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Zinemaldia, and a city that eats standing up
San Sebastián — Donostia in Basque, and usually written Donostia-San Sebastián — has two claims on September, and they overlap. The first is the film festival, the Zinemaldia, founded in 1953 and one of the oldest of the international A-list festivals alongside Cannes, Venice and Berlin. It runs for nine days in late September, its top award is the Concha de Oro — the Golden Shell, named for the bay — and it has a particular character: less of a market than Cannes, more of a public festival, with a large share of tickets sold to ordinary residents who queue for them. That is why Sofía says the sessions are abarrotadas, and why the red carpet outside the Kursaal is watched from the promenade by people who have come out after dinner rather than by anyone with a pass. The second is the food, and the claim here is not a boast. The Basque Country has among the highest concentrations of Michelin stars per head of population anywhere in the world, and San Sebastián in particular has several three-star restaurants within a few kilometres. But the thing to do is not those. It is the pintxo crawl through the parte vieja, the old town: you go into a bar, stand up, order one or two pintxos and a small drink, and move on to the next one. A bar has a speciality and you order that. Nobody sits down, nobody spends an hour in one place, and an evening covers five or six bars. Two practical habits. In many pintxo bars you take what you want from the counter and tell the barman at the end what you had — the system runs on honesty and works. And txakoli, the local white wine, is poured from a height much as Asturian cider is at lesson 69, though for less dramatic reasons. Ask for un zurito if you want a very small beer, which is the Basque equivalent of the caña and is designed for exactly this kind of evening: small enough that six bars is a pleasure rather than a problem.