Leintz Gatzaga (Salinas de Léniz)

At 600 metres, the air thins just enough for you to notice it on the climb from the car park. Below, the roofs of Leintz Gatzaga stack like grey slate dominoes against a sheer Basque hillside, and every stone seems to whisper the same word: gatz, salt. This is not a metaphor. For four centuries the village lived, taxed and quarrelled over the brine springs that bubble up beneath its main square.

Most British visitors barrel straight from Bilbao airport to San Sebastián’s beaches, 40 minutes away on the autopista. Turn inland instead, follow the BI-3552 for another half-hour, and you reach a place that cartographers once valued more than either city. In 1563 the Spanish crown raised the salt levy here by two maravedís a quintal; the ensuing riot lasted three days. Today the same lanes are so quiet that footsteps echo, and the only queue is for the coffee machine in Bar Arrate when the morning bus from Vitoria unloads six passengers.

A town that forgot to grow

Leintz Gatzaga never quite reconciled itself to the nineteenth century, let alone the twenty-first. The population hovers around 220, barely double what it was when the salt pans closed for good in 1970. Houses are still measured by the medieval vara (roughly a yard), front doors open straight onto staircases, and the parish church of San Juan Bautista fits its 80 pewter-coloured pews into a space the size of a London living room. Step inside on a weekday and you may find the lights off; the key hangs on a nail behind the bakery, but nobody minds if you simply stand in the porch and breathe the cool limestone air.

What saves the place from folk-park twee-ness is the patina of everyday use. A tractor idles outside Number 14, its tyres caked with red clay. Laundry snaps on first-floor balconies. Someone has wedged a goat bell into a cracked windowsill to stop the shutter banging. You are welcome to look, but this is not a film set; it is simply a village that never found a reason to knock itself down and start again.

Walking the white trade

Follow Calle Mayor uphill past the stone trough where mules once drank brine, and the tarmac turns into a stony track signed GR-25. Ten minutes of calf-stretching zig-zag brings you to the first hairpin and suddenly the whole valley tilts open: green wheat terraces below, beech woods above, and a hawk tracing circles at eye level. The salt museum – housed in the former Royal Salt Works – sits just beneath you, its slate roof glinting like wet cardboard.

Inside, the curator hands you a palm-sized block of 400-year-old rock salt still encrusted with iron-rich orange veins. You can lick it if you wish; it tastes faintly of blood and earth. Exhibits are labelled in Spanish and Basque, but the diagrams are clear enough: evaporation pans, wooden paddles, the hydraulic wheel whose axle survives as a charred stump. Entry is €4, children free, and on a Tuesday morning you will share the gloom with at most a retired couple from Vitoria who argue politely about whether the brine was heated or merely sun-dried.

Leave the museum and the GR continues south along an old mule path towards the ruined Casa de la Sal. The walk is 3 km there and back, mostly level, but trainers with grip are wise after rain. En-route you pass the village’s only picnic table, bolted to a platform so the wind does not launch it into France. Sit, and the silence is so complete you can hear your own pulse.

Food that remembers the sea

Salt built the houses; salt still seasons the lunch. At Soran Etxea, a low-beamed dining room with five tables and a wood-burning grill, the txuleta arrives as a single 1.2 kg rib-eye, charred outside, almost raw within. The house policy is to split it between two (€38 total) and serve it with nothing more than a dish of their own gatz gris – coarse crystals that crunch like thin ice. Vegetarians get the same treatment: fat mushrooms brushed with garlic and salt, then roasted until the edges blacken. Pudding is sheep’s-milk yoghurt drizzled with honey that tastes, inevitably, faintly saline.

If a full Basque steak feels like mountain over-kill, Bar Arrate next door will assemble a pintxo of salt-cod brandade on toast for €2.50. British children who “don’t do fish” have been known to inhale three. Wash it down with the local txakoli, poured from height so it fizzes like cider, and remember to bring cash – the card machine is “broken” every second Thursday.

When the weather shuts the gate

Altitude has its moods. In July the village can swelter at 32 °C, yet by 7 p.m. a cloud may slither up the gorge and drop the temperature to 14 °C in minutes. Carry a fleece even in August. Winter is sharper: snow arrives earlier than on the coast and the final 5 km of road is salted, not gritted, so hire cars need proper tyres. The salt museum closes entirely in January; the bar shortens its hours; the priest only appears on alternate Sundays. Locals admit the place “feels like hibernation”, but they also claim the silence then is worth the trip alone.

Getting it right

Arrive by 10 a.m. and you will park for free on the upper track signed Polideportivo. Leave anything bigger than a Focus in the wider bay at the entrance – reversing downhill past a stone wall built for mules is not a memory you want to take home. Public transport exists in theory: two buses a day from Vitoria, none at weekends, timetables adjusted for saints’ days you have never heard of. In practice, this is a driving destination. Bilbao airport’s hire-car village is 40 minutes away, and the last Repsol garage before the climb is at Arminón – fill up, because nothing in Leintz Gatzaga sells petrol, milk or newspapers after 2 p.m.

Accommodation within the village is limited to two guesthouses, five rooms each, booked solid during salt-festival weekend in September. Most Brits base themselves in Vitoria (35 min) or Elgoibar (25 min) and day-trip in. If you do stay overnight, expect church bells on the hour and dogs that keep Basque time – they bark at 6 a.m., not 7.

Leave before you run out of salt?

Two hours is plenty to walk the lanes, sniff the museum and eat a yoghurt. Stretch it to four by continuing the GR-25 another 5 km to the abandoned Zumeltzegi farmstead, where swallows nest in the rafters and the map promises a view of the Montes de Vitoria on clear days. But do not feel obliged to “fill” the afternoon. Leintz Gatzaga works best as a pause between Guggenheim crowds and San Sebastián calories, a place to remember that once upon a time a government fought a war over a mineral we now scatter on chips.

Buy a 250 g tin of herb salt from the museum shop (€6), switch your phone to aeroplane mode, and walk back up to the car while the village returns to its own quiet heartbeat. You will not find a fridge magnet, a flamenco show or a selfie-frame. That, after all, is what the coast is for.