The Basque Capital Nobody Visits — Spain's greenest city, the political seat of the Basque Country, with a medieval old town, the finest pintxos bar crawl outside San Sebastián, and a Green Belt that won the EU Green Capital award
Vitoria-Gasteiz is the institutional capital of the Basque Autonomous Community — the most economically powerful region of Spain — yet receives a fraction of the visitors that flood Bilbao and San Sebastián, its more famous neighbours. The city's medieval centre (Casco Viejo) is built on an elliptical hilltop in the classic pattern of a medieval Navarrese foundation: concentric streets radiating from the central cathedral down the hillside. The Catedral de Santa María — a Gothic cathedral that spent most of the 20th century in structural crisis, held up by scaffolding-forest that became a tou…
Gasteiz was a small Navarrese settlement when Sancho VI of Navarre fortified and expanded it in 1181 as Villa de Vitoria — a frontier town between Navarre and Castile. The Castilians took it in 1200 and confirmed its role as a market town. In 1813 the Battle of Vitoria — the decisive engagement of the Peninsular War — was fought on the plain west of the city: Wellington's Anglo-Portuguese-Spanish forces caught the French army under Joseph Bonaparte attempting to retreat with a baggage train carrying the treasures of Madrid, defeating them comprehensively. Napoleon called it 'a wound that will…