Discover Spain, One Blog Trip At A Time.
By Max Milano (Travel Writer) Madrid. Not a particularly pretty city, Hemingway wrote in Death in the Afternoon. It’s sometimes as if its grandiose buildings could be anywhere, Buenos Aires, for example. But it’s when one sees that deep blue, high-desert winter sky and the snow dusting the jagged peaks of the Sierra de Guadarrama as they loom above the city that one realizes it can’t be anywhere else but Madrid. But things have changed […]
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By Max Milano (Travel Writer and Photographer) This is part five of a six part El Camino de Santiago Roadtrip. You can read the rest of the chapters here. Hanging around Santiago de Compostela, surrounded by unenthusiastic pilgrims completing their camino by feebly posing for social media posts, was getting me down. So we decided to head out to Cape Fisterra, the end of the earth as the Romans thought. Only later did we learn […]
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The Dark Reality Behind the Spanish Driving Test Industry By Max Milano (Travel Writer) Spain, we need to talk.I know that we expats, particularly those of us from the United States, are often seen as privileged, maybe even entitled. And sure, many of us arrive with advantages. But the truth is that Americans and Northern Europeans who choose to make Spain their home bring a lot into the economy. We spend locally, we pay taxes, […]
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By Max Milano (Travel Writer) Morning is quiet and thick with mist. After nearly a month on the Road to Santiago, it feels like forever. My feet sink into the cold water of a Galician ría, eyes fixed on the fjord-like channel ahead until it vanishes into fog. The pines across the ría blur between green and gray, their slopes hidden by a drifting veil of fog that slides down to the waterline. Coastal Galicia […]
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By Max Milano Dusk on Laredo beach. My feet sink into the wet sand as the last surf pulls back. We’ve come a long, hot way from La Rioja, via Vitoria-Gasteiz, skirting Bilbao’s police state cameras and slow-motion speed traps on the freeways and B roads. We’ve been chasing the coast, longing for cooler air. It was an asphalt-melting thirty-five degrees today in Vitoria-Gasteiz. We find relief on the Cantabrian shore. Laredo. A name that […]
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A Pilgrim’s Road Trip Along the Camino de Santiago By Max Milano, Travel Writer & Photographer It has been a long, tough road to get to La Rioja, Spain’s premier wine region, but it’s been worth it. We’ve set our GPS to avoid tolls so we can really see the country. The freeways in Spain are antiseptic and empty, skirting small towns and cities like a gerrymandered political map. We want to see the little […]
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A Pilgrim’s Road Trip Along the Camino de Santiago By Max Milano (Travel Writer & Photographer) “We’re staying in a retirement home for old ETA members,” I hear my wife say from the bedroom as I sip a Scotch and Coke Zero on the balcony of the Hotel Arriaga in Bilbao. Below me, a narrow alley funnels the whole of humanity into the maze of Bilbao’s Old Town. I hear Dutch. German. Latin American Spanish. […]
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A Pilgrim’s Road Trip Along the Camino de Santiago By Max Milano (Travel Writer & Photographer) The Med in August is hot like fish soup. The air hangs heavy. The palms don’t move and the heat rides up from the Sahara with the sirocco. Yellow dust settles at dusk, and it’s 9:30 p.m. before the sun drops, because Spain still runs on Berlin time, a gift from Franco to Hitler that no one’s bothered to […]
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By Max Milano (Travel Writer & Photographer) I’m standing on a wobbly iron bridge bolted to the cliffs of Cuenca. They say it’s built in the Eiffel style, but when you step out onto it, it feels more Indiana Jones than Paris. The metal creaks underfoot. Hundreds of feet below, a river snakes through a canyon so deep you can hear it before you see it. Thick brush hides the water, but nothing hides the […]
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By Max Milano (Travel Writer) I, like most tourists and expats, must’ve driven past Sagunto a hundred times. Always between Valencia and Barcelona. Always in a rush. The AP-7 skirts along the Mediterranean, passing citrus groves, factory outlets, beach towns with nondescript condos, and even a Roman aqueduct. But then there’s that hill, the one crowned by an ancient fortress that seems to grow out of the stone itself. I never stopped. Most tourists don’t. […]
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