In the Footsteps of Smugglers: My Life on a Basque Mountain
Language: English
Published by Bradt Travel Guides, 2024
- Softcover
- New

Seller: Windflower Bookstore, Rockford, IL, U.S.A.Windflower Bookstore
AbeBooks seller since June 8, 2026
Condition: New
£ 8.14
Quantity: 1 available
Add to basketSeller Inventory # WFBV.1804692115.N
- Title
- In the Footsteps of Smugglers: My Life on a Basque Mountain
- Author
- Howard, Georgina
- Publisher
- Bradt Travel Guides
- Publication year
- 2024
- Condition
- new
- Binding
- Soft cover
- Language
- English
- ISBN 10
- 1804692115
- ISBN 13
- 9781804692110
The journey leads to wild and craggy landscapes in the Basque Pyrenees on the French/Spanish border, where place names are written in a bizarre, foreign tongue full of x’s and z’s. Losing her heart to this beautiful land and her pride to the inscrutability of the language, Howard moves into an isolated barn in a mountain hamlet. While pagan festivals reverberate through the valleys, her Basque neighbours – farmers, shepherds, a gravedigger and a champion female lumberjack – observe her, bemused.
Only when her daughter Marion is born – after an unsuccessful relationship with an eccentric Basque miller – do Howard’s neighbours drop their reserve and welcome her into their homes. Taking Marion’s upbringing upon themselves, they fatten her up on spicy Basque sausages and black bean stews, teach her Basque nursery rhymes and train her to milk sheep. Meanwhile, Howard converts a barn into the headquarters of an international business providing walking, culture and language tours. Resigned to the ineptitude of their new neighbour, with patience and amusement, the locals tow her car out of ditches and teach her how to stack wood, catch mice, unblock septic tanks and drink wine from a leather gourd.
In the Footsteps of Smugglers follows the adventures of an outsider: a single mother, linguist, cosmopolitan nomad and cultural chameleon who paradoxically makes her home amongst an indigenous people deeply rooted in their land, with a language and culture dating back to stone-age times. Unwittingly, she repays their hospitality by luring anti-terrorist squads, blackmailers and spies into their midst as the dramatic past of the Basque Country proves to have unexpected and far-reaching consequences.
An inspiring, humorous travel memoir, Bradt’s In the Footsteps of Smugglers weaves behind-the-scenes vignettes of daily rural life and historical research to produce authentic insights on all things Basque, threaded with a rhapsody on the theme of identity.
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Windflower Bookstore
Rockford, IL, U.S.A.
AbeBooks seller since June 8, 2026
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