I take back all those unflattering things I’ve said in the past about Bilbao. That stuff about how it’s the “the Pittsburgh of Spain.” Yes, it’s an iron city. Yes, the Ría that runs through it is brown. And yes, it’s annoying, if not panic-inducing, that the Guggenheim Bilbao is now listed in 1000 Places to See Before You Die. But the city that inspired a planning cliché, “the Bilbao effect” (build a Big-Name-Architect museum and you’ll soon be polishing up your rusting economy with wads of tourist dollars), is more than all that.

A month ago, we set out on the Camino de Santiago from here. There are historical arguments for starting in Bilbao – the city has figured on Camino trail maps since the 1300s – but I chose it for practical reasons: You can get to Bilbao from just about anywhere. And yes, there’s Gehry’s museum.

But while the Guggenheim lends this departure point an Oz-like glow, for me the real Bilbao effects, the things I want to go back for, are these:

Its green, green heart. You fly into Bilbao over rounded hills. “It’s like a fairytale,” said Ed, looking out the window at forests, meadows, and farmhouses coming into view through a mist. The Guggenheim is famously sited up against the city’s industrial edge, but here’s what nobody tells you: it looks pretty swell against that green farmland too.

Its good, good eats. The market has a whole floor, icy and sweet-smelling, dedicated to fish. An encouraging first stop. Afterwards, my Bilbaina colleague, Carmen, pointed us to her favorite bar on the Plaza Nueva for a pintxo (peppers and tuna and cod and countless other little bar bites) and a zurito (a little beer). The tap is a bronze hand by Lorenzo Quinn. And the fluffy scrambled eggs they fed us as a vehicle for buttery sautéed cèpes, well those cured our jet-lag, I swear.

Big colorful windows. It rained a few times on our first day here. Then again, the sun came out a few times, too. The Basques track it all from their pretty enclosed balconies, sometimes painted bright colors.

The Euskotran. The walks from old city to new couldn’t be better: fifteen minutes along pretty 19^th century boulevards and grandly gardened roundabouts or an equally easy stroll via the promenade along the river (and you get to cross Calatrava’s glass bridge). But it’s just so sweet the way this little tram zips quietly along the grass.

Bilbao’s big girl. You gotta love her. And also the shop selling boinas, those huge rain-worthy Basque berets. And the windows full of hiking gear including stuff for the people who are into ropes. Bilbao is just that kind of hearty, practical place.

Ongi etorri! Actually, nobody welcomed us with this greeting when we touched down in Euskal Herria (that’s the Basque Country, to you). But, with our comfort in mind, the airport did offer this helpful invitation to the komunak. Just the fact that the Basques have Euskara, their very own language that no one else can figure out, makes me want to write them a love letter in lemon juice.

In all, the plan was to land in Bilbao and get on the Camino without looking back. But that’s not the way it went.

For one thing, there was that last lunch at another of Carmen’s favorite places, a restaurant whose name I cannot bring myself to reveal (except to my clients): beautiful ham, and a “Rioja with Ribera tendencies” (my god, what was that?), a luscious stew of garbanzos with lobster, tiny squid with slow-cooked onions, a delicate shell of a cream puff, coffee on the terrace overlooking the city.

As I was leaving, the gracious owner-maitre, Patricio Valiño, discreetly handed me something. “Oh madam, I believe you dropped this…” It was the button from my pants which had, it seems, miraculously shrunk during our Camino journey.

A few years ago I convinced my husband Ed that spending a week as guests in a country farmhouse in Spain would be the perfect vacation.  We’d be surrounded by history, eat some real home cooking, and get to know the people – and more important now than it was then:  it would be cheap.

Naturally, I imagined rustic beauty, too.  Colleagues in Spain who know I can’t stand those overrated Paradores, with their fusty fake antiques and stodgy service, told me the country’s agroturismo offerings were finally catching up with the memoir-inducing rural lodgings of Provence and Tuscany.

Relying on a list from the Catalan tourist office, we headed to the village of Urtx in the Pyrenees.  My heart sank a little when I saw our cell-like room, two sway-backed twin beds practically its only furnishings.  And when Ed threw open the window, the view literally took our breath away—we were just above a muddy barnyard, piled high with steaming, um, authenticity.  Urtx, indeed!

Thus began my search for idyllic farmhouse inns in Spain.

The Internet is not a useful opening gambit.  The first step toward finding real gems is to get the scoop from someone who has stayed in (or at least visited) the places he or she recommends.  If those places have websites, and most do, by all means take a closer look.

Years of real-world searching has landed me on more than my fair share of horsehair mattresses, but it’s also turned up some lovely places in the region I know best, Catalonia.  Here are two of my favorites, along with special places suggested by my savvy colleagues in Andalusia and Green Spain:

• Masies in Catalonia:  Mas Garganta, north and inland of Barcelona, is full of charming little nooks and details.  I love it for its simplicity, tranquility, and dining terrace.  In the Priorat, Mas Ardèvol’s simple but pretty rooms and good food are just what you want to come home to after exploring that rugged wine country.

• Alquerías in Andalusia:  Jonathan Lord at All Ways Spain in Granada has a real talent for combining city culture with country escapes.  Alquería La Morayma, up in the Alpujarras, is one of his top picks – he especially recommends going in September to participate in the grape harvest.  Or after he has walked you all over Granada, have him set you up at a favorite closer by:  Alquería Los Lentos – it’s got a Moorish hammam, or traditional steam-bath.

• Casonas in Green Spain: Barbra Fogarty, an outdoorsy type who likes to eat, is my colleague at S-Capes Countryside Travels in Asturias.  She knows many casonas and pazos along the fabled Camino de Santiago. La Casona de Con is one of her favorites near Cabrales (oh, those delicious mountain cheeses) and, not far from Santiago, Cantiga del Agüeira is another (perfectly positioned for wine tasting in the Ribera Sacra).

Once you’ve picked out a few promising inns, clarify the basics:  Is breakfast included?  What other meals are available?  Some casas rurales are set up primarily for longer stays where “self-catering” is the norm (that means shopping in local markets and cooking in your own cottage kitchen).  Review the sleeping set-up:  bigger beds for couples, quaintly called camas de matrimonio, can be harder to come by.

Take it from me, you also want to ask questions that touch on how the place will look and feel:  Is it a working farm?  Do the owners live there?  Will you be the only guests or will you be sharing the property with others? Is the house in a village or an isolated location?  Does the village have shops, restaurants or other attractions?  Is the property right on a highway? Does the picture on the website show the part of the house you’ll be renting?

Some places can be too rustic.  More often, I’ve found charm forsaken in an overzealous under-funded effort to provide modern comforts.  Pictures on the web can help here, but they don’t always capture the real feeling of a place.  If you’re working with a trusted local travel advisor, get his or her to describe the proprietors’ taste.

Maybe the most important question is one you should ask yourself.  It goes without saying that you’re looking for charm and you want it to be inexpensive. But are you open to real simplicity?  Part of why I like Mas Garganta so much, for example, is that it is not over-restored.  Yet I think the proprietress has a great eye.  For me the calm simplicity she cultivates trumps such hardships as meagerly appointed bathrooms.  Most of the clients I’ve sent to Mas Garganta have adored it, but one couple never even noticed the still-lifes of garden produce in the pantry or the landscapes from the terrace.  They fled after glimpsing the gaps in the 300-year old floorboards and feeling the ordinary cotton sheets.

Spain’s casas rurales offer authenticity, with prices well below standard hotel rates.  Some are beautiful, too, but whether they’re idyllic or not is at least partly up to you.

Fina Puigdevall is probably the most committed locavore among her fellow Michelin star-winning Catalan chefs.  Her restaurant, Les Cols (“the cabbages”), occupies a family masía (Catalan country house) in Olot that dates back to the 15th century, though she hasn’t shied away from a few modern improvements–like the dramatic glass wall separating one of the dining rooms from the chicken yard.

The design is radical, the chef says, “but the most radical thing I’m doing right now is this:  I’m not serving fish anymore, even though we can get fresh fish from the coast of our own province. It’s only an hour away, you know. But we’re gradually retiring it from the menu because it’s not part of our local cuisine, our landscape.”

We rolled into Les Cols this fall, a group of food-loving American travelers who had just spent a couple of days at another masía, Mas Garganta, the farmhouse inn run by Fina’s sister Inés. (I’ve mentioned it here.)  The contrast between the two places–the inn humble, comfortably showing its age; the restaurant extravagantly embellished in cutting-edge design–is weird.  But gradually the similarities in these two sisters’ ways become clear. Together they reveal a contradictory but defining Catalan sensibility that reveres everything traditional and close to home and at the same time embraces innovation and craves worldly adventure.

Both women are deeply in love with the Garrotxa, the Pyrenees foothills west of Girona, where they were born.  Inés has replanted the old kitchen garden, trying to recover the self-sufficiency of the farmhouse as it might have been when her grandfather lived there. And even though Fina has made more radical amendments to her masía, she says, “There’s no place I’d rather be than this.  There’s no landscape I long for more than the Garrotxa.  Don’t get me wrong, I do go away sometimes, and I think it’s important to have the chance to miss this place.  But I think we are in a world in which people move around way too much.  What I am trying to do is somehow transmit this whole place to people.”

Both sisters have an artful eye for spaces.  The table in Inés’s pantry is a tableau for silent still lifes that she quietly arranges every day– pumpkins and squashes, a bunch of celery in a bucket, a braid of tomatoes.  A hedge of red roses stands at cooks’ eye view outside a long window in Fina’s kitchen.

But Inés flees when I pick up my camera.  And Fina won’t visit our table until we insist.  “I don’t want the restaurant to be about me,” she says, “I want it to be about the place.  When we’re all here in the kitchen, I like to imagine I can go unnoticed.”

“What our two places have in common,” Fina says, “is that they are both very real.  We both believe there is an important feeling that comes through when a place is real and in that sense we are doing exactly the same thing.”

Well, not exactly.  If you’ve eaten on Inés’s terrace, you’ve shared a stretch of mismatched wooden tables with other travelers; Fina’s shared table is a single sleek curve of gold-colored steel.

At Inés’s, you slice your own local sausage with crusty bread and humble jug wine; at Fina’s the sausage is served on a platter alongside a poem and a cold glass of reserve Cava.  If you’ve had one of Inés’s hearthside suppers, you know the white beans from Santa Pau that are the pride of the region; at Fina’s, they are rendered as “caviar” in delicate spheres atop a tiny “blini” made from local buckwheat–a traditional crop in these parts that is undergoing a quiet renaissance here.

The stew of chicken, pork, and wild mushrooms we had at Inés’s was real.  Our 14-course tasting menu at Les Cols might be described more properly as surreal–in the best sense of the word.

Here’s the menu from our feast at Les Cols.  I’ve added the wines we drank in italics and a few explanatory notes in brackets:

Autumn & Nature

Cava Raventós i Blanc reserva 2006

The land, the water, the cereal, the essentiality of primary food:
Homemade sausage from Olot with buckwheat crust
[the “crust” was a big paper-thin crisp we broke in pieces to eat with the sausage and Cava]

Caviar from La Garrotxa:
Buckwheat blini and Santa Pau beans
[no fish involved--instead, tiny spheres of bean paste]

Finca Viladellops, Viladellops 2007 (xarel-lo) d.o. Penedés

Autumn tastes and colours:
Beetroot roll, del ciri apple, goat cheese, oil, salt

With the texture and scent of this mushroom:
Mushroom salad, pine nuts, beet leaves, tortell d’Olot
[tortell is a traditional pastry; this was a slim biscotto-like serving]

To eat with fingers:
Cornbread sandwich, cereals bread from Els Hostalets d’en Bas, crumbs, olives
[baked in a nearby town famous for its wood oven and made into a little sandwich]

A vegetable of the season:
Pumpkin, eucalyptus oil, garlic flower
[a soup]

Celler Capçanes, Mas Collet 2006 (garnatxa, cabernet sauvignon, syrah) d.o. Montsant

A hostel dish:
Rice with squids, sausage, peppers, citrus fruits in batter
[traditional “black” rice, served to travelers who lodged in the hostels on their way to market, garnished with thin slices of lemon and orange in tempura]

A salted fish always present in mountain cuisine:
Cod, pil-pil, raisins, grapes, walnuts, hazelnuts
[the fruits and nuts make this a Catalan riff on Basque salt cod pil-pil with olive oil and a bit of hot red pepper]

With a traditional preservation process:
Pickled pork ribs, banana, honey, coffee
[a sweet and earthy version of excabetx, the Catalan pickling technique; the new world additions gave this a lot in common with a Southern barbecued spare rib]

With the contrast of jams made here:
Catalan cheeses, right to the point
[watermelon jam and orange-carrot jam with three Catalan cheeses: Tou de Tillers--soft cows’ milk cheese from the Pyrenees; Garrotxa--firm sheep’s milk cheese from a farm near Inés’s; Borredà Carrat Cendrat--fresh goats’milk cheese from Bergueda, rolled in ash]

The nostalgic taste of whole milk:
Croquette, bread, milk, caramel spread, nutmeg
[a bread pudding]

A holiday dessert:
Pastry, egg sweetmeat, truffle, baba au rhum & chestnuts, pomegranate & tangerine lollipop
[petits fours; the egg sweet is known as a yema, which amounts to an ultra-condensed tiny flan]

To share:
Chocolate bar, an evocation to the restaurant space
[a riff on the traditional children’s after-school treat--waiters carved off dark chocolate bars and slices of coca, a sweet, simple Catalan pastry]

With the typical liquor from la Garrotxa:
Ratafia ice lolly
[this liqueur is like nocino, made from green walnuts and 40 herbs]

Rotllan Torra, Mistela (garnatxa, nv solera method) d.o.q. Priorat

Les Cols, 14 October 2008

Getting to the Penedés wine country from Barcelona is as easy as last week’s New York Times travel section article (“Catalonia’s ‘Champagne’ Country“) makes it sound. About an hour’s drive gets you to the big-volume producers travel writer Sarah Wildman mentions. What she doesn’t offer a clue about is that another half hour and a good map will take you away from the “Disneyesque” Cava touring she describes.

I’ll admit, Codorniu does have beautiful architecture going for it in the form of the 1915 bodega designed by Puig i Cadafalch, a contemporary of Gaudí, and, if you go, they’ll tell you that their family has been making wine here since the 15th century and that in the 1870s they invented this region’s sparkling wine and its traditional production method.

But since the Times focuses on these two massively marketed brands, Codorniu and Freixenet — whose black bottle inspires here-comes-the-cheap-wine dread at parties, and says nothing at all about the tasting itself, one might be dubious about bothering with this whole “cava” thing. Skeptics should know that there are a number of producers who are more focused on quality and artisanship than on reaching the mass market: Llopart, Gramona, Carmenet, Pere Ventura, and Recaredo are among many making lovely bubblies. I also really love Albet i Noya, whose d.o. Penedés still wines are excellent too; they’re an old time winemaking family but the younger generation has steered toward organic and biodynamic practices.

The Times’s headline, mentioning “Catalonia’s ‘Champagne,’” is pretty near criminal: Spain’s Cava makers have to avoid references to champagne, even in describing their methods — Cava was coined in the 1980s to give an identity to these wines and deal with a longstanding conflict with France on that score. Curious drinkers might discover more pleasure in cava by getting to know it on its own terms.

While the traditional sparkling wine methods used to make Cava are quite similar to those used in Champagne, the wine involved here is pretty different. The traditional Cava grapes are macabeo, xarel-lo, and parellada, though a few other varieties, including chardonnay are allowed. These are all white grapes whereas Champagne’s trio is pinot noir, pinot meunier, both reds, and chardonnay, so cava is, in effect, a blanc de blancs. Other differences: Cava makers are working with warmer weather crops with plenty of natural sugars and so the method prohibits chaptalization (the addition of sugars to the wine at first fermentation, done in France). In spite of Spain’s drier climate, irrigation is also prohibited here (not in France). Old-time Cava-makers add barrel-aged wines at the dosage stage (after the yeast has been disgorged and the bottle gets topped up), whereas more modern producers aim for Champagne’s flavor by adding younger wines.

A strange thing about this d.o. is that it’s not strictly geographical — the Cava-making capital is Sant Sadurni d’Anoia, but some Cavas are produced up in the Empordà, and a few are made outside Catalonia altogether. Sant Sadurni, is, in fact, smack in the middle of another d.o., the Penedés, but the sparkling wines made by the traditional method are considered part of the d.o. Cava, not the Penedés.

The countryside is arid and hilly, with lovely stretches of vineyard interrupted by industy here and there — the business of winemaking is not hidden in a Disney kingdom here. The town of Sant Sadurni itself is, as Wildman describes it, a dusty place. It’s downright ugly, in fact, not a whiff of Sonoma romance. But that’s why touring the Penedés, if you get to know the carefully-tended vineyards and the thoughtfully-made wines, and delve into the cool, peaceful underground caves, can leave you all the more wonderstruck.

They say it’s spring but it’s cold out and my head is stuffed up and I’m convinced the only cure is the rosemary soup Inés Puigdevall makes at her beautiful casa rural, Mas Garganta, near Olot. I guarantee this soup will lift you out of almost any kind of slump. Its simplicity is an antidote to winter excesses. Its corny-ness is especially sunny at this point on the calendar when real corn is long ago and far away. And the rosemary, infused correctly, is just this side of medicinal (the trick to that is in steeping the rosemary in the chicken stock to gently extract its aromas — boiling it can make the stock bitter).

Rosemary Soup
Serves 4 as a first course

1 quart good chicken stock*
4 small branches fresh rosemary (each about 4” long)
1/2 cup stone ground organic cornmeal
good kosher or sea salt & freshly ground pepper to taste

Bring the chicken stock to a rapid boil in a saucepan. Make a rosemary “tea” in the hot stock: turn off the flame, drop in the rosemary and give the broth a stir to submerge the stems thoroughly, cover the saucepan tightly and let the rosemary steep for about 20 minutes. Remove the rosemary and discard it, taste the broth and season well with salt. Bring the broth to a boil again, stir in the cornmeal. Simmer and stir for about 5 minutes. Finish with a grind or two of pepper.

*My friend Gracie, who is a great cook, has cheated very successfully on this recipe using “Better than Bouillon.”

A much-younger-than-me friend Katie is spending one of those college-semesters-abroad in Barcelona right now. When she asked about non-touristy things to do, I had to admit that I now go to bed approximately 8 hours before the bars start to rock. So I told her about the Ateneu Barcelonès, one of the quietest non-commercial and considerately secular places to go when Barcelona is just too, well, too LOUD. If you’re staying in the city for a while, consider joining so you can use the reading rooms and quiet bar overlooking a palm-tree filled courtyard. Many Ateneu events are open to the public, and its old-fashioned spaces and small audiences made up of local bookish-folk will take you far from the maddening crowds. For Catalan and Spanish-speakers, there are plenty of meaty debates and talks to attend, but there’s also music and some movies that transcend the language gap. The agenda is posted in the lobby and on the Ateneu’s website about one month in advance of events. There’s a restaurant on ground level, L’Ateneu, open to the public, with a perfectly decent 12 Euro weekday menú del día lunch (between 1 and 4pm).

Ateneu Barcelonès, C/Canuda, 6 Barcelona 93-343-61-21 (resto: 93-318-52-38)