We’ll leave the ‘big city’and travel to rural Gipuzkoa to learn the secrets of Idiazabal cheese production in a traditional farmhouse. A kilo of this cheese usually goes for around 20 euros, although a competition is held every year to select the best cheese of the season, sometimes reaching up to 14,000 euros per ½ kilo! We’ll do a tasting, and you’ll hear the secrets of Basque cheeses. You’ll taste traditional cheeses, all made with unpasteurized sheep's milk. This is the Real Thing, the Real Cheese.

There’s a Spanish expression that roughly translates as, ‘With bread and wine you walk the road’. We’ve already eaten the bread and cheese. We’ll find the wine on the coast, in the hills overlooking the Cantabrian Sea, the ideal place for growing the grapes from which txakoli is born - a typical Basque white wine with a slight acidity, ideal to pair with fish. We’ll visit a small sustainable winery that uses traditional methods and grapes called Hondarrabi Zuri and Hondarrabi Beltza. Thus you’ll learn the intricacies and power of txakoli.

All this will take place near Getaria, the coastal town through which we’ll take a short walk before eating. Getaria is not only the home of a mountain with a mouse-shaped profile, but it’s the hometown of two of the most well-known Basques: Juan Sebastián Elcano (the first to go around the world) and Cristóbal Balenciaga (the international designer known as the Prince of Fashion). More: our coast is famous for its charcoal-grilled fish, omnipresent in the streets closest to the port…so it makes sense to have lunch here. Do you need a more compelling reason?