Go Spain: A tortuous journey across northern Spain, following an old part of the Camino de Santiago, is enlivened when Manchán Maganstumbles across the true origins of the Irish
PILGRIMAGE invariably involves suffering, and on a recent coach trip through northern Spain, loosely following an old pilgrimage route along the Camino de Santiago, I suffered plenty: not from the usual pilgrim privations of blisters or bad weather but from the inane nattering of tour guides, bleating endlessly through the coach's loudspeakers, a constant mindless disembodied voice driving down from the roof, gradually unravelling my sanity.
"On your left side you see the very nice and very famous beaches of Cantabria. Well appreciated by the peoples of this area. The peoples of Cantabria, mens and womens, are loving these famous beaches." Aargh!
I have promised Go to focus on the positive, the lush pastoral landscape of this stunning and overlooked part of northern Spain, a cluster of autonomous regions that have a distinctly different culture to the Spain most Irish people know. Until recently, accessing the area was awkward, but now that Aer Lingus flies from Dublin to Bilbao and Santiago de Compostela, and Ryanair to Santander, there are ideal entry and exit points.
My journey began on a high note at Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum, in Bilbao. The building overwhelmed me, managing to bypass my usual suspicion of extravagant architectural projects designed to rebrand neglected areas. It spun me into such elation that I temporarily forgot the worries that had arisen when I first sat on the coach and heard the guide begin to whine: "Bilbao: one millions peoples. Sometimes more and sometimes less. People changing all the days."
Bilbao's Guggenheim is more than just a museum; it's a key to understanding the entire Basque region and its place in Spain. The monstrous titanium-clad, iron-girded structure, with its soaring cliffs of limestone leaning at impossible angles, impresses itself on the entire city. The vast wealth Bilbao and the Basque region have always earned from mining iron ore, making steel and building ships is encapsulated in it and by it. Its self-assurance makes you intensely aware of space, of light play on man-made edifices, which in turn informs your visit to the city.
Entering the building is like going underwater, like entering the hull of a ship or the belly of a whale, and, inside, the art is immediately engaging: Richard Serra's permanent installations have a visceral impact, luring you ever deeper, through iron realms of lunar sunrises, desert wadis, veladromes and Martian dockyards. It's potent. I was moved to tears.
It was hard after that to get back into the steel cage with the twittering guide, knowing that no cathedral or pilgrim hospital on our route west across the Basque Country, Cantabria, Asturias and Galicia could ever have the same effect. But in fact I was soon won over by the landscape, the lushness of the forested hills and farmed valleys, which offered an entirely fresh perspective on Spain.
I soon came to realise that what the regions are most proud of is their food. They seem to have an unhealthy obsession with it, each village and town elevating its speciality to an all-consuming passion. Not only was every dish I was served a mini masterpiece, but even in the smallest bars I found bite-sized morsels lined up on the counters that were so exquisite they make sushi look like mud pie.
These artworks are far too elegant to be described merely as tapas - these are pinchos(or pinxtosin Euskara, the Basque language), divinely inspired pieces of food heaven: a tail of octopus marinated with strawberries and pine nuts; pickled duck liver scented with cider; a slice of blood sausage on a cushion of oregano and anchovies. Here everyone seems to eat like a king; the kind of elitism that accompanies gastronomy in Ireland is absent.
Admittedly, my viewpoint was skewed in that I was a guest of the various autonomous regions, which were all determined to flaunt their cuisine. This meant sitting at a chair in a local restaurant for two and a half hours twice a day every day and force-fed course after course of the most outlandish and extravagant dishes.
I promised Go I wouldn't complain, but there is something deeply depressing about knowing that at 2pm and 10pm each day your stomach is going to be engorged when all you really want is a green salad and a break from the guide's tyranny. For the Spanish government I was the equivalent of a goose liver to be fattened up in the hopes of a good review. At times I would rather have walked the caminobarefoot than face another meal.
I should clarify that the caminowe were following on the coach was not the typical French route from the Pyrenees. Ever since St James's ashes turned up in Santiago, in the ninth century, pilgrims have been making their way along various routes to pay deference. We were following the Basque (or Ancient) Way, a remote mountainous route that sticks close to the coast. It was the only one that remained passable during the centuries of Islamic rule. I saw far fewer pilgrims on it than on other routes, but there were just as many old chapels, monasteries and medieval hostels.
The Basque region is as lush as the Irish midlands, with long-eaved, red-roofed tower houses as neat as anything in Bavaria, each with its own orchard, polytunnel and vegetable plot, which was normally being dug by a bean an tí in a pinafore using a medieval-looking sod-turning tool.
This region has always been isolated and staunchly traditional. It has a timeless feel, like something out of Tolkien's Shire. The uplands are clad in oak, pine, beech and vigorous young eucalyptus, while mist clouds hang on the uppermost craggy rocks. The appearance of pilgrims in the 10th century was the biggest thing to hit this region, and it hasn't been outdone since.
We wound our way from the Basque region through Cantabria and Asturias, stumbling from humble 12th-century hermitages to ostentatious Gothic cathedrals, but it was in Galicia that the excitement I had felt in Bilbao began to return. Suddenly, I began to see castros, or ring forts, in the landscape and signs pointing towards dolmens.
This was clearly a place apart. I had known that Galicia had Celtic roots but hadn't realised how strong they were. It was like finding Ireland's half-sister, or at least her second cousin. The swinish food-trough sessions were suddenly enlivened by locals who were immensely proud of their heritage and regarded themselves as our close kinsmen. It was embarrassing to find out how much they knew about Ireland, how keenly they followed our lives, whereas I knew next to nothing about them.
Yet I was suddenly keen to learn. Arriving in the region was like returning to a house you barely remember from childhood. The landscape and buildings were familiar, with a shabbiness that is unmistakably Irish. The fields had lost their strict geometry and now began to sluggishly follow the lie of the land, marked out here and there with tumbling stone or slate walls. The vegetable plots were less manically well-tended than before. The houses were humble and low-slung, with patches of crumbling plaster, rotting windows and higgledy-piggledy roof slates, as opposed to the imposing tower houses of the Basque region and Cantabria.
Most startling of all were the hórreos: tiny traditional grain stores in the shape of tabernacles that stand on columns in many farmyards. They looked prehistoric, and clearly served as much a pagan totemic role as a functional one. Perched on the roofs of these hórreoswere a series of stone pyramids - phallic fertility symbols to keep away evil and attract a good harvest. It was like finding Síle-na-Gigs above every doorway in Ireland.
I longed to know more about them, but the guide was already shuffling us back towards the bus to our final destination, Santiago de Compostela.
I have to admit that when we eventually arrived at the Cathedral of St James, in the great pilgrim city, I felt somewhat triumphant striding through the soaring Romanesque portal amid the teeming crowds. I may not have fulfilled the pilgrim's obligations of walking at least 100km or had my pilgrim's passport stamped at every church (and certainly I didn't share their smell of sweat, chorizo and Deep Heat), but I had endured my own ordeal, surviving days of gluttony and slothfulness, and I had learnt something, too: that although the Irish have now become insular and somewhat distrustful of Europe, there is no doubt that this is where our people originally come from.
The coastal regions of northern Spain and France are our neighbouring parishes, and our long-lost cousins are out there, keenly waiting for us to acknowledge them.
As the mighty silver urn of the Botafumeiro swung through the cathedral nave, high above our heads, anointing us with incense and fumigating the smellier of the pilgrims, I made a promise that I would come back and get to know my cousins.
• Manchán Magan flew from Dublin to Bilbao and from Santiago de Compostela to Dublin as a guest of Aer Lingus (www.aerlingus.com). Ryanair (www.ryanair.com) flies from Dublin to Santander.