Haro - capital of La Rioja

Haro is a beautiful town and is the capital of the wine region of La Rioja.  

According to Wikipedia the first mention of Haro dates back to the year 1040, in a document of king García Sánchez III of Navarre. There are some beautiful old buildings, including the church of Santo Tomás 

Since the early 19th century Haro has established a worldwide reputation for being the most important wine town in the Rioja wine region. The number of Bodegas (wineries) in the region have multiplied 8-fold to 574 during the past 50 years (1970 to 2020). We visited 5 of the 9 best bodegas (according to Wikipedia) namely:

Compañia Vinícola del Norte de España [CVNE] (founded in 1879); 

Bodegas Roda (founded in 1989); 

Bodegas Muga (founded in 1932); 

Bodegas La Rioja Alta S.A. (founded in.1890).

 Ramon Bilbao (f.1924).

We tried to visit R. López de Heredia (founded in 1877) but they didn't do tastings or even wine by the glass, only by the bottle. If we had wanted that, we would have gone to a shop. It was evident that they didn't want to serve the public so we took our money elsewhere.

Now we are on the ferry from Bilbao to the UK. It's the first time we've tried this crossing, we'll see how we feel after 30 hours onboard.

Where will the Powells be?

Confirming the worst kept secret of recent months....

After 10 years as nomads and 3 years in Spain, we have decided that Spain, and in particular Gandia beach is where we want to base ourselves in future, so much so that we have bought a piece of it. We completed the purchase of a plot of land yesterday with a view to building a house on it in a few years.

After the self absorbed bullshit of catalan independence, Valencia has been a pleasant change where people just get on with life and don't ram how they are special and unique and different down your throat at every opportunity. Gandia as a town has pretty much everything we want - big enough to have its own character, close enough to get to Valencia when we want to and still primarily Spanish - there isn't a british pub in the place. Further south towards Alicante you start to get the larger expat communities that we can dip into if we want, and all the towns we visited this spring to the north of Valencia are a bit small and don't seem very interesting. Ditto the places we visited down in Murcia before christmas - Cartagena was a nice city but not one to live in permanently, and everywhere else was too dry and hot and desolate. Gandia seems just right.....

We started looking at land  almost by chance at the start of the year, and once the idea took hold it just seemed a natural next step. We always wanted to be in a town with easy public transport and access to shops, beach, etc and with a good selection of restaurants. There are not many plots left in the beachside urbanizations (estates) but we found one right at the north end of the developed area about half a kilometer back. Quiet and with a small public park next door and then a bit of a wetland nature reserve, hopefully that side will never be built on and we should have views of sunsets over the mountains - despite Johnmills best efforts to introduce us to dawn by booking stupidly early flights we've never been sunrise people :-)

It will still be a few years before we can sell up in the UK and start building here proper, but we will spend the winter here and start discussions with architects and builders about what we want and will be allowed to build ; I favour a modernist, open plan house with lots of energy efficiency design features. There are quite a few such places mixed in with more traditional Spanish style villas in the Kentuky urbanization (yes, that is the correct Spanish spelling) so hopefully it will be approved and not stand out like a sore thumb. And maybe by then energy-intensive building materials like concrete and steel will have dropped back to more normal prices from where they are now. Otherwise i'll be planting some trees and growing a log cabin.

So, another factor in our cutting short this summer's Baltic trip was to come back here to look for another rental property to tide us over. There is quite a big university presence here so a lot of properties are let at lower rates to students and lecturers september - may, and then are used by their owners or let out as holiday rentals for the busy and expensive summer months. We have agreed to take a small 2 bed 2 bath flat towards the southern end of the beach from October for 7 months as a base while we get the initial design work underway, then we will hopefully be able to head back up and finish off the Baltic tour later next summer.

Northern Germany

Flensburg is a port at the head of the fjord of the same name and is Germany's most northerly large city. We walked our feet off looking around the old town and all the not so vertical, historic buildings 

Then off to Kiel but we couldn't find a place to park for the night so we carried on to Lübeck. Kiel will have to wait until another time.

Lübeck is famous for having been the de facto capital of the Hanseatic League. The brick Gothic architecture dates back this medieval time. The city centre is Germany's most extensive UNESCO World Heritage Site. There were so many beautiful buildings.

The city was heavily bombed during WWII and many buildings have been reconstructed.

Here is just a small selection of the photos I took which really don't do them justice:

These cities were major ports in the Hanseatic league, a large trading federation that lasted over 400 years from the 12th century.

For a number of reasons we have decided to split this trip in two. We will continue to the Baltic countries and the rest of Scandinavia next year. So now we are heading back to Spain for the remainder of the summer. 

Denmark part 2 - North Jutland

Tuesday 14th July - We caught the ferry from Kristiansand (Norway) to Hirtshals in Denmark. I found us a nice campground not far from the town and just missed a lovely sunset over the North sea

Friday afternoon we headed down to Aalborg. We saw the Jørn Utzon center - he designed the Sydney Opera House.

 Here are a few old buildings

Sunday saw us heading down to Aarhus, Denmark's second largest city. We stayed at a campground only a few kilometres walk from the centre 

That's it for now. We'll be back to discover the rest of Denmark, including Copenhagen, in the autumn. The 

Next stop - Flensburg, Germany