assorted  bags and the staff jumped right up to get everything we carried out of the way. They we so accommodating as we stretched out our meal catching up and laughing. The food was great, too. Thanks again to Elizabeth and Rick for making 8.5 hours go by in 10 minutes!

John, Pam, Rick, and Elizabeth *STILL* laughing!

The next 8.5 hours were not as fun as that was the flight to Barcelona. We booked the flight through American Airlines but was flown by a company I’d never heard of: Level. To their credit, we didn’t have a rapid unplanned disassembly and we got our checked bags, so that was good, However, they designed the seats to be slightly uncomfortable in any position, had an average cabin temperature of 86°, and any amenities past survival (like pillows, blankets, ear phones, and alcoholic drinks) requiring a credit card, one felt like mooing in cattle class.

Once we got to Barcelona, another adventure began: driving a stick shift. The last time I drove a stick was in Spain in 2017. My wonderful sister Deb and husband Jose, invited Pam, myself, and Deb and I’s Uncle Pete and Aunt Carol to visit them at their house in Spain. We decided to see the Roman Aqueduct in Segovia, so we piled into their brand, spanking, new minivan. As we got closer to Segovia, I happened to be driving and told everyone there was no way I was going to drive in streets laid out in the year 700 and scratch up (or do worse) to their car. Of course, as soon I say, “I’m not driving any more”, I turned right onto one of those streets only 3 inches wider than their mirrors. I managed to get us to the hotel 15 minutes later without a scratch but that was pure stress.

Pura Aventura has already rented a car for us, and we knew it was a stick shift. What surprised me as we walked up to the car was because it was an MG. MG’s have a huge soft spot in my heart as they were my dad’s favorite cars, and my first car was a red 1963 MGB convertible. While I had visions of double clutching and drifting around corners, the modern MG we rented was an underpowered, bland SUV styled, thing. It’s fine, but the incongruent MG visions in my head vs. reality made me feel a little old. Fortunately, other than a few high revs when sliding into 1^st gear, I didn’t have engine kills or tire squeals, so I’m happy that I remembered a core adult task.

The drive up to Cadaqués was straight up a highway and mostly boring but as we got closer to Cadaqués the road changed into an even better Deal’s Gap, AKA the “The Dragon” (318 curves in 11 miles 45 minutes from Asheville), which is considered the best motorcycle road in America. I had so much fun driving that curves-out-the-butt road though I pined for my 1963 MGB (or 1993 BMW R100GSPD motocycle) at every corner.

We were hustling to get to Cadaqués as Pura Adventure strongly recommended that we take a walking tour of the town with a local guide. As we were very tired from no sleep, we were wondering why we agreed to something planned on the day we came in. Let’s sum it up this way: if you visit Cadaqués and don’t take a tour with Mercé Donat you will have all your vacations revoked until the end of time. Her family has lived here forever, and she loves Cadaqués and all its people with all her heart. We have run out of superlatives to describe how fun and interesting the tour with Mercé was. As we told her, this was the exact perfect start to our vacation. (If you do plan to visit Cadaqués let us know and we’ll get you Mercé’s number so you can book your own tour.)

Cadequés. The Iglesia de Santa Maria is on the left.

The first thing you feel when you arrive in Cadaqués is the wind. Even though Cadaqués is on the Mediterranean Sea facing east, the wind  blows constantly and strongly, from the north west and is called the Tramontane (Castilian Spanish) or Tramuntana (Catalan, and is the name of hotel we are staying in). As Mercé told us “In Cadaqués we have 335 days of Tramuntana and 30 days of bad weather.” In fact, the wind is such a constant, that the juniperus oxycedrus, cade in English, or cadeque in Spanish (I wonder how the town got its name?) grows to accommodate the wind with the main branches appearing on the side opposite of where the wind hits the trunk.

Pam standing among the cade/cadaqué. She’s facing into the Tramontane wind so notice how everything grows.

The other mind-blowing fact we learned about Cadaqués is that the super curvy road we drove over the mountains to get to Cadaqués was only built in 1910! Cadaqués was a major fishing port and wine making region through the Middle Ages and Renaissance and the only access was by the sea. Even more mind blowing to us is that Cadaqués didn’t have city water until the 1970s. There are pictures around town showing how the local women carried water in vessels called “dolls” on their heads. These are some hard people here in Cadaqués.

Mercé showed us around the area where the old town walls used to stand. She is especially interested in the Jewish history of Cadaqués and pointed out how we could find the two synagogues that were very active until the Christian kings expelled the Jews in starting in 1492. The two synagogues are now in privately owned houses. Mercé has spent ages in various archives across Spain trying to find family names so she can use that to try to use that get funding to buy the houses and restore the synagogues.

At the second synagogue, the only piece outside that you can tell that the building used to be a synagogue is the carved out piece in the entry arch that housed the mezuzah. She knows the inside of the current private house because when she was a teenager in the 1980s, the house was the town disco and she said she spent a lot of time there. In fact, the disco ball used to hang over the mikvah! Even more hilarious was that the balconies in the disco were the same balconies that separated the women from the men in the synagogue. As teenagers the world over do, in Mercé’s day, the boys hung out in on one balcony and the women on the other. I just found that hilarious because even as a de-consecrated synagogue, the sexes separated, just like the Middle Ages.

Of course, we visited the Cadaqués Catholic church, Iglesia de Santa Maria. What we didn’t expect to find was an altar piece that just blew us away. It was designed and built in the Baroque Style in the 1700s and has two fascinating characteristics. The first is its size and the second is that it is one of the few alter pieces that incorporated regular people into it. At its base are two local fishermen in positions that show them supporting this entire gigantic piece of art. The funding came from the local fishermen working on public holidays, bank holidays, and weekends. Having seen so many churches in Spain, it was glorious to see a representation of the people themselves so prominently. So much of what you see in these old churches is ego stroking by a king or overly wealthy people patting themselves on the back.

The glorious altar piece of the Iglesia de Santa Maria.

We are in the Catalan region of Spain, and it was a stronghold of the Republicans fighting against Franco’s fascists in the Spanish Civil War. The Republicans were anti-Catholic, because the church aligned with Franco, and their first order of business was to destroy churches. It wasn’t a miracle that this glorious alter survived the war. Even though the townspeople were Republicans, they knew how important and priceless this alter is, so they built a wall in front of it to protect it from destruction.

Another fascinating tidbit we learned was that the altar piece has only been properly cleaned once in over 300 years. The town and church are arguing over who should pay for the long overdue cleaning because it will cost 80,000 Euros.

The left side fisherman.

The right-side fisherman (Dude’s kind of jacked!)

We were also lucky to see the alter all lit up. Mercé checked at the church before our tour and noticed that the donation box where you can light up the display had broken. Since she’s as local as can be, she got the key from the church electrician so she could light the display for us.

Of course, Spain is all about eating! Being a fishing village, you know that the fish is to die for. Since we had eaten our way across the Atlantic, we weren’t full dinner hungry so just hit up a couple of places for tapas. We had a wonderful meatball in brown sauce with shrimp. I know that sounds off to most Americans, but it was excellent. We (mainly me) had to have the Cadaqués specialty of anchovies at multiple places. The tradition is to take that wonderful, fresh, daily baked, Spanish bread, spread a smear of tomatoes on them, and lay a single anchovy on the top. These are fresh anchovy simply smothered in olive oil so lack the over saltiness of American anchovies. They were so, so good that my goal is to eat 20 pounds tomorrow. Even Pam liked them!

Pam’s scared but loved the anchovies anyway!

I think you can see why we can’t recommend spending some quality time with Mercé Donat if you visit Cadaqués. I could go on for another 1,500 words (or more!) about all the cool things we learned on her tour, but it’s now 01:10. I need my beauty sleep as we start walking tomorrow!

As always, thank YOU for reading!