Zumaia flysch cliffs

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Flysch cliffs, Zumaia, one of the most amazing geological formations I’ve seen. These vertical layers run for 8 kilometres along Basque coast, each a page, forming a book covering 60 million years of our planet’s history. Created when Iberia crashed into Europe and things went all squishy.

The second image just a few hundred metres away shows something remarkable, a key site in Earth history. One of the few places where the K/T boundary is identifiable (with a microscope). Below lie dinosaurs, etc, above the flowering of mammals, leading to us. In between a thin iridium deposit, common in meteorites, including the big one 65 million years ago, landing in the Gulf of Mexico, dispersing a thin layer of this rare metal across the planet..

Video of Sakoneta, Flysch de Zumaia, spectacular sea cliffs, rock beach, brooding sky, scuttling crabs. (I also learnt here crab in Basque is karramarro).

Basque whalers

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Hondarribia stamp bearing a right whale

Official stamp of the Basque border town of Hondarribia, dated 1335, showing the hunting of a Right Whale (Ballena de los vascos in Spanish). With local whales decimated by the end of the Middle Ages, Basque whalers found new population off Newfoundland, reaching these territories by the early C16th or even before.

Image Wikipedia

Basque squirrels

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Katagorri, a lovely word in Basque for squirrel. (Also Urtxintx)
Ardilla in Spanish, Esquirol in Catalan. Esquío in Galicia
📷Fischer.H (Wikipedia)

Many years ago, an old anarchist bookseller from the Raval assured me that squirrel was the most delicate meat he had ever eaten. Nowadays, it is better to let them play in the trees.

There’s a song from the 1960s:

Nik ere nahi nuke
Izan urtxintxak bezala
Hain gora, hain trebe,
Izaiteko libre

I, too, would like To be like the squirrels— So high up, so agile— To be free.

Aitor, a friend on social media, a Basque doctor commented:

It’s a song from my childhood, when our language was banned, Franco ruled with an iron fist and freedom was to be achieved yet. We wanted to be like squirrels. A song for children with a deep meaning

See also Red squirrels in Spain