While you could easily spend a week or two in San Sebastián ... especially for a summer beach holiday ... we headed there for a long weekend. This seems a typical time frame for many visitors. With just a few days on your hands, what should you do? (Other than eat, of course, which will be the topic of stories to come.)
Three things: walk around a lot, delve into the San Telmo Museum, and relax in La Perla spa.
Walk
19th century beach resorts were all about promenading, and it's worth planning plenty of long, leisurely walks around Donostia ... to use its Basque name. This is a town that rewards pedestrians. The views are magnificent, combining the glories of raw nature (surf, sand, hills) with artfully planned gardens and impressive architecture. You can walk almost anywhere you'd want to go in under a mile, though we were clocking five to seven a day cumulatively. Fortunately, this is a town laden with interesting bars and coffee shops when you need to rest your feet.
The most obvious walk is around the crescent moon-shaped La Concha beach, as anticipated by 19th century town planners who created a tidy embankment risen high enough above the beach to give you sweeping views. There are broad pavements, ornate street lamps and some suitably frivolous Belle Epoque architecture. Surprisingly, there's little shopping on this stretch. Unlike Cannes' Croisette, which rings the beach with back-to-back posh shops and cafes fronting the hotels behind, La Concha's seafront is quiet and heavily residential. On the east side, closer to the Old Town, there's a lovely garden in front of the Town Hall.
From there, you turn back towards town and the whole sweep of La Concha hits you, with fanciful towers and rooflines rising up the hills behind. At the same time you're getting a great view of the little Santa Klara island that sits in the middle of the bay and is responsible for calming the surf on the beach beyond. A bit further on and you're now looking down into the old harbour, and scrambling down steps to return you to the Old Town. You can continue onto the more genteel circuit of La Concha from there. Although I'd nip into a bar for a drink and some pintxos first.
Walking through the urban centre can be just as spectacular, thanks to Donastia's eclectic and highly decorative architecture. The biggest attraction in the Old Town is the remarkable density of pintxos bars. But there's also a pleasing jumble of venerable buildings, a noble rectangular plaza that used to be the setting for bull fights, and a couple of churches worth popping your nose into. (San Vincente, free, is all brooding, dark Romanesque lines and glowering, martyr-driven Catholicism; Santa Maria, €3, is a more cheerful, light-touch baroque building with a museum and some interesting modern art amongst more suffering saints.) Don't miss the exceptional fish market, now in modern quarters down an escalator beneath the grand old building that once held it. You'll weep that you don't have a kitchen.
Drift south from the Old Town into the Centro, a bonanza for shopping in independent boutiques
while gazing up in appreciation at the architecture. No two buildings are the same. As you near the cathedral the neighbourhood gets more residential. Mums with prams, grandparents with toddlers and youngsters fresh out of school played around fountains or along tree-lined streets. Meanwhile, lots of grown ups seemed to be enjoying the freedom of flexible working from WiFi enabled cafes on Reyes Católicos, the street that runs straight from the back of the cathedral. (Don't miss Old Town Coffee, the kind of independent cafe most of us can only fantasise about calling our local.)San Telmo Museum
Start your trip here, if you can, and plan for two or three hours at the beginning of a day when you're still full of energy. There's a lot to see.
Spread through an old Dominican convent and a modern addition, this museum is tucked in a corner of the Old Town hard against the wooded hillside of Mount Urgull. It covers the history of the area but ... more specifically ... the history of Basque culture. It's an unabashed celebration of a people who are, lest you forget, not Spanish.
There's a theory that the lack of a political identity at home sparked the Basques to great things abroad; the galleries on the Age of Discovery are where you'll really start to be impressed. The Basques were master ship builders and explorers who gave us salt cod (a food that transformed the modern economy), long distance travel (the first captain to circumnavigate the globe was not Magellan, who died en route, but Basque Juan Sebastian Elcano) and the rubber-cored ball (transforming tennis and many other sports). Back home, women ran things in a society that had been matriarchal since pre-history. Basque women were known for their assertive, showy nature and my favourite display in the place was of traditional headwear, arranged by modern Basque designer Balenciaga. And in turns out Saints Francis Xavier and Ignatius Loyola were Basques. Suddenly, I understood the Jesuits a lot better.
Historical galleries proceed through the industrial revolution, where Basques punched above their economic weight once again, and on to the civil war, where the Basques suffered horribly. (Can we talk about Guernica?) The modern galleries leave you with an upbeat sense of a people who are grabbing every opportunity for success. Specialist galleries offer collections of Basque art, looks at folkloric traditions and an introduction to a unique set of Basque sports. The convent's church was closed when we visited, but is set to re-open with a new exhibit on local hero Balenciaga.Your €6 admission fee includes an audio guide with detailed English commentary.
La Perla Spa
If your idea of a great spa is torrents of hot water pounding you in a dazzling variety of ways, La Perla is for you. Four main pools offer jets, bubbles, waterfalls and whirlpools directed at every body part imaginable.
This being a continental European spa, it's more about health than R&R. La Perla offers serious thalassotherapy, trumpeting the positive effects of sea water. One of the main pools takes you down a line of jets, each one with specific instructions for how to relieve stress in the targeted part of the body. In another, you can push through a waterfall to lie on a row of beds frothing with bubbles. Fancy something less exotic? There's a plain-old whirlpool bath, but it's big enough to seat 20 comfortably and sits in the middle of the central pavilion with a sweeping circle of windows looking out over beach and bay.
Another level down you'll find a grotto-style area with cool blue lights and a pool with special aqua gym equipment. Bicycles, cross-trainers, weight machines, all used under water for a joint-friendly experience. It's my dream gym! This level also has saunas, a cold sea water plunge pool and a relaxation room. There's even a bizarre but amusing twisting, tiled corridor you explore while intermittent jets of hot and cold water surprise you from different directions while the lights shift from blue to red to total darkness. (Clearly, health and safety rules are different here.)
Add fantastic views and great architecture: the original building forms part of the seaside embankment, with a grand central rotunda and two wings ending in matching pavilions. On the main floor, everything is flooded with light and looks out over the beach and the water. You can descend from one of those wings onto the sand and head out for a dip in the bay, which I did despite the bracing temperatures of late October.
While the exterior has changed little from its 1912 opening photos, inside you're in state-of-the-art health club territory. Entering from the street, you're actually at the top of the building. Descend one floor for the gym and regular members' entry, and two for the spa visitor area.
La Perla is surprisingly good value for money: Five hours in the spa and a one-hour full-body massage was £87. (The equivalent would be around £150 in the UK.) That's probably because of some important cultural differences. Knowing about them in advance is key to really enjoying your time here.
The locals use this as a health and fitness facility. They go in, do their aqua workouts and leave. There is no tradition here of lounging around with books and magazines, or taking long naps on heated loungers. I counted only 16 places to sit down in the whole facility, and the "relaxation room" (eight elevated beds with water mattresses) features disturbingly loud spa music that discourages lingering. Which also explains why the girl showing us around was so discouraging about us bringing in kindles, books, glasses, etc.
To enter, you have to put your dressing gown and other items through a chute while you walk through a shower lane. You also have to keep your La Perla swimming cap on the whole time. We were amused that they were so obsessive about cleanliness in those ways, but insisted everyone leave their flip flops outside and walk around barefoot ... something you'll get reprimanded for in British spas. They also don't provide towels, presumably because they think you're going to get into the water, stay in until you're ready to leave, then go shower. There's no drinking water anywhere in the spa, much less a restaurant or bar. That's all outside, for afterwards.
Armed with the knowledge of experience I would have skipped the massage, which was perfectly pleasant but nothing special. (And lost any lingering benefits the moment I was forced to put a sodden dressing gown on to return to the dressing room.) I definitely recommend the pools, but treat them like locals do. Go for a two-hour slot for €27. Bring a water bottle. Skip the reading material. And pinch a towel from your hotel.
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