Zarautz

I got to Zarautz by the coastal train from San Sebastián, the Euskotren line that rattles along the Basque cliffs stopping at towns whose names I couldn’t yet pronounce, and stepped off into a wind that smelled like salt and cut grass. The beach announces itself before you see it — that particular hollow roar of Atlantic swell hitting sand at scale. Playa de Zarautz runs nearly three kilometres, the longest beach in the Basque Country, and on the morning I arrived it was stippled with black wetsuits bobbing past the break like seals waiting their turn.

This is not an accident of geography so much as a decades-old identity. Zarautz has hosted legs of the World Surf League and produced some of Europe’s most decorated professional surfers, and the town wears that fact without much fuss — surf shops stacked three deep along the promenade, boards leaning against bakery windows, grandmothers walking dogs past teenagers hauling longboards down to the water at seven in the morning. I am, by any honest measure, a mediocre surfer, but I rented a board anyway from a shack near the eastern end of the beach and spent an hour getting humbled by whitewater that looked gentler from the sand than it felt from inside it.

Getaria’s Shadow

What pulled me out of the water eventually was hunger, and Zarautz does not make that an easy problem to solve badly. The Basque coast invented pintxos as a competitive sport, and here the specialty leans toward the sea — txipirones in their own ink, grilled turbot, anchovies that taste nothing like the tinned version I grew up thinking anchovies were. I ate standing at a zinc counter, the way you’re supposed to, next to a fisherman still in his boots.

A short walk or bus ride west sits Getaria, birthplace of Juan Sebastián Elcano, the navigator who completed the first circumnavigation of the globe after Magellan’s death partway through the voyage. His statue stands over the harbor looking permanently unimpressed by the tourists photographing him. Getaria is also the home of txakoli, the sharp, slightly effervescent white wine grown on steep coastal trellises that you’ll see poured from a height into wide glasses all along this stretch of coast — a ritual meant to aerate the wine but that mostly looks, the first time you watch it, like the waiter is showing off.

Walking the Cantabrian Cliffs

The other Zarautz — the one that has nothing to do with surfboards — is the walking route east toward Orio, part of the Camino de Santiago del Norte, which threads along cliff tops with views back over the whole curved beach and the green Basque hills stacked behind it like folded cloth. I did an hour of it in the late afternoon, alone except for a farmer moving sheep across a field that ran right up to the cliff edge, no fence, just trust in the animals’ good sense. The light out there in early evening turns the sea a colour I don’t have a precise word for — not blue exactly, more the grey-green of old glass bottles.

Back in town that night, the promenade filled with families out for their paseo, ice cream in hand, the surf schools packing up their last boards of the day, and somewhere a txalaparta — the Basque wooden percussion instrument — being practiced badly by what sounded like a teenager who’d rather have been at the beach. I understood the impulse completely.

When to go: July and August bring the biggest swells and the surf competitions, but June and September offer warmer water with far fewer people crowding the lineup.