Walk through a Spanish town in September and you will notice something in the air, a sweet, smoky, unmistakable smell drifting from windows and balconies and courtyards. It is the unmistakable smell of roasting peppers, and for a few weeks each autumn it seems to fill the whole country entirely, because this is the season …
If your plan for deciding whether you could actually retire in Spain involves renting a nice apartment in Barcelona for a month or three and seeing how it feels, you need to know that the ground is shifting under that plan. Barcelona has decided to get rid of every single one of its licensed tourist …
Ireland is known for its warmth, charm, and legendary hospitality, but that doesn’t mean visitors can do whatever they want and still blend in. Every country has unwritten rules, and Ireland has plenty of them. Some are rooted in centuries-old traditions, and others come from modern cultural norms that travelers don’t always recognize at first …
The French cafe is one of the great pleasures of travel, and it is also a quiet minefield of unwritten rules that an American can trip over before the coffee even lands on the table. None of them are written on any menu, but all of them are enforced by the servers and the regulars …
There is a dessert on nearly every Spanish restaurant menu, elegant and silky and crowned with a glossy caramel, that arrives at your table looking like something that took real skill to make and comes with a price to match. It is flan, the classic caramel custard, and here is the small secret the restaurants …
Tell an American that you and your spouse are taking separate vacations this year, that you are off to hike with friends while your partner heads somewhere else entirely, and you may be met with a worried look and the unspoken question, is everything okay at home. In much of Europe, the same announcement raises …
Americans arrive in Europe with one big assumption: “If it’s cheaper, it must be worse.” Then they get whiplash. They see modern hospitals, calm clinics, and pharmacists who act like actual humans. They also meet the other side of the deal: slower systems, more gatekeeping, and admin that assumes you are already part of the …
Picture a restaurant on the Spanish coast. A waiter carries a heavy dish to your table, and on it sits not a plate of food but a strange white mound, a whole fish entirely entombed in a hard shell of salt. Then, with a few sharp taps of a knife handle, the crust cracks open …
Somewhere in Spain, in an ordinary hospital nursery, a striking statistic is playing out one baby at a time. Roughly one in nine babies born in the country now comes into the world with the help of fertility treatment, a share so high it makes Spain the assisted-reproduction capital of Europe. Behind that number are …
Every year in France, hundreds of thousands of couples make their relationship official, and a remarkable share of them skip marriage entirely for something else. It is called the PACS, a kind of civil union that has quietly grown into one of the most popular ways to formalize a relationship in the country, so popular …
There is a way of eating well that fits on the back of a napkin and asks you to count exactly nothing, and it is one of the most quietly powerful things I have ever tested. The rule is simple: fill half your plate with vegetables, a quarter with protein, and a quarter with whole …
There is a dish from the Basque country, that green corner straddling the border of France and Spain, that solves the eternal question of what to make when you have peppers, eggs, and not much else. It is called piperade, and it is one of those perfect, humble, endlessly useful recipes that a whole region …