Unexpected Spain (& Portugal)
Even after visiting Barcelona years ago, I’ve still found Spain to be full of surprises. Here’s a list of random observations about our two weeks in Spain plus the past week in Portugal.
My gawd, this place is old. I mean, humans have been here in the Iberian Peninsula for 1.2 million years. And they’ve been busy. We pulled off the highway one day to discover a Neolithic burial cave, once a mass grave for hundreds of ancient humans, now open for tours…just sitting there incongruously next to a bunch of warehouses and farm fields.
As we’ve passed through the Spanish countryside, we’ve been surprised to see that nearly every tall hilltop in sight is crowned with the remains of a castle or tower, in various states of decay. In the towns, even the popular ones, we found a surprising number of abandoned buildings with collapsing roofs, some which had clearly been that way for decades—something you’d never see in California. In the countryside, the remains of crumbling stone farmhouses are scattered everywhere, likely abandoned for more than decades. In Lagos, Portugal, we found some such ruins perched on a beautiful cliff overlooking the ocean—immediately next door to to a new hotel & golf resort.
But also punctuating the view are a surprising number of massive white windmills and fields of solar panels. Like way more than we have at home. The Spanish apparently take renewable energy more seriously than we do, and they’re installing it at scale, which I appreciate. But the juxtaposition of highways, high-speed rail tracks, modern cities, ancient villages, cobblestone streets, and crumbling castles makes for an interesting landscape. Spain is definitely a land of contrasts!
Consider the Spanish diet. I’ve been surprised just how much meat that the Spanish eat—mostly pork. In Portugal, it’s mostly fish. In Spanish supermarkets, the ham and salami section (and cheese & yogurt sections) are bigger than the fresh vegetable section. At some of the more traditional establishments, whole pig legs hang from the ceiling, but it’s hard to find a single vegetable on a menu. And yet, equally surprising are the large number of vegan restaurants and vegan dishes available even at simple cafés in small towns. There are apparently a lot of progressive folks in Spain & Portugal, and there’s no stigma attached to veganism here as in the States, and I’ve found most menus have vegan and vegetarian dishes called out with icons that seem to be universally understood. I’ve enjoyed some of the best vegan meals of my life here! Definitely a change from my previous sojourns in Europe when pickings were slim.
I’ve also been surprised to find that despite the fact that everybody drinks coffee, coffeeshops just aren’t a thing in Spain. You might find a handful of them, mostly catering to tourists, in the bigger towns and cities. So where does everybody go to get caffeinated? Seems that the bars and taverns, the ones that serve wine and tapas until midnight, re-open in the morning to serve pastries and espresso. And there’s at least one on every block. I’ve been a little surprised to pass patrons having a late dinner as we walked into our apartment for the evening, only to come back out the next morning and find the same folks sipping a café con leche before work!
But then the places close again, because the siesta is real. In Granada, we were surprised to find the streets empty out around midday. Most restaurants, even in popular tourist areas, closed from 12-4pm, others from 4-8pm, then re-opened from 8pm until midnight. Where did everybody go? Home to nap? (Sounds amazing to me…there’s nothing better than a furtive afternoon snooze.) But strangely, some tapas bars only opened at noon and would be filled with rowdy locals swigging beer and eating fried sardines until they abruptly shut at 4. I’m sure there’s some rhyme or reason to this, but we couldn’t decipher it. But wherever most of the people went in the middle of the day, they suddenly reappeared en masse around 5pm, when the streets were jammed and lively didn’t settle down until after well after we went to bed.
Because Spaniards are vampires. Or at least nocturnal. I had discovered this in Barcelona in 2005, when we tried to go out to a club at midnight and discovered that it didn’t even open until 2am! I thought that might just be cosmopolitan Barcelona, but…in the much smaller town of Ronda, I was surprised to hear a bunch of people in the square at 7:15am…and then realized that they hadn’t yet gone to bed. A little white later, I went out to find a coffee and a croissant, and found virtually nothing open at 8:45 on a Saturday morning, not even the bakeries. Even in bustling Seville, it was nearly impossible to find anything that opened before 8am. Meanwhile, the Catholic Semana Santa celebrations, which we stumbled into, went all night…all week.
Amy, ever the night owl, says she’s finally found her people. Griffin’s been up until 10pm every night since we got here. It doesn’t help that Spain is on European Central Time, but due to its western longitude, doesn’t get dark until almost 9pm right now…and the sun doesn’t rise until after 7am. But I’m still befuddled why people of all ages here like to stay up so darn late.
And people just move slower here. Nobody seems to be in a hurry. Meals seem to typically take 1–2 hours, and asking for your check before that, even in a crowded restaurant, seems to just confuse the waitstaff, who won’t return with it for at least another 10 minutes. If you take a two-hour lunch and a two-hour dinner (plus a few coffee and smoke breaks in between)…when do you actually work? How does anything ever get done here?
But somehow it does. The Spanish are a proud people who don’t seem content to let others do things for them. We’ve been surprised by the number of products here that are made in Spain, rather than imported from China or elsewhere, including everything from strawberries to toilets to kitchen appliances. Meanwhile, there’s surprisingly few American chains here, though we have seen the occasional Starbucks, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut…though not nearly in the quantities I would have expected.
We’ve also been surprised just how modern most European homes are. Euro-style is definitely a thing. While a building may be several few centuries old, the interiors are often sleek and modern. Our current apartment in Lisbon has the most incredible hand-crafted plaster work on the ceiling that is reminiscent of a palace and must be over a century old; but the kitchen meanwhile is all done up in ultra-modern black cabinets, black countertops, and brand new stainless steel appliances. I guess when everything around you is so old, there’s no particular nostalgia for vintage living spaces. A funny juxtaposition for me, after all the work I’ve done to make our home feel like a Victorian farmhouse!
Of course, remodeling something here would give me a nervous breakdown. Nothing here is made of wood; it’s all stone, brick and mortar. Many of the homes we’ve seen here are all just globbed together precariously against the side of a hill or built against city walls that are 1,000 years old. Making it all rather unclear where your place actually beings and ends. Nothing is straight or level; buildings lean out over streets at strange and somewhat unsettling angles. A disproportionate part of construction here seems to be about patching up holes with plaster. This perfectionist would not do well here!
But making your place nice is surely easier when everything is so small. Bathrooms are the size of our closets; and kitchens are the size of our bathrooms (and usually include both the water heater and washing machine). With one exception, we haven’t had anything larger than a double bed since we got here, which gets a bit crowded with all three of us in it (and Griffin sprawling out in the middle, pushing both of us to the edges!).
But I do love that with few exceptions, every place we’ve stayed in has somehow found room for a bidet. Now if only I could figure out quite how to use them…
Overall, we love all the idiosyncrasies of Spanish and especially Portuguese life. Amy is obsessed with Lisbon and wants to move here…but I’m getting ahead of myself! Back to our journeys in Spain…