Six days in and tomorrow will be our last full day in the Basque Country, having started on the French side in St Jean Pied de Port and walked across the Spanish province of Navarre.  We saw the Basque heritage on our previous visit to St Jean in 1988, watching a reconstruction of an early 20th century Basque wedding, and buying some Basque table linen which we still use.  On the Spanish side, my impression is that the Basque identity has been reinforced.  Street signs and other notices are routinely in both Spanish and Basque – it’s like Wales in that respect.  About one person in seven in Navarre reports that they speak Basque, and about the same semi-speak it, though we haven’t picked any up (though since our Spanish isn’t much good, we might just have missed it!). And as well as the official notices, there is plenty of graffiti which has Basque messages, as in the picture above: one person has drawn the flag and written “This is Spain”, only for another to score that and rewrite it to read “This is not Spain”.  Fortunately the violence that was associated with Basque separatism a few years ago seems to remain in the past.

Navarre and its people get a bad vibe from the writer of the surviving medieval guidebook to the Camino, a French monk called Aimery Picaud.  He dishes out plenty of criticism, culminating in the accusation that “the Navarrese even practise uncharted fornication with animals”!  Goodness knows where he got that idea from – maybe political or church rivalries made him prone to spread particular stories?  We have certainly felt welcome anyway.  

Picaud did however like the town of Estella, where we are staying – “stocked with good bread and the best wine, and meat and fish and all good things”.  Time to go and check that out!