52 Countries in 52 Weeks, Chapter 9: Spain & Portugal

In Which I Almost Cause A Teensy Scene At A Massive Art Event, And Learn To Stop Worrying And Love Tapas

It could have been a scene out of Forrest Gump.

Somehow, I had stumbled into the biggest art story in the world without realizing it — when all of a sudden, a security guard grabbed me on the shoulder.

The Italian painter Caravaggio is famous for a number of reasons, but one of them is the scarcity of his output, with only around 60 works to his name.

As such, it was a big story in 2021 when the government of Spain stopped an auction of a piece of art (initially priced at 1,500 Euros), because experts believed it could be a lost work of his.

It was an even bigger story earlier this year when it was confirmed that it was indeed a Caravaggio from sometime around 1609, and that it would be displayed for several months at Spain’s Prado Museum, beginning on May 28.

On the morning of May 28, did I know any of that?

No. All I knew is my co-worker Lisa Christensen and I both happened to be in Madrid at the same time. She suggested we go to the Prado, and I figured going to one of the most iconic art galleries in the world would be a fun way to hang out for a few hours before we went our separate ways.

So we went in, not understanding why ticket lines were surprisingly long for a Tuesday afternoon, or why there was a large number of a professional cameras surrounding one particular exhibit.

At that point, we decided to check our phones, and discovered what we had literally stumbled into. We marveled at the coincidence of being witness to a story spanning more than 400 years.

Then I turned on my camera. And suddenly, there was shouting.

I had not read the signs saying no photography was allowed, and my journalism instincts kicked in — without really thinking about the fact that nobody except professional media were filming.

Thankfully, a hand on the shoulder and an angry admonishment was all I received.

Well, that, and a four second video — that I will keep on my phone forever, but never share — that ends rather abruptly.

There’s more to Europe than fancy royal palaces of centuries past, like Granada’s Alhambra. There are also the views from those palaces.

Way back in the early stages of planning this trip, “Summer in Europe” was one of those concepts that seemed to make sense: a classic genre of travel that I never had a chance to do as a young adult, and once I decided the journey it would start in the Americas in March, crossing the Atlantic after two or three months clicked into place.

And after two weeks — an initial few days in Portugal, followed by a little circle route around Spain — I have some very preliminary takeaways.

First, Europe is just easier from a logistical perspective if you’re hopping from country to country. A single currency means not having to worry about a) finding an ATM or money exchange centre when I get out of the airport, b) finding an ATM that doesn’t charge me 400% of what I’m withdrawing to make the international conversion, c) not realizing five hours before leaving a country that I still have three bills and eight coins and zero idea what to do with them.

The major cities and geographic wonders are more closely bunched together, while the higher volume of tourists means more people that are used to dealing with silly foreigners like me who can barely eke out a few phrases in their own language.

And the trains! Can we talk about the trains?

(“It’s your newsletter and you love trains, why is this a rhetorical question, and why are you using a secondary narrative device to make fun of that point?”)

Oh, if you insist.

Europe’s train system is much lauded by North American transit nerds for its number of routes, number of high-speed lines, and connectivity from country to country.

It was one thing to read that the trains I would be booking would be fuller, faster, and more efficient than the ones I took in Canada and the United States; another to actually experience them.

What has been almost as striking though is how boring the trains were. With limited funds and stagnant ridership, Amtrak and Via Rail have taken to branding a lot of their routes as experiences, highlighting observation cars and pristine views and luxury seating that will only cost you an entire month’s rent. You can find a decent amount of influencers talking about their amaaaaaaazing North American train rides in what are clearly sponsored content posts, yet never bringing up the actual price of the trip.   

In Spain, I took seven trains, and they varied in terms of views or accessories. Some had plugs for electronics and cafes, some didn’t. Some were on high-speed routes of 300 kilometres an hour, others ambled along at less than half that speed.

On the other hand, they were all efficient, with only one delay of about 30 minutes on any my routes. All of the train cars and stations looked as though they had been built in the last few decades, unlike their North American counterparts. On most of them, I was one of the only people constantly taking photos and videos like the overexcited child I am.

Obviously the massive differences in geographic density and government funding go a long way. Yet I couldn’t help but notice the difference between a train system that accentuated tourism, and a train system that accentuated getting people from Point A to Point B in a straightforward manner.    

As evidence of the boring efficiency of Spain’s trains, I don’t have any great photos of them in action, because the views were rarely amazing. So here’s a pretty picture of Lisbon.

The trains contained few signs of tourism, but the cities?

Hoo boy, summer arrived quickly.

It was almost jarring to see the difference the moment May turned to June. Plazas that were full of locals became full of groups standing still, either listening to their tour guide or waiting for their tour guide to arrive. The type of marquee attractions that I could get into without much preplanning in Los Angeles in April or Buenos Aires became downright impossible in Madrid and Barcelona.

Which, I’m sure some of you are thinking, “Duh doy. Summer in Europe is packed with tourists.”

Point taken, and something I understood going in. At the same time, I was having such a blast not really booking most stuff ahead of time except for things like Disneyland or Machu Picchu, letting the motivations and energy of each day take me in unexpected directions, the unplanned daily itineraries contrasting nicely with the extremely planned overall route.

Fortunately, through the help of tour guide ticketing apps and the ability to pay through the nose on said ticketing apps, I was able to see the things I really wanted to see.

But it was a grumbling reminder that the next few months would have to be a little bit more deliberate.

tfw you’re getting wedding photos taken at the Barcelona Cathedral while surrounded by hundreds of tourists and also a clown.

The transition to Europe and ability to take trains just about everywhere also made it easier to plan a longer exploration of a single country. I spent close to two weeks in Spain — from Madrid to the northern Basque Country, heading south to Barcelona, and then west to Granada.

While there are joys in flying into a big city and devoting lots of time to the rhythm of a single place, it was stimulating to travel and reflect on Spain as a whole.

Going to mid-sized cities like San Sebastián (population 190,000) and Granda (population 230,000) provided a different experience than the metropolises of Madrid (population 3.4 million) and Barcelona (population 1.6 million). Returning to train travel afforded the chance to see the geography up close. Taking in more communities gave more opportunities to observe global tensions play out in different ways, from the debates over drought policies in Barcelona to the many Palestinian flags in Basque Country.

And it allowed me to appreciate — on both a cultural and physical level — what I have decided is Spain’s greatest contribution to the world.

I speak, of course, about tapas.

Tapas varies from region to region and place to place. In some places the portions are close to a small meal, in others the size of a large sample snack from Costco. Some places focus on ham and cheese, while others are more seafood-based. In the Basque Country they’re known as pintxos and come with a toothpick; in the south you get a free small one with every beverage purchased.

What unites them all is the basic concept of something that seems so intuitively simple, yet somehow impossible to find back home: a small gourmet appetizer and a drink for 6 or 7 euros.

(Or 10 Canadian bucks, if you’re playing along at home)

Aside from being a great way to eat and explore the local cuisine, a tapas crawl a great way to explore a city. Aside from being affordable, it’s flexible — some days I went to one tapas bar, while others it was four or five.

And they were also delightfully informal, with people spilling out into the street with a drink, and folks ambling up to the bar in haphazard fashions, all in ways that made me think about the 80,000 bylaw infractions they were probably violating back in Vancouver.

In summary and conclusion, unless I’m given evidence to the contrary, I’m going to assume Spain has blackmail on any country that doesn’t have tapas, in order to preserve its gastronomical competitive advantage.

I suppose I should write about the cities I saw in this part, right?

(On one hand, that’s the part of the trip that interests me the most from both a professional and observational standpoint. On the other, it would get fairly repetitive if the entire thing was “And then I went to this city, here is what is good and bad, and how it compares to Vancouver” over and over again. So I’m trying to mix up how I talk about them, until I inevitably rank all of them at the end)

It feels a crime not to write more about Lisbon, and how it manages to simultaneously be a heritage tourist trap of a mountain town filled with narrow alleys filled with hillside cathedrals and cafes, AND a grand European capital with amazing museums and pedestrian walkways and plazas.

San Sebastián, Bilbao and Granada were all interesting, with the Basque history of the first two and the Moorish history of Granada giving them a distinct identity and visual feel, and their smaller size making it easier to get around.

The “best” place though, by most objective measures, was Barcelona. It was easy to see why it features on so many people’s lists of great cities: an amalgam of medieval neighbourhoods and cosmopolitan boulevards; H&M and Zara outlets in beautiful gothic buildings; beaches and bike lanes and bars in all directions; a relatively compact city that feels like it can still breathe under the weight of all the tourists.   

Barcelona also has a strong aesthetic cohesion due to the predominance of Antonio Gaudi, the famed Art Nouveau architect who built many of the city’s most famous structures, from the Sagrada Familia to Casa Milà, nary a straight line seen in any of them.

It gives the city a unique visual identity that I think sticks in people’s mind when they think about metropolises that truly stand out.

But it also made me think about what makes my own city special — and the limits of design when contrasted with the grandeur of nature.

One of Gaudi’s most famed works is Park Güell (seen above), a monument to his design philosophy in the shape of a large hillside park.

There are curved viaducts and shapely buildings, a massive “bench” ringed with mosaic art that overlooks the city, and plenty of other flourishes that delight the eye.

However, my frame of reference for a big park is Stanley: Vancouver’s downtown jewel, a massive mix of forests and cliffs and walkways right in the centre of the region.

The more I visit other great parks around the world, the more that Stanley’s minimalism compels me. There may be an Aquarium and playgrounds and horse-drawn carriages, but the vast majority of the space is forests or beaches or views of the ocean where the only things you can do are walk, bike, or sit down and take it all in.   

In Barcelona’s Güell, in New York’s Central, in Mexico City’s Chapultepec and beyond, most great parks are fundamentally a collection of man-made exhibits with trees or flowers as the backdrop, strung together by walkways. You’re constantly aware of the element of design in creating this manicured oasis in the middle of buildings.

Wandering around the amazing curved walkways of Park Guell, I thought about how I was clearly in an amazing park, in the middle of an amazing city.

It made me yearn to be in Stanley Park, to get to a quiet place on the seawall or one of the trails, and to barely know I was in a city at all.