Itinerary · for one

Basque · pintxos, txakoli, Rioja

1 traveler 5 bases 10 nights 11 min read

v2 · May 12, 2026

Sep 28 · Day 1 · the first one

Wheels down at Bilbao. Then the long bar crawl.

Late September into the Basque country — Sanfermines is months gone, the Bayonne festivals are over, the bodegas are deep in vendimia. Ten nights along the Bay of Biscay and into the Ebro valley with a fork in one hand and a small glass in the other. Three in San Sebastián for the Parte Vieja pintxos crawl — the gilda at Bar Néstor, foie at La Cuchara de San Telmo, txakoli poured from height. Two in Bilbao for the Guggenheim and a pilgrimage out to Azurmendi. Two in Rioja for tempranillo straight from the barrel at Haro''s barrio de la estación. One quiet night in Pamplona at Café Iruña where Hemingway wrote. Two on the French side for Bayonne ham, Cazenave chocolate, and piment d''Espelette on the drying racks.

Begin the journey ↓

Sep 28 → Oct 8 · 10 nights · 5 bases · 330 km between bases

Chapter 01 · Sep 28–30 Days 1–3

San Sebastián · the Parte Vieja

Three nights in Donostia. The counters stacked with pintxos at noon and again at eight, txakoli arcing into the glass from a metre overhead, the bay curving silver under a pewter sky.

3 nights

Fly HKG → Bilbao (BIO) via Madrid · taxi or bus 1h to Donostia

Eat pintxos served 12:30–3 + 7:30–11 · the bars between hours are closed

Things to do

Bar Néstor · the tortilla limited to two a day at 1pm + 8pm · gilda + tomato salad on the side
La Cuchara de San Telmo · foie a la plancha + cochinillo · the back-of-the-museum hole-in-the-wall
Borda Berri for risotto idiazábal · Bar Sport for hongos toast · Casa Vergara on the cathedral square
3-star pilgrimage · Arzak (Juan Mari + Elena) or Akelarre (Pedro Subijana) over the Cantabrian sea
Cidería day at Astigarraga · Petritegi or Zapiain · txotx straight from the kupela, txuleta off the grill

Mugaritz is closed mid-Dec to mid-Apr but open in autumn · Arzak books 2 months out, Akelarre 6 weeks · Bar Néstor's tortilla goes fast, queue 30 min before service

Bookings

hotel Donostia · 3 nights in the Parte Vieja or above La Concha pending

flight HKG → BIO via MAD pending

activity Arzak or Akelarre · one tasting menu reservation pending

Book 6–8 weeks out via the restaurant site

Chapter 01 · the story

Three Michelin stars sit within twenty kilometres of one another and Donostia still treats the pintxo counter at noon as the more serious meal. The whole Parte Vieja runs on txikiteo — one bite, one glass, one bar, walk on. The bay does the rest.

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The shop signs in the Parte Vieja are in Euskara first, Castilian second. Okindegia for bakery, harategia for butcher, taberna for the place with the marble counter and the trays of pintxos already lined up at quarter past noon. Donostia is the Spanish name. The city calls itself Donostia. The language is older than Latin and not related to anything, and you hear it on the street between schoolchildren before you hear it in a museum.

At Bar Néstor on Calle Pescadería the tortilla comes out twice a day, at 1 and at 8, and only two of them — the queue forms thirty minutes before, a piece of paper goes around, names get added, and when the wedge arrives it is still warm in the middle and the gilda on the side is the original one from 1946: olive, anchovy, guindilla pepper, named after Rita Hayworth. One bite, one txikito of red, walk on. Two bars down at La Cuchara de San Telmo the foie comes hot off the plancha with apple compote and the counter is six people wide and nobody sits.

The txakoli comes out of the bottle from a metre overhead, a thin arcing pour the bartender does without looking, breaking the slight pétillance into the glass. It costs two euros. The mountain behind the city is Monte Igueldo and the funicular from 1912 still works; at the top there is a small ramshackle amusement park and a view of La Concha curving silver below, the crescent of sand the postcard photographers have been shooting since the queen regent decided in 1845 that this was where she would summer.

Arzak is in the suburbs in a stone house his great-grandparents opened in 1897. Akelarre is on the cliff at Igueldo. Martín Berasategui is twenty minutes inland at Lasarte. Three stars apiece, all within reach of the same bay, and the city still believes the proper meal is the one taken standing up.

Chapter 02 · Oct 1–2 Days 4–5

Bilbao · Guggenheim and pil-pil

Two nights in the old shipyard city. Titanium scales on the Nervión and bacalao al pil-pil emulsified by the wrist of a man who has done it for forty years.

2 nights

Train Donostia → Bilbao · Renfe 2h30 or ALSA bus 1h15

Drive 20 min out to Larrabetzu for Azurmendi · taxi return after the tasting

Things to do

Guggenheim Bilbao · Frank Gehry titanium · Jeff Koons puppy on the plaza
Mercado de la Ribera lunch · ground-floor pintxos counters above the Nervión
Casco Viejo + Plaza Nueva pintxos crawl · Sorginzulo for gilda · Gure Toki for the morcilla
Bacalao al pil-pil at Egiluz or Rio-Oja · the dish emulsified tableside in a clay cazuela
Azurmendi · Eneko Atxa 3-star at Larrabetzu · txakoli vines on the roof, indigenous-seed garden

Azurmendi closed Mon–Tue · book 8 weeks ahead · the Casco Viejo bars are tight on Friday nights, go early or after 10

Bookings

hotel Bilbao · 2 nights near the Guggenheim or Casco Viejo pending

train Donostia → Bilbao · Renfe or ALSA bus pending

activity Azurmendi tasting menu · one lunch slot pending

Lunch service is the long-format menu; reserve 8 weeks out

Chapter 02 · the story

Before 1997 Bilbao was a dying shipyard town. Then Frank Gehry put thirty-three thousand titanium scales on the bank of the Nervión and a whole city turned around. Twenty-eight years on the river still runs through what the building started.

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The titanium does not look like metal. It looks like fish skin, or the underside of a wave, and it shifts colour through the day the way the Nervión does — silver at noon, bronze when the sun comes in low over the Abandoibarra promenade, almost lavender in the rain, which is most days. Frank Gehry’s argument was that the river had been the city’s spine since the iron works of the nineteenth century, so the building should belong to it. It does. The scale is right. It is huge against the water and quiet against the hills behind, which is the trick.

Across the river the Casco Viejo still runs on the seven streets the medieval town was built around — Las Siete Calles, parallel lanes between the cathedral and the Nervión, each lined with tabernas where the marble counters are loaded by eleven and cleared by three. Sorginzulo does the gilda. Gure Toki does a morcilla pintxo on toast with caramelised onion. Casa Víctor Montes on the Plaza Nueva has been there since 1849 and still sells the same croquetas de jamón at the same counter under the same vaulted arcade.

The Mercado de la Ribera is the largest covered market in Europe, three floors over the river, and on the ground floor at the back the jamón slicers work bone-in ibérico de bellota off the leg — the curing room in Jabugo, the acorn finish on the pig, the seven-second carving rhythm. Upstairs the fishmongers have hake, bonito, kokotxas — the small gelatinous throat-flesh that gets emulsified into the pil-pil, the trick of cooking bacalao in its own collagen until the sauce thickens on the wrist of a man who has done it for forty years.

What the Guggenheim started, the city has now made its register. You can stand on the Zubizuri footbridge and see the building, the old wrought-iron Puente Colgante shipyard crane downstream, the new Calatrava bridges, and the green hills behind. The Nervión is no longer the working river it was. But it is still the spine.

Chapter 03 · Oct 3–4 Days 6–7

Rioja · barrio de la estación

Two nights in tempranillo country at the height of the harvest. Cellars cool and dim, the smell of fermenting must in the streets of Haro, Calle Laurel in Logroño packed shoulder to shoulder after dark.

2 nights

Drive Bilbao → Logroño · ~2h via AP-68 · rental car essential for the bodega day

Harvest mid-Sep to mid-Oct · bookings tight, but the energy in Haro is at peak

Things to do

Haro · barrio de la estación · CVNE, Muga, López de Heredia Viña Tondonia all walking distance
Marqués de Riscal at Elciego · Frank Gehry titanium ribbons over the old cellars
Bodegas Ysios at Laguardia · Calatrava wave-roof against the Sierra de Cantabria
Calle Laurel pintxos run in Logroño · champi-skewer at Bar Soriano, oreja at Bar Sebas
Briones village + Vivanco wine museum · the corkscrew collection alone is worth the stop

Most bodegas closed Sunday + Monday afternoon · pre-book Tondonia at least 2 weeks out · Marqués de Riscal hotel rooms are scarce in harvest, fallback to a hotel in Logroño

Bookings

hotel Logroño or Elciego · 2 nights · base for the bodega circuit pending

Marqués de Riscal Hotel if available, else Hotel Calle Mayor Logroño

rental Compact car · Bilbao pickup, Pamplona drop pending

activity López de Heredia + Muga bodega tours · one day, two estates pending

Chapter 03 · the story

Tempranillo grows on slate at altitude. The slope facing south above the Ebro is where the time is. Frank Gehry put a hotel on one ridge, Santiago Calatrava put a winery roof on another, and underneath both of them the same vines keep doing what they have done since the monks of San Millán.

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October in Rioja smells of fermenting must. The vendimia is in, the bodegas in Haro’s barrio de la estación are running their crushers around the clock, and the air on the street between CVNE and López de Heredia and Muga is sweet and yeasty and a little sharp. The barrio is six estates inside a five-minute walk because the rail line came through in 1880 and the bodegueros built next to it to ship the wine north to Bordeaux when phylloxera had killed the French vines. The arrangement still holds. The trains still come.

At López de Heredia the cellar at Viña Tondonia has not changed since 1877. The barrels are American oak, racked three high, with their own black yeast crust on the staves — the flor the family refuses to clean off, on the argument that the cellar is a living organism. Their Gravonia white spends four years in barrel before release. Their Tondonia red Gran Reserva spends ten. The fourth generation runs it now and the answer to most questions is we have always done it this way.

Twenty minutes south, across the Ebro at Elciego, Frank Gehry put titanium ribbons over the old 1858 stone cellars of Marqués de Riscal — pink and gold and silver, the colours of the wine, the foil on the bottle, the netting they used to wrap the bottles against counterfeit. The hotel above is forty-three rooms. From the terrace you see the Sierra de Cantabria across the vineyard rows, slate-grey behind the green. Ten kilometres east at Laguardia the Calatrava wave-roof of Bodegas Ysios sits low against the same mountains — a long sine curve in aluminium and cedar, deliberately written to echo the ridge behind.

At midnight in Logroño the calle Laurel is shoulder to shoulder. Champi-skewer at Bar Soriano: a single button mushroom on a toothpick, garlic, olive oil, parsley, a single shrimp on top. One euro fifty. Oreja at Bar Sebas. The whole street does one dish each, and the locals do the loop, and the time-slope from the vineyards above runs all the way down into the glass.

Chapter 04 · Oct 5 Day 8

Pamplona · the quiet Casco

One night in Hemingway's town with the bulls long gone. The encierro route walked end to end in twenty minutes, no white-shirted crowd, just the smell of cazuelica de hongos drifting out of the bars on Calle Estafeta.

1 night

Drive Logroño → Pamplona · ~1h45 via A-12

Sanfermines July 6–14 only · October is the quiet inverse of the famous week

Things to do

Café Iruña on Plaza del Castillo · the corner where Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises
Walk the encierro route end to end · Santo Domingo, Mercaderes, Estafeta, the bullring
Asador Olaverri · suckling lamb roasted in the wood oven, served with a single piparra
Cazuelica de hongos at Mesón del Caballo Blanco · mushroom stew in a tiny clay dish
Evening paseo around Plaza del Castillo · the locals trade the same loop they did in 1925

Plaza del Castillo bars fill from 8pm on weeknights · Asador Olaverri closed Sun evening · most kitchens stop serving at 11

Bookings

hotel Pamplona Casco Antiguo · 1 night near Plaza del Castillo pending

activity Asador Olaverri · dinner reservation for the lamb pending

Order the cordero lechal a media ración if dining solo

Chapter 04 · the story

Eleven months a year the encierro route is just a street. Calle Estafeta in October is a narrow Casco lane with wooden balconies and bakeries, and you can walk the eight hundred and twenty-five metres from Santo Domingo to the bullring in twenty minutes without anyone running behind you.

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The red kerchiefs come out only in July, for the eight days of San Fermín. The rest of the year Iruña — the Basque name, used here even when Castilian is the official one — is a small Navarrese capital of two hundred thousand people, with the Pyrenees in the backdrop and a quiet stone Casco built around the Plaza del Castillo. October is the inverse of the famous week. The bars open late, the bullring on Paseo Hemingway is empty, and the encierro route is something you walk on, not from.

The route starts at the corrales at Santo Domingo and climbs the short steep stretch where the bulls hit speed. Then it bends right through Mercaderes, where the slip on the cobbles in 1980 cost a man his life and the wall now carries a small ceramic plaque. Then the long straight on Estafeta, eight metres wide, balconies overhead, the section where Hemingway stationed the narrator of The Sun Also Rises. Then the chute into the bullring through the callejón. The whole run is two and a half minutes when the bulls are loose. In October it takes the time it takes to read the plaques.

Café Iruña on the Plaza del Castillo has been there since 1888, the long mirrored room with the curved bar and the gilded caryatids, and the corner table marked Rincón de Hemingway with the bronze statue of the man leaning on the counter. He drank here in 1925 and again every July through the fifties. The plaza outside is where the locals trade the paseo — the evening loop, done at the same slow clockwise pace by the same families, the arcade on all four sides covering the route in rain.

Asador Olaverri does the cordero lechal in a wood oven — milk-fed lamb, twenty-one days old, roasted with nothing but salt and its own fat, served on a clay dish with one piparra pepper. The plate is austere. The flavour is not. Hemingway would have ordered it. The town is the same town. The bulls are just away.

Chapter 05 · Oct 6–7 Days 9–10

Biarritz + Bayonne · the French side

Two nights over the border. Bayonne ham cut tissue-thin at Pierre Ibaialde, Cazenave chocolate frothed in a Belle Époque salon, the drying racks of piment d'Espelette burning red against whitewashed walls.

2 nights

Drive Pamplona → Biarritz · ~2h via A-15 + A-63 · drop rental at BIQ

Out BIQ → Paris CDG → HKG · evening departure

Things to do

Halles de Bayonne morning · jambon de Bayonne at Pierre Ibaialde, Salaisons Pierre Oteiza
Cazenave on Rue Port-Neuf · chocolat mousseux frothed at the table · operating since 1854
Espelette village · piment drying racks on every facade · the AOP cooperative shop
Chez Mattin in Ciboure for txuleta · whole bone-in rib steak grilled over oak
Les Halles de Biarritz + Macaron de Saint-Jean-de-Luz · gateau basque + axoa de veau for lunch

Cazenave closed Sun–Mon · Chez Mattin closed Sun evening and Mon · Espelette is a 30-min drive each way, half-day minimum

Bookings

hotel Biarritz · 2 nights near Grande Plage or Place Clemenceau pending

rental Drop rental car at Biarritz airport on arrival pending

flight BIQ → HKG via Paris CDG · evening departure pending

Chapter 05 · the story

Eugénie de Montijo asked her husband for a seaside palace in 1854, and Napoleon III built it for her on the cliff above the Grande Plage. A hundred and seventy-three years later the Hôtel du Palais is still there, and the Côte des Basques below still has the first wave in Europe a longboard was ever ridden on.

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The border between Spain and France runs through the Bidasoa river twenty kilometres south and changes almost nothing. Bayonne calls itself Baiona in Euskara. The houses are the same whitewashed walls with red and green shutters. The ham on the counter at Pierre Ibaialde is from pigs raised on the same Pyrenean slopes as the ones in Navarra, cured for twenty-two months, sliced tissue-thin so the fat melts on the plate before it reaches the mouth. The Adour estuary moves seven hundred cubic metres a second through the old port. The trawlers still go out.

In Biarritz the Hôtel du Palais is a pink confection on the headland between the Grande Plage and the Phare lighthouse, built as the Villa Eugénie for the Spanish empress who told Napoleon she missed the sea. It burned down in 1903 and was rebuilt as a Belle Époque hotel and the corridors still smell faintly of beeswax and salt. Below it the Grande Plage curves east towards the Casino Municipal, and the surfers paddle out at the Côte des Basques on the south side, where Peter Viertel brought the first balsa longboard in 1956 and the European surf culture started.

The Espelette road climbs inland past whitewashed Labourd farmhouses with the red drying racks of piment hung on every south-facing wall, four thousand strings of pepper a year, the AOP cooperative in the village shop selling powder, paste, jelly, even chocolate. The pepper is not hot. It is fragrant. It is what the ham is rubbed with at month eighteen of the cure.

Cazenave on the rue Port-Neuf in Bayonne has been making the chocolat mousseux since 1854 — the same year as the villa — and the salon upstairs still has the original Belle Époque mirrors and the brass-handled jugs the chocolate gets whipped in. They froth it at the table. It comes with a small jug of cream on the side and a wafer biscuit and the bill, in francs once, then euros, now about six. It is the last thing before the airport at Biarritz and the long flight east. The Basques on both sides of the border still call it the same drink.

Oct 8 · Day 11 · the last one

Last gilda on the counter. Then the flight home.

Final morning at Halles de Bayonne, a slice of jambon de Bayonne cut to order, a bar of Cazenave dark to carry. A short taxi out to Biarritz-Pays Basque, the evening hop up to Paris, the long-haul east to Hong Kong by way of somewhere with a layover lounge. Ten nights of standing-room counters and stacked tapas plates, of bodega cellars cool and dim, of idiazábal rinds and anchovy oil on the fingers. The Basque country tasted bar by bar — and the bottle of Viña Tondonia in the case still half-full.

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