Eviva España!

Drive the length of Spain in the middle of summer, with kids? It’s not such a crazy idea, says Robert Elms … just make sure you plan some treats.

We passed many Spains along the way. That long haul with a car – full of family – all the way from the Basque-lands straddling the French border, right down to the foot of shimmering Andalucia, with Morocco hovering in the distance – is still one of the great journeys.

Iberia is a vast land-bridge from a safe European home to the daunting Africa waiting below, and to drive from top to bottom took us a week and took us through more landscapes, languages, cultures and cuisines than I could have imagined. Endless, dreamy longueurs interspersed with intense bouts of discovery and a fair few arguments. It was a good trip.
 
This was all my fault. A life-long obsession with Spain has taken me to most of the major cities, much of the coast and even acquired us a home in the deep-south, overlooking the Atlantic from a whitewashed Moorish redoubt. But I’ve always hankered after going all the way, a Spanish epic taking in forgotten enclaves of this still unruly land. My wife was skeptical about the distances involved and my kids were hostile to the idea of being cooped up in a car for hours in the middle of Spanish nowhere. But I managed to convince them by booking the biggest, most ferociously air-conditioned hire car we could find and a couple of fancy hotels en route.

Working out exactly where that route would take us, laying out maps and drinking Ribera del Duero, was part of the appeal of the trip. Our end-point was that crumbling warren within the fortifications of Vejer de La Frontera which is our house. So I plotted a chart from sea to sea, which started at Bilbao, took us via the green hills of the Basques, down through near-empty parts of Leon and parched Extremadura, before finally entering Andalucia and home. It looked straightforward on the map, but still my wife bought a satnav system. She doesn’t trust me with maps.

Our first turn at Bilbao airport was to head north and east, diametrically away from our final destination, but this was definitely the right move. Bilbao, bar Frank Gehry’s metallic masterpiece, is not a great city, and forcing the kids into a museum on the first day would have been a big mistake. Instead, we’d promised them seaside and seafood and nowhere does that combination get better than San Sebastian.

This elegant resort town is one of the loveliest in all Spain. Wrapped around a golden bay, with the hills rising behind, it’s got a tobacco-coloured old quarter, a delightful promenade, plenty of good hotels and great chefs. We had arranged a couple of nights in a nicely faded art nouveau confection called the Hotel Londres, right on the beach, which is where we spent the days, while the evenings were for parading followed by eating. We watched jai-alai, their insanely rapid national sport.

The realisation that you are in a very different land comes when you leave the city and hit the dark, smokestack hills and remote villages, where everybody speaks their consonant-cluttered tongue.

We took lunch in lofty Zumarraga, pictured right, where conversation stopped and beret-clad heads twisted as we entered the restaurant. We drank at an open-air sidreria on a farm in a deep green valley, which looked like a misplaced Switzerland. We then spent the night at a B&B in a quasi-Alpine chalet in an unpronounceable village full of Xs and Zs.

Finally, we bid adios to the Basques, got on the motorway and left one Spain for another.
 
There has been an EU-funded orgy of road-building throughout this land, which means that you can now cover large distances very quickly by sticking to often empty toll roads. Of course, you miss the subtleties of dusty pueblos and smoky truck-stops, but the shift from the closed mountain world of the Basques to the vast skies and wide plains of Castille and Leon is so striking you feel it even at 120kmph.

There’s something remorseless and austere about the terrain, which now rolls in front of you; die-straight roads, distant blue lakes, large gaps between anywhere and long silences in the car. When you see a sign for a town called Torquemada, you realise this is indeed the tortured heart of old Spain.

We were bound for Salamanca, an inquisitive university city, but broke the long stretch in Palencia. The modern Spain I know is a vivacious land, but this old, overlooked part is infused with ancient catholic rigour, which makes it sombre and still.

We ate well in a muted, well-mannered restaurant, took in the sites, including some rather ruined Roman ruins, but then decided to press on. Our mood was undoubtedly affected by all this solemnity, and by our electronic navigator throwing strops and ordering us to take U-turns on new motorways it never knew existed. Finally, after a suitably self- punishing drive, we arrived.

Our spirits were considerably lightened, though, by an elegant and amazingly cheap new boutique hotel right by the walls of the old town and a great meal of the rich, dark beef that is bred out on those endless plains.

Extremadura is officially the least-visited region of Spain; poor, arid and pitilessly hot. It was also, until all those roads were built, a long way from anywhere. Now, though, it’s opening up and revealing some true wonders.

We pushed on, past broken crusader castles and Roman viaducts, over the mighty Rio Tajo to Caceres, where we spent a sumptuous afternoon and night wandering virtually alone through a film-set 16th Century walled town of bewildering grace and charm.

Recognised by Unesco as a world heritage site, but ignored by almost everybody else, even our blase offspring were amazed by its riches. There’s a plethora of churches, palaces and mansions provided half a millennium ago by the conquistadors who left this tough land to subjugate continents and then returned to display their wealth.

Over here, hard by the border, the accent takes on that sibilant Portuguese slur and the people also have the slow, slightly subdued manner of their more downbeat Iberian neighbours. So we slowed down too. We’d booked a couple of nights in a rather posh hotel in a converted monastery in the very epicentre of rural nowhere. After all that driving, a cool pool and room service were very welcome.

Perhaps the most wondrous part of the journey was still to come. Now heading east as well as south and back on little local roads, we were meandering through undulating pasture when we saw a tiny caravan of beautiful old horse-drawn Gypsy carts parked up by the side of the road, three or four families hanging out their washing and feeding their steeds, their kids playing football in a field. Poverty is rarely romantic but this scene was so redolent of a Spain now almost vanished that we could but stop and stare at time frozen in the heat haze.

Our next stop was also pretty magical. Zafra, pictured left, its name clearly pointing to Arabic origins, lies on the cusp of Extremadura and Andalucia, and simply happened to be where we were at lunchtime. And what a time. The greatest pleasure of driving through Spain is to land in some village, locate the old quarter and discover an unpolished gem.

Zafra was just that, a charismatic community, out in force eating and playing, arguing and flirting in their unique double plaza, a couple of wondrously wonky Moorish squares, one after the other, both laid-back yet buzzing with life.

We plotted up at a shady table in the eaves of a medieval inn, ordered ham and olives and bread and dined as well as you could ever hope to.

All roads from here lead to Seville, so we took one, traversing dense cork forest and steep hills, passing entire villages dedicated to that succulent ham, flamenco now on the car radio, eagles hovering in the unforgiving skies. Pulling into that great Moorish metropolis felt almost like the end of our journey, as this is where we usually finish our Spanish sojourns. This time, though, it was just a staging post and I was anxious to complete the odyssey.
 
Finally, a week after landing on Spanish soil, we arrived at the foot of our adopted home pueblo. But rather than climb up to our house I decided to push on just a little further. My family thought yet again that I was mad, that we should finally unpack and relax, but we had started at the Atlantic and I felt it was only right to finish there, more than 1,000 unmistakably Spanish miles later.