As you can see, we’ve made some friends here in San Sebastian. One friend is even a Spanish celebrity. Let us introduce you to Pipper, the first Spanish canine tourist. Pipper, with his human Pablo, are in the midst of traveling through Spain to raise awareness of dog-friendly tourism. Pipper has a website with fabulous videos that highlight his journey and Spain’s best places to visit: www.pipperontour.com We learned about Pipper from the local newspaper and started following his adventures. So, when I saw he’d be in San Sebastian, which is where he’s from, I had to meet him! We met up last month and really hit it off, so we connected again last week.
Pipper has become quite a travel ambassador for Spain. He and Pablo are working hard to make as many places dog-friendly as possible and they’ve had a lot of success. We can’t wait to meet up with them again when they are back in San Sebastian in December. We highly recommend the videos – they are guaranteed to make you smile. And who doesn’t need to smile these days?
Pipper’s name is a mixture of “pepper” in English and Basque, which gives us a great segue between Pipper and a type of Basque peppers called pimientos guindillas.
On August 19 we took the train to the nearby village of Ibarra (actually, we rode to Tolosa and walked to Ibarra, which is right across the river), and took a tour of the Guindillas de Ibarra with some friends. The tour included three parts:
(1) A walk through the guindilla fields with an explanation of the farming process:
(2) A tour of the factory where the peppers are packaged for sale in jars:
(3) A tasting session:
Guess which part we liked most?? We struggled a bit to understand the tour of the fields because our vocabulary is lacking agricultural terms, and we had a similar issue in the factory, but once we got to the bar and started eating and drinking, everything got easier. The jarred peppers are pickled and used in many pintxos. We preferred the fresh peppers fried up crisp. They all paired perfectly with Txakoli, the traditional white Basque wine. The tour also included a jar to go.
It was a very tasty afternoon. And the best part was the whole tour cost only 10 Euro (about $12)!
Adios,
Shana & Jeff
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