Navarre is the true heart of Spain, a land lost to tourists and hidden amongst the hills. John Hillman reports.

Gently nestling on the southern slopes of the Pyrenees in northern Spain lays Navarre, the autonomous Basque speaking region of the Vascones.

This ancient Kingdom was once fiercely independent and in charge of a whole swathe of the surrounding regions – La Rioja, Cantabria, Castile & Leon, Aragon and the Basque Country – before being whittled down by geopolitics into the Spanish province that it is today.

But like most of Spain, Navarre still retains much of its proud self-supporting sprit and offers the visitor something completely unique in terms of landscape, culture and cuisine.The area is renowned for its dramatic mountain vistas, which contrast strikingly with the less visited plains of the Ebro river valley in the south, but perhaps best known of all is Navarre’s capital city of Pamplona and its famous festival, El Encierro (The running of the bulls).

This now world famous event was first brought to the attention of the world by Ernest Hemingway in his first novel, The Sun Always Rises, and has gone on to become one of the most popular acts of mindless stupidity in the European calendar.

Hemingway was a fan of the region and especially a local drink Fundador, which is not an advisable tipple unless you are about to put yourself in the way of a herd of charging bulls, at which point it becomes fairly essential.

Navarre’s climate is temperate most of the year and the sparsely populated countryside a joy to behold. It’s a short drive from the ports of Bilbao and San Sebastian; a place where you can truly feel like you’ve escaped the 21st century and found your way back to an age before cheap airlines and shoddy tourist trails, a place that may well make you want to sell up and start a lost generation of your own.

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