SPAIN

Typical Spanish imagery calls to mind Gaudi’s Barcelona, sun-drenched beaches along the Mediterranean, vibrant flamenco dancers and tapas in sidewalk cafes. But venture to the north, over the Cordillera Cantabrica and down into the strip of coastal land stretching from the Atlantic in the west to the French border in the east, and you enter an isolated region closed off by the Cordillera to the south and the Cantabrian Sea to the north. You find Basque country, that fiercely independent region with a language all its own; Galicia, whose people gave their name to Argentina’s Rio Gallegos; and Asturias, home to a good portion of the world’s southernmost population of Atlantic salmon. 

Those salmon are born in the Cordillera Cantabrica, where the rivers tumble down from alpine peaks through verdant valleys on their way to the Cantabrian Sea, at the southern end of the Bay of Biscay. Hemingway’s Jake Barnes, protagonist of A Sun Also Rises, apparently missed out. In the book he and his friend Bill Gorton spend several days fishing for trout on the Rio Irati, while just a bit farther west, in the direction that same sun sets, they could have been chasing salmon while they shot wine into their mouths from skins, rode the tops of crowded busses and struggled to escape the general malaise that had infected them in Paris and elsewhere...

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