You Never Take More Than a Third
At four o’clock Jerez does not exist. Every shutter on Calle Larga is down. The heat comes up off the paving and sits at chest height, and the only thing…
The Older Cave Is Open
I came to Cantabria to look at a room I would not be allowed to enter. It seemed a strange thing to build a week around, and I built the…
The Rent Was Paid in Octopus
Ourense is the only province in Galicia without a coastline. It also cooks the best octopus in Galicia. Nobody here treats those two sentences as a contradiction, and getting over…
The Riverbed and the Ranking
Valencia is the consensus pick. Ask any nomad forum where to go in Spain and you get the same answer within two replies, usually with the same three reasons: cheap,…
The River Was Here First
The train from Ourense takes thirty-one minutes to reach the river, and for most of them you cannot see it. You pass through cuttings and short tunnels and stands of…
Lisbon Eats On Its Feet
Mouraria — the bifana counter I’m leaning against a marble counter in Mouraria with a bifana in one hand and the second beer of the afternoon in the other, and…
Two Weeks at the Edge of the Map
I’m writing this from a fourth-floor window in Funchal, looking at an Atlantic that has nothing on the other side of it for about 950 kilometres. The next landmass west…
The Lagoon Has Its Own Hour
You wouldn’t think Aveiro had its own register. Most of the articles I had read called it the Venice of Portugal, which was the first thing the city itself disagreed…
The City That Kept the Tripe
The street was empty in the way that only Portuguese streets are empty on a Sunday at noon — not abandoned, just waiting. The windows were open. The radios were…
The Porto-Pinhão Line
I have a rule: one rental per country. Not a car collection — a deliberate driving experience, the single road that a country does better than anywhere else. Austria got…
