Stephen Phelan

IT’S already after sunset when we push out from the slipway with the low evening tide. We pass almost silently under the Somo-Pedreña road bridge and out through the mouth of the Miera River, just in time to see the streetlamps of Santander come on across the bay. I’d be more entranced by the city’s… Read more »

The ARMH stepped back and gave her a moment to say or do whatever she felt compelled to. Josefina climbed down a little wooden ladder to the excavation. Treading carefully in her trainers, she leaned in close enough to run a finger along a bare vertebrae. Then she bent right over in the dirt, closed her eyes, whispered something, and kissed the skull.

ho, or what, is Irish, or Basque, in the context of this cave? My people, if I can call them that, have been around for 2,500 years, give or take. His may be much older – the origins of the singular Basque language and culture remain an ethno-anthropological mystery. But according to radiocarbon dating of the ashes they dropped like breadcrumbs on their path through Atxurra, the ones who came to make art here were mid-to-late period Magdalenians, between 12,000 and 14,500 years ago.

I RODE into a rocky canyon on a horse named Estrella, our passage soundtracked by Ennio Morricone’s demoniac theme music from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. Whistles, wails, trumpets, whip-cracks, gunshots – I might have heard that legendary film score in my mind even if the trail guide wasn’t playing it through her iPhone on a tinny little saddle-mounted speaker.

THE fall of the Mayan Civilization left their stuffed-out centres of power and culture to be reclaimed by the jungles of what we now call Guatemala. Tikal, El Mirador, Copan, Tak’alik Ab’aj … so many mighty cities lost for centuries, while lumberjacks and gravediggers kept finding little pieces of them all over the place. Those pieces sustained a booming black market in Mayan artefacts, even after each site was formally discovered and protected.

I HAVE always longed to be a lighthouse-keeper and now, at last, I am one. (If only for the weekend.) Look ye upon my chunky jumper! Feel the waterproof weave of my Donegal tweed cap! Truth be told, I am way too toasty in this quasi-nautical ensemble, having hoped and dressed for ominous fog, murderous gales, oceanic rainstorms.

IBIZA in the off-season. The big resort hotels are shuttered for deep cleaning, the beach bars sealed up, the superclubs powered down until their showy reopening parties get the summer started again in late April. By July, the ratio will be back to 20 holidaymakers per every one resident, but for now the island is as empty as it gets.

Paradors offer specificity as a matter of policy. Their dinner menus are authentic to the region, their stylings generally sensitive to original period designs, and their settings often serve as portals to what they call La España Profunda, or “the deep Spain” – those lonely, uncanny ranges of Iberian countryside that seem conjured from Goya paintings, or passages from Don Quixote.

THE unofficial motto of the Spanish capital is customarily spoken, or sung, or sighed aloud, with notes of pride or pleasure. Sometimes, it can even sound like an incanted spell: “De Madrid Al Cielo”, or, “From Madrid To The Sky.” This curious expression has been ringing in the streets for centuries, its useage dating all the way back through vintage pop ballads, and movie titles, and promotional slogans, to the city’s literary quarter in the late Renaissance.

THE food is good in Madrid, and the seafood surprisingly so, given the city’s distance from salt water. In a decade of living there, I’ve become a fiend for salt cod and grilled octopus. I’ve even been known to order tinned fish in tapas bars. Gourmet-grade mussels, for example – often greviously expensive and eaten with toothpicks straight out of the can. And all the best stuff is brought in from Galicia, as Galicians are quick to remind you.