We are delighted to share this first in a series of travalogues written by Sir Jeremy Blackham KCB, former Royal Navy officer who served as Deputy Commander-in-Chief Fleet, as he journeys through the Iberian penninsula. Jeremy speaks multiple languages with a particular fascination for the spanish dialects and is a keen supporter of languages and classics at Bradfield;

'The Bay of Biscay was unusually calm when I left Portsmouth on Sunday afternoon.  It can indeed be so, although less in the autumn than in summer.  This time there was not a breath of wind during the 36 hour voyage, the sea was flat, and it is mostly very misty with visibility less than a mile.  It will be a surprise if it is not stirred up by El Nino by my return trip on 31 October!

For a change I arrived at Bilboa instead of Santander.  Whereas Santander is an elegant town, with fine buildings and beaches and the port in the middle of the town, Bilbao's port is well outside the town and is busy, bustling and industrial.  The network of roads around the town, leading away to the south is daunting and challenging, much expanded since my last visit to Bilbao some thirty years ago, and difficult to navigate.  The traffic has grown exponentially and takes no prisoners - Spaniards are good reivers generally but do not respect the hesitancy and uncertainty which comes from getting used to spaghetti junctions where you have to get re-accustomed to driving on the right, and it was the morning rush hour! 

So, it was a relief to survive the town and set off into the wonderfully green and hilly country south of Bilbao en route for Santo Domingo de la Calzada, one of my favourite small towns, and a popular stop on the popular Camino de Santiago.  It's wonderful to be in Spain again.  It is so open and spacious, more so than any other country I know, so steeped in history from an extraordinary range of cultures - prehistoric, Celtic-Iberian, Carthaginian, Roman, Visigothic, Islamic (for over 600 years) and Spanish and of languages.  The countryside is so rural and always there are mountains in the distance on every side.  It's lovely to hear and speal Spanish again after nearly a year away.  And to be reminded of the passion for cleanliness.  Here bins are cleared daily, main streets in towns washed almost every night, and you never see any litter - by comparison English towns. and especially London are very grubby and less cared for.  Spaniards are always keen to tell you about their towns and are proud of where they live.  And eating is so cheap.  I bought a couple of coffees today for 3 euros (about £1,40 each).  When I told the young lady behind the bar that in England it would have cost more like 7 or 8 euros, she looked shocked and rushed out to tell her girlfriends who were having coffee outside.  They looked equally astonished and looked at me with great sympathy!

En route to Santo Domingo, a lovely ancient small town on the banks of the Rio Oja, which is one of my favourite places, I stopped in Haro, the capital of the Rioja wine region.  Haro is an old, once walled, town, perched on a rocky eminence above the River Ebro, near where the Ebro is joined by the very small Rio Oja.  It seems odd that so small a river should give its name to one of the great wine regions of the world.  Haro is full of wind merchants, bodegas and bars, and is surrounded by vineyards (including come of the great names of Rioja - Muga, Cune, Cerro Anon etc and lives and breathes wine - but I decided to leave that for another day and came on to Santo Domingo, first visited well over 30 years ago and most recently 2 years ago, sitting beside the Rio Oja, and right astride the Camino, with a constant stream of pilgrims passing through.  They are of all ages, but at this time of year mainly elderly folk, some even walking less than easily.  But I am afraid I don't feel guilty.'

Santo Domingo is a place I have visited twice before and love.  It's one of the oldest towns in Castile, barring those founded by the Romans. It was effectively founded, not long after the Camino became a serious pilgrimage route at the beginning of the 11th Century, by a priest called Domingo, who had set about clearing forests along the trail, and had built a bridge over the Rio Oja to help pilgrims on the way,  Then he built a pilgrim hostel which, in the 14th century or so, turned into the very attractive building where I am now staying, right beside the Camino route where there is still a constant flow of pilgrims from all nations, including curiously many Japanese, en route to Santiago, many of them well into retirement age and often walking with sticks and occasionally even crutches. 

Slightly surprisingly, but encouragingly, there are quite a few young women doing it alone.  It is 350 miles from Santiago, almost exactly halfway from the start of the "French Route" at the pretty town of St Jean Pied-de-port at the foot of the French Pyrenees.  You can think of the Camino as a huge river running east to west across North Spain, with tributaries joining it from different starting points. and it has been flowing since the late 10th century.  You meet some interesting people.  Yesterday I had a long chat with two (late 60's?) Irishmen walking through Santo Domingo who were very happy to chat over coffee before going on their way.  In the old days people would take many weeks to get to Santiago, and then, having rubbed the elbow of a statue of St James, and seen the coffin underneath the altar which may, or may not, contain bones, which may or may not be those of St James, turn round and walk home again.  This might take a year or so if you managed to achieve it on foot!

The old town of Santo Domingo is walled (of course) with a fine large square and a beautiful, if slightly oddly shaped cathedral, wherein Santo Domingo (as he eventually became) is entombed in a very ornate chapel.  His sanctuary also has two live cockerels permanently strutting around in a cage, as the result of a miracle several centuries ago.  The story runs that someone was pleading with a rather pompous bishop there to help his son who had been very ill and was dying.  The bishop, cross at having his dinner interrupted told the man he was wasting his time - "Your son is as dead as this roast cockerel on my plate."  Whereat the cockerel jumped up and started crowing and the bishop was put firmly in his place!  Ever since them, the same family business has been providing the cockerels which are kept in the Cathedral! 

Walking round this quiet town, where the narrow streets and tall houses give lots of shade is a real delight, with new quirky things to discover round every corner, and if you are feeling energetic, there are nice walks by the Rio Oja.  Whilst it is wide and swift in the winter and as the mountain snows melt, in summers it is much smaller and goes subterranean as the picture below shows..  If you have transport there are several fine, and of course still active, monasteries and nunneries to visit including two, Sos and Yos which are deservedly world heritage sites, nestling in the mountains to the south of the town, although I didn't revisit them this time.

Incidentally, there are still a large number of very fine active monasteries in Spain and people sometimes there are too many churches in my talks on the subject.  But it's worth remembering that Spain is the most catholic country in the world (cf the Spanish Inquisition) and probably still is.  Besides, in the 16th Century when Thomas Cromwell dissolved the monasteries to feed Henry VIII's demanding wallet, he closed down over 300  monasteries in England so perhaps Spain is not so unusual!  In fact, later Spanish governments did something very similar for the same reason in the 19th Century.

All in all,  Santo Domingo is a nice and gentle re-introduction to Spain, and its inhabitants speak a nice, clear form of Castilian which is a pleasure to listen to and allows easy conversation.  How different from Madrid, where the Madrileno dialect sounds more like machine gun fire!