Travel #3 - Why you should book flights to San Sebastián now! 🐟
Trust us, just do it
Hello!!
I’m going to get straight into it… If you love food, then seriously, open Skyscanner and book flights to San Sebastian now!
We've just returned from our five-day trip, and we're so excited to share our experiences with you that we’ve put together this email in a hurry while waiting for a Basque Cheesecake to bake in the oven.
As always, we’ll be publishing our complete guides to San Sebastián on the website here over the next few weeks, but for now, lets go over the highlights from our trip.
Also, feel free to share this email with anyone who might be planning a trip to foodie heaven soon.
Donostia
San Sebastián is a coastal city in northern Spain on the Bay of Biscay. It is part of the Basque Country, an autonomous community with its own unique language (Euskara), history, and traditions.
Donostia = San Sebastian in Euskara (the Basque language)
For the history nerds, Basque people have been in the area since before the current Indo-European population of Europe, which is why Euskara (Basque) bears no resemblance to Latin or other European languages.
Watch this YouTube video about Basque history.
A taste of San Sebastián
We didn't have a single bad meal/snack/pintxo during our stay in San Sebastián. Absolutely everything (apart from the coffee) exceeded our already high expectations.
Donostia is famous for its pintxos (pronounced 'peen-chos'), and we spent most of our time hopping from one pintxos bar to another, indulging in fantastic seafood and sipping on txakoli, a local white wine.
Many popular Pintxos bars we planned to go to were closed for their summer vacations, including Casa Urola, Ganbara, Bar Nestor, and La Viña. We were absolutely gutted at first, but we learned that you can’t really go wrong here. Just walk around, find a pintxo bar with a crowd, and you won’t be disappointed.
Our Pintxos Highlights
We’ve recorded everything we ate in San Sebastián for a future blog post but below is just a snippet of our favourite places
Gandarias: Get the T-bone bruchetta
Atari: Arroz de Temporado (chicken and rice) with a refreshing glass of Martini Rosso
Bartolo: The Monkfish and Aambas skewers were insane
Bar Sport: Creamed sea urchin, Croquettas (the fillings change daily), and the cheesecake.
Make sure you try the Gilda (pickled peppers, olive and anchovy on a cocktail stick) when you’re bar hopping. It was the very first ever Pintxo, and it’s a great way to start your crawl. Most bars serve them.
For a sweet treat, you’ll find plenty of Tarta de Queso at Bassk, a cafe specialising in Basque Cheesecake. (La Viña is the normal go-to place, but it was closed when we went).
Our favourite restaurant
Although most of our time was spent pintxo-hopping, we did have some sit-down meals, and our favourite one was after a surf session at Geralds Bar in the Gros neighbourhood. Our instructor recommended it to us. The restaurant was fully booked, but they let us eat lunch at the bar, and thank God they did—it was delicious!
Tuna belly
Grilled leeks
Atlantic Horse Mackerel
Peppers with labneh and pancetta
Another food highlight was the Tomato Salad and Xabiron Ceviche at Ziaboga, a waterfront restaurant in Pasaia that is perfect for refuelling if you hike the coastal path like we did.
When we weren’t eating…
… we were trying to burn off as many calories as we could!
There are two excellent sandy beaches in San Sebastián. La Concha, the main beach, has apparently been rated one of the best beaches in the world (for a city beach, it’s very good but we wouldn’t say it’s on our top 10 in the world), and Playa Zurriola is where the surf scene is.
Learning to surf
We surfed on three mornings with Pukas Surf School, which was an incredible way to start the day. In addition to teaching us how to surf, our instructors gave us a lot of recommendations about things to do and food places to go to.
San Sebastián is a good place for beginners to surf. The waves can get pretty big on certain days but the beach is very spacious to cater for the number of surfers.
Running tour of the city
We went on a 12km running tour with Carlos (booked via AirBnb), who showed us around the city and shared fascinating insights about the history and architecture.
It's a great way to see the city, and Carlos helped us navigate the Pintxos bars. The bars can be pretty overwhelming, and the service comes ‘Spanish style’, meaning you must be assertive to get a good spot and the waiters’ attention.
Carlos taught us some Spanish phrases, which helped us a lot.
Hiking the coastal path
On our last day, we took a 3-hour coastal hike to Pasaia, a small fishing village in the Eastern part of Donostia. It was a beautiful trail with a fair amount of incline, so we definitely felt it in our legs (especially after surfing that morning), but the views were worth it!
Pasaia was a lovely village, we only stayed there for a quick lunch, but on our next trip we will definitely be booking into Casa Camera for a seafood dinner as it smelt epic when we were walking past.
Shopping
Surprisingly, there was good shopping in San Sebastian, which we hadn’t expected. Downtown had all your usual high street brands, but in the old town, there were many shops selling cool art and clothing designed by local designers. Usually, the touristy shops can be repetitive and ‘tacky’, but here, we ended up buying a lot more than we anticipated.
That’s it for now
This was a different kind of post for us. It’s the first time we’ve shared a summary of one of our trips, so if you liked it, please reply and let us know. If we get a good response we will share more of these stories in the future, too.
In the next few weeks, we will post full guides on everything we mentioned above on the website, so keep an eye out on this page for updates. You can also check out our story highlights on Instagram too.
In the meantime, we strongly urge you to get your calendar out and book your trip to San Sebastian; you will not regret it!
The Hungry Soles
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