W hen Eskerne Falcon was living in New York, she thought she overheard some people speaking Basque. Now leading tours back in her home city of San Sebastian (and a Tripadvisor “world’s top ten food experience” guide to boot), she tells me how she turned round to greet her fellow country folk, only to realise she’d actually caught a snatch of conversation between Japanese tourists. “Basque is a unique language unlike anything else around the world,” she says proudly.
“But all the Ks and Ss and vowels in Japanese sounded so familiar. It was the closest thing I’d ever heard to Basque!” San Sebastian, with its glorious La Concha bay tipped by sentinel mountains, is the belle époque jewel in the crown of northeast Spain’s Basque region — and its unlikely links with Japan don’t end with its language. It has a strong cultural identity and social structures that outsiders have traditionally found hard to penetrate.
Fishing remains a key industry, with tuna auctions once quite the spectacle at the central market. And joining the dots more tangibly as of August 2023 is the Nobu Hotel San Sebastian, a northern Spanish outpost of the luxury chain owned by celebrity chef-hotelier Nobu Matsuhisa, celebrity actor-hotelier Robert De Niro and not-so-celebrity film-producer-hotelier Meir Temper..