Day 31 Thursday 4 June 2026
How the weather can change and affect your experiences and decisions for the day. The rain rolled in overnight which resulted in our destination turning inland. We had also travelled along the coast twice before.
We drove about an hour on windy roads up to a pass and down again until we reached Bergara. Our book tells us it is full of character with distinguished colleges, churches and mansions. Unfortunately parking was a bit tricky and the rain was falling, so we just had our breakfast and kept going….
More windy roads and another mountain pass (although not high in altitude).
Our stop here was at the Loiola Sanctuary where St Ignatius (1491-1556) the founder of the Jesuit order was born.
Donning our raincoats and umbrellas we made our way to the Basilica. Built in the Baroque style in 1738 in honour of St Ignatius. We were wowed by the beautiful pink marbled dome ceiling.
We then paid €3.50 pp to visit the Santa Casa (Holy House), the original home of the Loyola family around which the Sanctuary was built. Here we learnt about his life going from knight to pilgrim and the start of the Jesuit order.
We managed to find a parking spot closer to the old quarter and as the rain had ceased we took the opportunity to go for a walk.
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| The bull ring.. 1st one we have seen this time |
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| Looks like the equivalent of the Edinburgh Tattoo.. |
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| Guess what… it wasn’t open |
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| Interesting wash house |
We were hoping for a bar with some atmosphere to have a bite to eat but nothing took our fancy, so we returned to Bluey and picked an aire that had some good comments on park4night and headed there. It was another 1 hour of yet again windy backroads to the small village of Berastegi.
We settled in with a couple other motorhomes, had an early dinner and watched the rain drops run down Blueys windscreen..
