Travel stories and photography from the road with Max Milano.
By Max Milano (Travel Writer & Photographer) It’s a crisp, cold January morning in La Mancha, and the sun is just starting to peek over the dry, rusty hills beyond the whitewashed village below. I’m on a ridge crested with windmills and crowned by an old Moorish fort. Suddenly the sun’s rays break out from over the hills and illuminate the landscape, giving the whitewashed windmills a dreamlike look. You can almost see Don Quijote […]
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By Max Milano (Travel Writer & Photographer) The moment I heard that Spain’s 2026 total solar eclipse would enter the Iberian Peninsula over A Coruña, one thought came to mind. The eclipse would occur in the early evening, about an hour before sunset. That created a rare opportunity to place something remarkable in the foreground. And what could be better than a 2,000-year-old Roman lighthouse, the Tower of Hercules, standing guard over the entrance to […]
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By Max Milano (Travel Writer and Photographer) I consider myself something of an old hand when it comes to total solar eclipses. The upcoming total eclipse in Spain will be my third. That is nothing to boast about, since solar eclipses are not especially rare on a planetary scale. Somewhere on Earth, between two and five solar eclipses occur every year, although many are only partial. A total solar eclipse happens somewhere on our planet […]
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By Max Milano (Travel Writer & Photographer) Every April, a certain kind of expat arrives in Valencia, sun-kissed and looking for the shore, but I am not talking about the humans who fill the cafés in Benidorm with their flamingo-like sunburns and lager, I am talking about the real flamingos that come back to the Albufera lagoon south of Valencia and farther down to the salt lakes of Santa Pola. They arrive from Africa, from […]
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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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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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