Getaria · Spain
Getaria: The Village That Sailed Around the World
Getaria, Spain
The Cristóbal Balenciaga Museum, the world's first devoted to a single couturier The Gothic church of San Salvador, with its sloping floor, where Elcano was baptized The Katrapona tunnel and the monument to Elcano, first to circle the globe The fishing port and its asadores — home of the world-famous grilled turbot The climb up Mount San Antón, the 'mouse of Getaria,' for the panorama over Elcano's sea
The world's first museum devoted to a single couturier, housed in the Aldamar palace where Cristóbal Balenciaga — a mariner's son who learned to sew for his mother — grew into the designer Dior called 'the master of us all.' It holds more than 5,500 garments and opened on 7 June 2011.
Kale Nagusia is Getaria's single cobbled main street, the entire spine of the old town, lined with traditional Basque fishermen's houses, pintxo bars and txakoli, with the Camino del Norte threading straight through it.
The Iglesia de San Salvador is Gipuzkoa's great Gothic church, built between the 14th and 18th centuries directly onto the living rock so that its wooden floor visibly slopes and no two lines run parallel. Declared a National Monument in 1895, it formed part of the old town wall and holds the font where Juan Sebastián Elcano was baptized.
The Katrapona is a defensive tunnel bored through the rock beneath the church, and it opens onto the square where a marble statue of Juan Sebastián Elcano — the first man to sail all the way around the world — gazes out over his harbour.
Getaria's sheltered fishing harbour is one of Gipuzkoa's most important inshore ports, where the day's catch is grilled whole over open street coals in hinged baskets. It is the birthplace of the world-famous grilled turbot and the woodsmoke that perfumes the entire town.
The artificial neck of land, built in the 15th century, that ties Getaria to its mouse-shaped rock, flanked by the calm Malkorbe and the surf-swept Gaztetape beaches, with txakoli vineyards rising on the slopes behind.
Mount San Antón, the 113-metre headland known as "el ratón de Getaria" for its crouching-mouse silhouette, was an island until the 15th century and is now a motor-free green park crowned by a lighthouse built on a ruined chapel — the old whale-and-corsair lookout facing the open Bay of Biscay.
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