Speak the Culture: Spain: Be Fluent in Spanish Life and Culture

vi. La Rioja

With its vineyards and market gardens,

La Rioja provides northern Spain with a

final greenish fling. Landlocked and small,

the region cradles the early stages of the

Ebro Valley where the weather perks up

and starts to find its Mediterranean form.

Rioja is the star of Spanish wine, and the region’s many

bodegasoffer a chance to try the goods. On the Ebro

plain and in the nearby hills you find villages built around

monasteries and other pit stops on the road to Santiago

de Compostela. One such pilgrims’ rest, Logroño, is the

regional capital, where the Gothic cathedral gets more

than its fair share of devotion. But forget the man-made

marvels, for La Rioja has much older charms – 120 million

years older in fact – in the three-toed, foot-long shape

of fossilised dinosaur footprints stomped into the

Cretaceous sludge near the mountainous southern

border with Castile y León.

Alfonso Daniel Rodríguez Castelao(Galicia) Caricaturist, novelist, theorist and

politician – nobody pushed Galicia and its culture more in the 20thcentury. He died

in exile after denouncing Franco but remains a hero in the collective memory.

Clarín(Asturias) The acclaimed 19thcentury novelist wroteLa Regenta(1884-5),

a long, multi-layered exploration of religion, sex and class in a provincial town.

José María de Pereda(Cantabria) Realist writer best remembered forSotileza(1884),

an insight into the daily routine of a fishing community that drew on his own life in

Santander.

Eduardo Chillida(Basque Country) The former Real Sociedad (San Sebastian)

goalkeeper became a giant of 20thcentury sculpture, creating huge abstract forms

deposited all over the world from Berlin to Houston.

Manuel Rivas(Galicia) A leading contemporary Spanish writer plying his trade

in Galician. The tenderO lápis do carpinteiro(1998) is his most popular, widely

translated novel.

Five cultural icons from the north

16

1. Identity: the
   building blocks of
   2. Literature
   and philosophy
   3. Art and
   architecture
   4. Performing
   arts
   5. Cinema
   and fashion
   6. Media and
   communications
   7. Food and drink 8. Living culture:
   the details of

Early words
The first written texts
in Castilian emerged
from the monastery
of San Millán de la
Cogolla, La Rioja, in
the 10thcentury. The
earliest named Spanish
poet, Gonzalo de Berceo,
lived just down the road
in the 13thcentury.