Tag Archives: gipuzkoa

Basque Fact of the Week: Basque Peppers

I hate peppers. They smell nasty when they are cooking and they taste vile. My dad had literally hundreds of pepper plants in his garden. He would always give me a hard time when I ate his homemade chorizo, which I loved, saying how could I like those when they had peppers in them? When […]

Basque Fact of the Week: Unique Basque Drinks

Whenever I visit the Basque Country, my entire time ends up being centered around dinner tables abounding with food and drink. I swear I always find 10 pounds that I never manage to lose after each visit. Food and drink are such central parts of Basque life that it is hard to imagine a Basque […]

Basque Fact of the Week: Paulino Uzcudun, the “Basque Woodchopper”

My dad’s favorite sport to watch was boxing. I never asked him why (so many questions were never asked…) but I always assumed that it was because, of the sports on our American TV, boxing was the most straightforward, something he didn’t have to grow up with to understand, unlike American football. However, I recently […]

Basque Fact of the Week: Cristóbal Balenciaga Eizaguirre

This year is the 500th anniversary of Magellan’s expedition, which culminated in Juan Sebastián Elcano becoming the first person to intentionally circumnavigate the planet. Elcano hailed from the small Basque coastal town Getaria, Gipuzkoa, just twenty-five kilometers west of Donostia/San Sebastián. However, Elcano is not the only famous son of Getaria and, in fact, isn’t […]

Basque Fact of the Week: The Basque Ice Cream Maker

We are all familiar with the Basques who, like my dad and his uncles before him, came to the United States on contracts to herd sheep. They all came looking for opportunity and for a better life than what they could make back in the “old country.” But, sheepherding wasn’t the only route to a […]

Basque Country has 5 of the top 50 Restaurants in the World

I’m a man of simple tastes, seemingly from a long line of Uberuagas with similar levels of refinement. My dad would rather make sure he get his dollar’s worth at an all-you-can-eat buffet. And when I took my aunts, who grew up in rural Bizkaia, to the Guggenheim in Bilbao, and I asked them what […]

How the last election breaks down by region

In his blog, Ricardo Ibarra posted an infographic taken from El Correo that shows the breakdown of the last elections by region within the Basque Autonomous Community, an image shamelessly stolen from him and reposted here (click on the image for a bigger version). It is interesting to see how things break down.  Gipuzkoa went […]

BasqueStage: Cooking in the Basque Country

I just stumbled onto this by pure accident (sometimes, spending too much time just surfing the web does lead to serendipitous discoveries).  Basque Stage is part project, part contest, with the goal of teaming up young chefs with world-renowned chef Martin Berasategui, owner of his signature restaurant in Lasarte-Oria, Gipuzkoa.  Basque Stage will award two […]

Coats-of-arms of Euskal Herria

A while back I found an awesome book that showed the coats-of-arms of most of the towns and villages of Bizkaia.  Each town was given a different page, with a drawing of the escudo and some information about the town. I’d always hoped to find something similar for the other provinces, but was never able […]