Vanessa Thorpe. As it happens, now is not just “any time” for San Sebastián, known as Donostia to the Basques. It is stepping up as European Capital of Culture for 2016 and will stage a chain of bold art projects over the next 12 months. Already known internationally for its food and its glittering annual film festival, the city will feature choral groups in the open air and an art project, Waves of Energy, bringing to life a surge of ideas suggested by the public, as well as performances and exhibitions inside sleek venues such as Basque music’s new home, Musikene, the San Telmo museum or the cube-shaped Kursaal on the edge of the sea.
As the sun’s rays faded this autumn I went to see what plans were being made for San Sebastián’s stint in the limelight. I assumed most of the excitement would revolve around the city’s vast sandy beaches and its celebrated bars, all serving a deluxe variety of tapas known as pintxos. But rather than beach life, what I came across was a strident maritime tradition, a part of the city’s identity that has seeped into every crack.
A former Spanish naval port 12 miles from France, it sits on the edge of a natural double harbour at the bottom of the Bay of Biscay and is divided by the mouth of a pulsating tidal river. In the autumn and winter this river, the Urumea, becomes so convinced that it is really part of the sea that surfers can ride up into town on its waves. Sometimes the powerful swell damages the bridges that link the two halves of the city. So it is only a fool, like me, who would walk nonchalantly around the headland during a high wind.
I understood I had made a mistake when I saw the police closing off the road, heard a roaring noise, and then looked down at the salt water swirling round my feet. When the waves really get going car windows are smashed. It makes a gusty walk along the prom at a British resort seem a bit tame. “We don’t go around that way when there are big tides,” I was told with unblinking frankness as I squelched up to my hotel reception desk.
San Sebastián’s wilder side is hard to ignore. It is so stylish and ordered, with its recreation of the Haussmann avenues of Paris, yet the passionate political eruptions of the past mark those streets. I learned from Pablo Berástegui, the man in charge of Donostia/San Sebastián 2016, that this is the Spanish city that suffered most during the sporadic murderous campaigns of the separatist terrorists of ETA. In response Berástegui has taken “peace treaties” as a key artistic theme for the year. He also visited Derry/Londonderry, holder of the culture title in 2013, to find out what another city with a split name and split history did with this opportunity.
“We are posing the question: how do you overcome conflicts?” he said. “It may be a memory, but it is pretty recent. So how do we organise a symbolic act that will pay homage to all the victims? We don’t know yet, but we are having conversations to find out what people feel.”
Berástegui does know he will be staging an interactive drama in which the audience will have to judge a dispute and resolve it. Much of what else is planned is home-grown, with few big names flying in. During the summer solstice visitors can watch an English-language performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the park and the Basque writer Anjel Lertxundi will lead Carte Blanche, a programme of events curated by guest artists. The streets, for Berástegui, are the main venue.
And what grand streets they are. Tour guide Inigo from the brilliantly informal Go Local explained that the city is often thought snobby by inhabitants of Bilbao and Victoria, its two big neighbours. This dates back to the 1800s, when Queen Maria Cristina began holidaying here and put up regal buildings like the Victoria Eugenia Theatre and the Hotel Maria Cristina (and prompted the name of famed football team Real Sociedad).
San Sebastián officially starts its year of culture on 23 January, and more than 400 projects are in progress, several drawing on the city’s extraordinary gastronomic reputation. Berástegui tells me about one “multisensory” event called Time Travel Soup that will involve a tasting menu featuring “10 paradigmatic soups” to show how food can be used to trace human history. Onlookers can opt instead to drink the dry local cider or the sharp fresh wine, txakoli, while they consider whether the soups count as art or not.
And that ancient Basque cultural gem – the mysterious language with its odd Xs, Ks and Ts – will be honoured at every turn in a city where it was forbidden by Franco. As the 100-year-old Basque linguist Koldo Mitxelena reportedly says: “Its greatest mystery is how it survives.”
Now the city is ready to engage with its difficult past and celebrate its future.
Essentials
Vanessa stayed at the Hotel Silken Amara, double rooms from €119, and travelled with Brittany Ferries, which sails into Bilbao or Santander from Portsmouth or Plymouth.
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