Letter from San Sebastian by Benjamin Curtis

The moment you leave Spain's sun-baked central high plateau and descend north east into the topsy-turvy, bottle-green hills of the Basque Country, you may feel a certain sympathy for the locals who argue for a separate, liberated Basque nation of their own. Not for the bomb-throwing terrorists or teenage weekend rioters, but for the family living at the head of one these great valleys in an ancient farmhouse whose white-washed walls could not be further from Madrid's centralised government if they were on the other side of the world.

The Basque Country, brooding away from Bilbao to Biarritz, quite simply looks like another country. It's just too green, soft and fecund to be associated with the harsher extremes that constitute the rest of Spain. It looks like a landscape adrift, snagged up on the wrong side of Europe, exiled from some distant mountainous home.

I'm spending a night in San Sebastian, the burning heart of Basque nationalist sentiments, on my way to France. I wouldn’t be stopping at all if I'd listened to the dissenting voices in Madrid. "They burn buses there every weekend", I heard, "The old town is very dangerous", and time and again, "A beautiful city, but what a shame about the 'problems'". Any mention of these 'problems', similar to Northern Ireland's Troubles, causes a lot of mystified head shaking in Madrid, and is usually exaggerated to the extreme.

Once you arrive, however, it's hard to imagine that there are any problems here. You'll find little more than a supremely elegant, work-a-day city, a small fishing fleet, and, to my mind, the most beautiful urban beaches in the world. The best way to appreciate them, and the city itself, is on foot - a good couple of hours’ stroll end to end.

San Sebastian sits proudly against the Atlantic coast, clustered around two horseshoe bays separated by a central headland. The easterly beach, Gros, is a fine place to start. Littered with young, bronzed bodies in summer, for the rest of the year it resumes its roll as a wide, wind-blown, sandy city park, home to dog walkers, joggers and all-weather surfers, who travel far for the city's famous breaks.

This beach's most distinguished feature is "El Kursaal", a gigantic architectural experiment. Two cuboid conference centre monsters in steel and sky-grey glass perch on the beach, blocking the certain irate flat-owners' views of the sea. This is San Sebastian's answer to Bilbao's Guggenheim; finished in 1999, it is said to reflect "the romance between the city and the sea".

"Do people like it?" I ask a local girl. "Yes", she replies, "they have to, what else can they do?" "It must be terrible to live in one of the flats that's lost its view of the sea," I add. "Yes", she growls, "Like me." Winner of many an architectural prize, the building’s design is said to be based on the beach's sea defences, vast blocks stretching out to sea, cut, at goodness knows what expense, from local marble. In other seaside cities concrete blocks would normally do.

Heading on west you'll first cross the city river where fishermen line the bridges and men with buckets scour the rocks for shellfish at low tide. The central headland that separates the two bays is home to the old town, a warren of tall apartment buildings and tight cobbled streets. Hanging from every corner is the colourful Union Jack-like 'Ikurriña', the Basque national flag. Any of the bars here will serve up the most refined Tapas in Spain, known locally as 'Pinchos', to be taken at will from mouth-watering bar-top platefuls and washed down with young, fizzy 'Txakolin' wine. Eat and drink as much as you like, keeping a mental count as you go, then pay up before you leave. One can only imagine how much a system like this would be abused in the UK.

Leaving the old town again, worn down by the gourmet delights within, you emerge by the harbour, gazing onto La Concha beach, jewel in San Sebastian's fading crown: a lazy curve of golden sand backed by an elegant promenade, protected from the ocean by an abrupt, molar-like central island, and lorded over by the bay's personal dolphin. In autumn the local schools organise Rugby matches on the soft sand at low tide. This the stuff of Harry Potter and his magical games of 'Quidditch' compared to the miserable, frozen British playing fields that I once knew.

Don't give up once you've got this far but keep going right round to the very end of the bay, past the tennis club and the funicular railway leading up to a crumbling amusement park. Here, at the point where the road ends and the cliffs rise dramatically away from the sea, are Eduardo Chillida's 'Combs of the wind' - three twisted, rusting fingers of solid sculpted iron, one jutting straight from the cliff, the others erupting seamlessly from great outcrops of bronzed rock that protrude from the sea. The work is awe-inspiring, ensnaring the elements that surround it and feeding them back into the city behind.

I spend the night in the company of some Basques who tell me, ironically after what I'd heard in the capital, how much they'd love to go and live in Madrid. Before I leave the following morning I pick up a copy of the local paper, the 'Diario Vasco', and take a last walk along Gros beach. Sand, sea, horizon and sky are static, blending into one, the air cool and salty. I'm sorry to leave this regal old city, the indomitable Queen of the Basque court, but have to head north into France.

Later, somewhere near Bordeaux, I open my paper and am surprised to find the headline "Bus Burning in San Sebastian." The previous afternoon, just before I arrived, four youths in balaclavas boarded a bus and obliged its occupants, at axe handle-point, to leave, before throwing various Molotov cocktails into the back. One person was treated for shock. Fire-fighters extinguished the flames but had not been able to save the bus. I decided not to mention this to anyone when I got back to Madrid. I wouldn't want the prejudices that keep them, and consequently others, away from the delights of the Basque country, to be strengthened by the idea that they'd been right all along.