There’s one very special constellation that lights up the San Sebastian night sky. This beautiful Basque city, just 15 miles from the French border in northern Spain, boasts 16 glinting Michelin stars and can count some of the world’s best culinary alchemists among its residents.
To visit Donostia – as the city is known to locals – is to sign up for a gastronomic adventure that pinballs between centuries-old cooking traditions and the wizardry of chefs who tease ingredients into works of art on a nightly basis.
Techniques such as spherification, deconstruction and sous-vide (a kind of posh version of boil in the bag) are liberally sprinkled across menus in even some of the more humble establishments.
With such glittering credentials, San Sebastian, this year’s European Capital of Culture (alongside Poland’s Wroclaw), could be pretentious. There is nowhere else in the world that can boast so many Michelin-assigned sparklers per capita than here.
And yet, you quickly realise that this easy-on-the-eye seaside city, which has so much more than just food to boast about, invites everyone to dine at its table. Avant garde, maybe… but elitist it certainly isn’t.
Which is good news for us. The views of fawning food critics mean absolutely nothing to my children, Belle, four, and Cleo, nearly two, who’d take bangers and mash over haute dining any day of the week.
So the words uttered by Belle on the third day of our trip saw me nearly fall off my chair. ‘I’m just dipping my bread in the oil and balsamic, Mum.’ Almost simultaneously, Cleo discovered calamari, which seemed to double up as natural teething rings. Chewing, and then chewing some more, she quickly devoured half a dozen perfectly-fried coils of squid.
We’d been inspired to visit this region that kisses France largely by cheap flights into Bilbao, an hour to the west, but found ourselves quickly smitten by a part of Spain that feels almost nothing like the sultry cities of the south.
Visually, San Sebastian is soul-soothing; its wide, deep bay is laid out like a curled bicep and offers a horizon of headlands and islands that enchant when the last rays of the sun are bouncing off them.
From the golden sands of the main beach, La Concha, the view of Santa Clara, a small nugget of land adrift in the centre of the bay, and the two mini-mountains – Igueldo to the west and Urgull to the east – is oh-so-pretty and not unlike a cut-sized Rio.
La Concha’s roomy crescent of sand is also a social hub for Donostiarras. Sprightly Septuagenarians in Speedos stride purposefully towards the Bay of Biscay, clearly happy to use it as their year-round local swimming baths, and post-work surfers pad barefoot through the town to Playa de Gros, the easterly beach where the feistiest waves hit.
La Concha became our go-to spot for fun, too. We paddled in the clear waters, enjoyed the kids’ playground at the Ondarreta end and spent way too many euros on the pretty La Caramel carousel that whirls in the beachside De Cervantes Plaza.
In the summer months, Mount Igueldo’s historic fairground – accessible by funicular and dating back to 1912 – is a huge hit with tourists but was deserted during our visit in October, bar a curious few who, like us, had come to enjoy the ghost-town feel… and the unfettered views of the Bay of Biscay.
Directly across the bay from Igueldo and close to the old town lies the Paseo Nuevo promenade, where visitors and locals gather to watch the maritime theatre show of spectacular foaming waves crashing into giant monoliths of granite beneath the esplanade.
They’re a long-standing attraction, too. Victor Hugo wrote about the ‘entertainment’ offered by the raging sea when he spent a year here in 1843.
Throughout our stay, we enjoyed San Seb’s most popular foodie trick, pintxos. These are the Basque region’s rather refined take on tapas – pintxo translates as ‘spike’ or ‘thorn’ and refers to when 19th Century bar-owners would offer their drinkers slices of baguettes piled high with everything from cheese to anchovies, all pinned together with a cocktail stick.
Pintxos cost a couple of euros and, tradition dictates, when you’re done with the paper napkin they’re served in, you can just throw it on the floor. Pintxos are a culinary heritage that Donostiarras are happy to both pay homage to and totally reinvent. The creaking bars of old San Sebastian hang up great marbled legs of jamon, while the more experimental kitchens in the city’s modern quarter trade in offbeat morsels that Heston Blumenthal would be proud of.
Most serious foodies come here for more than just fantastical snacking, though; they want to experience the handiwork of the Basque region’s grand master. Juan Mari Arzak, owner of the eponymous San Sebastian restaurant, has culinary wordsmiths drooling into their copy.
The 73-year-old has evolved his family’s 19th Century former inn into a near-fabled establishment that boasts a 100,000-bottle wine cellar, research kitchen and the small matter of three Michelin stars above its door.
Would we go with children? Don’t be ridiculous… but if you’re a grown-up who can, and are organised enough to book months in advance, everything suggests that you’ll find yourself tucking into the meal of a lifetime.
San Sebastian is surprisingly gentle on the wallet. We stayed at the best hotel in town, the palatial, honey-coloured, five-star Maria Cristina, a stone’s-throw from the old town, where off-season rooms will set you back about £150 a night, for the kind of accommodation that might cost treble that in some of Europe’s other city-break goliaths.
In our limited experience, the barometer for a great holiday with children is realising that you’ve been somewhere and not had to seek out the local aquarium for entertainment.
San Sebastian has one, close to the shore, and it’s great… apparently. The puffer fish, sharks and stingrays weren’t for us on this visit, though. We were far too busy paddling in the ocean, chowing down on pinxtos and whirling on carousels to meet the marine life.
