Gijón lacks the touristy sheen of some other Spanish cities, but it is well worth visiting. And, not only for its cute little Plaza Mayor which stands out in sharp contrast to the grandiose, monumental Universidad Laboral, located virtually on the outskirts, or for its broad, pleasant esplanade or the Cerro de Santa Catalina park, crowned with a sculpture by Eduardo Chillida, Eulogy to the Horizon.

Los Pomares

A 10-minute walk from the centre has its reward – the “Best Fabada in the World 2015”, an award they won from among 80 competing restaurants from all over Spain. Made of large La Granja beans orf abes,they are tender from almost five hours of simmering away in their gravy of 100% Iberian bellota (acorn-reared) morcilla (blood sausage), chorizo (cured pork sausage), lacón (shoulder of pork), panceta (streaky bacon) and tocino (fatty bacon). A long flavour with a spicy highlight and not at all rich, as they do not stir-fry. Also served up are squid-ink calamari, which leave you stunned, delicious Emmental and cauliflower croquettes and fresh fish and seafood which attract local pilgrims to the cider hall.

El Quinto

A winery offering both Asturian and international cuisine as Mariano Mier, their chef, just loves travelling (he has visited some 50 countries). His Gwao Bao – a sandwich made of Taiwanese steamed bread, with Astur-Celta-breed Gochu pork jowl, peanuts and cilantro – won the Madrid Fusión 2016 Spanish Tapas Championship, while his Okonomiyaki – an omelette with five vegetables and seven spices – was a finalist in 2015. El Quinto, which devotes thematic menus to several countries, was also a finalist in the Asturias 2016 Pinchos Contest, at which they entered their Ahi Poke Hawaiian salad, made of marinated tuna fish tartare, sesame oil, soy, sriracha sauce and spring onion.

Casa Trabanco

Learn all there is to know about cider. Situated in Lavandera, 10 kilometres from Gijón, a glance at their cider press reveals how apples are pressed – a 0.75-litre bottle is equivalent to a kilo of apples – and how they let the must ferment for 4 to 6 months in 40,000-litre wooden and stainless steel casks in a tunnel originally built to transport coal. The restaurant features produce from their market garden – onions stuffed with codfish or meat and arbeyinos (peas) served up with poached egg, cucharina (teaspoon) stews (fabada, pote…) and such dishes as T-bone ox, codfish omelette and diced nuggets.

El Candil

For those who like good fish, you’ve come to the right place. It is selected daily by José Luis Camacho, the life and soul of El Candil, who is obsessed with offering quality at a reasonable price. In addition to the fish dishes on the menu (sea bass, sea bream, alfonsino, sole…), he always has salmon he himself smokes in oak sawdust, as well as quality meats, stews such as fabada, chickpeas and green vegetables. At this downtown restaurant, which opens from Monday to Saturday, they offer products in season, while wines can be ordered from their continually augmented wine list by the glass, in half-litre jugs or by the bottle.

La Bolera

La Bolera is one of the best grillrooms in Spain. Its manager, Cuco, is an expert on beef and he applies his expertise as a geneticist and chef when offering dishes of Black Angus, German and Dutch Frisian, German Simmental, brown Swiss, Dutch Holstein and others. The dishes that come off his Cuban Marabú charcoal grill is capable of moving his diners– the 350 to 400-gram T-bone steaks are wolfed down in a trice, garnish included (the chips and red peppers are framers). Other noteworthy dishes include the codfish, capon and field-mushroom rice, and leeks stuffed with Iberian ham and cheese.

Hotel Blue Santa Rosa

A great accommodation option in Gijón is this functional, modern, bright, affordable 3-star hotel located in a central but quiet pedestrian precinct, a three-minute walk from the Plaza Mayor, on the San Lorenzo beachfront and marina. Customers have breakfast in their café-bar, while the lunch menu on workdays features stews (€6.90 for a single dish and €9.90 for two, both including dessert, bread, a beverage and coffee). The à la carte has pasta, sandwiches, pizza, hamburger and mixed grills which are never more than €8, and they are takeaways, too. Free high-speed wi-fi is included, while parking is optional.

Get going on your getaway to Gijón – check out your Vueling here.

Text and photos by Ferran Imedio de Gastronomistas.com

Majorca is one of the pearls of the Mediterranean. Over the years, the island has drawn from its traditional resources to reinvent itself in line with current trends. No wonder, then, that it is one of Spain’s design meccas. This is where the Camper footwear brand was born, and the painter, Miquel Barceló, too. It was also the destination of such artists as Joan Miró and the pianist, Frédéric Chopin. This thirst for creation and good taste has led its capital, Palma, to build up a bountiful network of shops, restaurants, bars and hotels which can wreak havoc on the unsuspecting design lover. From the old town to the grass-roots quarter of Santa Catalina, from the classical to the most genuine vintage, one things emerges clearly – Palma is design.

1. In Progress
In the heart of Santa Catalina lies the store run by Sonia and Jesús, two enfants terribles of vintage who specialise in artefacts from the fifties to the eighties. Here you will find anything from chairs and lamps to Pontesa crockery, Arcoroc glasses and old Palma shop counters. With special emphasis on “Made in Spain”, on many a Saturday they organise aperitif concerts and exhibitions by local artists.

2. Rialto Living
As soon as you set foot in Rialto Living you will feel as though you’re in the chic venues of Capri or the Hamptons. This “living store” is housed in an old palace in the city’s historic centre and its offerings range from furniture and art to books, fashion and a restaurant. Old and modern mingle in the ambience, with that Mediterranean flourish we are so fond of.

3. Frida Watson
Seen from the shop window, items in the Frida Watson collection confirm love at first sight. This store in Santa Catalina features pure Scandinavian design from the fifties to the seventies in harmony with Vitra clocks, Murano glass and retro lamps that resemble flying saucers.

4. Hotel Cort
The work of interior designer, Lázaro Rosa-Violán, Hotel Cort is one of the most elegant in town. Perfect lighting, hydraulic flooring and island colours compound a blend of elements that can make your head swim. Further, the sophisticated hotel restaurant is the ideal spot for a quiet dinner with your partner.

5. La Pecera
Few places can reconcile mid-20th-century European furniture with vintage and contemporary Majorcan items so deftly. La Pecera is a small but alluring store where you can find lamps, designer furniture, decorative items and craftwork. C/ Victoria, 4

6. Ariela Schönberg Vintage Collective
German furniture is one of Ariela Schönberg’s fortes. This, one of the latest shops to open in Santa Catalina, features designer artefacts and anonymous furniture from the whole continent.

7. Posada Terra Santa
Despite its rather solemn name, the Posada Terra Santa (Holy Land Inn) is one of the loveliest hotels in Palma. Housed in a 16th-century palace, its 26 rooms display a blend of history and modernity with comfort. Additionally, their swimming pool, with views of the Cathedral, is the perfect spot for chilling out and letting yourself get drawn in by the city’s charm.

8. Sa Costa
Sa Costa is a classic in Palma. Their antiques show wonderfully next to vintage formica, plastic and iron. As soon as you enter the shop, you realise you could spend hours admiring the dozens of furniture pieces and other items that people this store in the city centre. Costa de Sa Pols, 7A

9. Patrón Lunares
The classic essence of the Mediterranean arrives in Palma, skippered by the Patrón Lunares tavern and their chef, Javier Bonet. A pretty venue decorated with hydraulic floor tiles, iron columns and retro furniture where you can eat good seafood and enjoy the island’s flavours.

10. Galería Veintinueve
Now in their recently opened new premises, Galería Veintinueve continues to be a hit, with their dual facet of contemporary art exhibition centre and venue for large 20th-century pieces by such designers as Jacobsen, Scarpa and Colombo. The store and patio are spectacular and the collection of art and furniture will leave you impressed.

11.  Viveca
Antiquities, ceramics, textiles and lots of vintage – this is the essence of Viveca Palma, where Íñigo Güell and Ingrid Iturralde have unveiled a store featuring 18th-century Swedish furniture and iconic 20th-century furniture. A real pleasure.

12. Louis 21
Upcoming artists jostle to exhibit their creations in Louis 21, one of the leading springboards for promoting the careers of emerging artists. With another gallery in Madrid, their philosophy is to elicit interaction with the public and the collaborative urge.

Come in search of fine design in the Balearic capital – check out your Vueling here.

Text by Aleix Palau for Los Viajes de ISABELYLUIS

Images by Aleix Palau

By Monia Savioli from ilTurista.info

Berlin: Young, lively, trendy but cheap, organized, linked to an important past which doesn’t forget and doesn’t want to. You can’t define the city of Berlin just listing a limited number of adjectives and characteristics. That would restrict its beauty and what the city can offer to people.

Vueling launched the route Florence-Berlin on March, the 22nd increasing its new offer from Florence with furthers routes to London Heathrow, Copenhagen and Hamburg providing 160.000 new seats in addition to the already available flights to Barcelona, Paris and Madrid. There is an efficient bus shuttle service that connects Florence train station to the airport. From the train station, you can reach the airport in 20 minutes and by an about 90 minutes flight you arrive at the Tegel International Airport of Berlin.

The only clashing point is that the German airport is not connected directly to the city by underground, although the net is constantly increasing. It’s possible to reach the nearest station by taking a bus from the airport. You can ask for more information about the bus within the airport, where people speak English if you don’t know German (bus and taxi drivers often speak only German). If you want, you can also take a taxi since rates are cheaper than the Italian’s ones. The bus that brings you to the city is the 128 and leads to the “Kurt-Shumacher-Platz” underground station and the course lasts about 15 minutes. Once arrived to the underground station, you can use the same ticket to reach Friedfrichstrasse, the core of Berlin and the shopping road par excellence. There, you can take a room at the Melia Hotel, just close to Spree river and to the Metropol Theatre. Friedrichstrasse is a strategic point to chance upon the famous “Unter den Linden” boulevard, going into the core of the city visiting the main Berlin places that you should see in a 2-days-trip.

If you prefer walking, you can also visit the city with your own feet or you just ride the several bikes for rent. There are also buses for scenic tour working up to 6 p.m. that let you get on and off to visit the main important places.

One of these places, is “Charlie”, at the Friedrichstrasse. It originally was a checkpoint between the Mitte and Kreuzber districts. Mitte belonged to the East Berlin, run by Soviets in the past and Kreuzber to the West side of Berlin, run by Americans. The name of the place, Charlie, is pronounced as the third letter of NATO phonetic alphabet after “Alfa” and “Bravo”. Nowadays Charlie checkpoint is a bar where you can taste delicious drinks or drinking beer sitting on beach chairs with you feet on the sand. The headquarter of the old Gestapo is on the Niederkirchnerstrasse where you can find few empty tiled buildings. It’s situated next to a portion of the Berlin’s wall that is ruined and constantly reduced because visitors often steal pieces of wall as souvenir. In that place now there is a permanent photography exhibition called“Topography of terror” about Nazism. So it’s evident how the old and the young Berlin are living together, to bearing in mind a past that no one can’t forget, fixing it through feelings felt due to the almost holy silence you can find in those places as a sign of respect.

These are the same feelings and sensations you can feel within the Holocaust Memoirs, in the Cora-Berliner Strasse, where there are 2.711 anonymous grey stones with an irregular shape that are arranged within a field characterized by several bumps that gives you the feeling of a dark choking and light-living feeling at the same time.

The East Side Gallery, an almost 2 kilometres of the Berlin’s Wall on the Mulenstrasse (ex East Berlin) is now the longest open-air art gallery in the world and show you several visions about the years of the split of Berlin. The murals realized by international artists offer alternative points of view by illustrating characters and symbolisms of that period as the Trabant, the famous old Berlin car, drawn as it would break down the wall.

For the aficionados, it’s also possible to rent a “Trabi” to drive around the city or take one of the odd vehicles situated along the Brandenburg Gate, the symbol of a reunified Germany and the access gate to the Tiergarten. This is a former shooting ground of the royal palace where you can find the Victory Column and the famous zoo.

There are also several nice flea markets along the boulevards where you can buy an endless quantity of stuff during the weekend, from jewelleries to art masterpieces or, for instance, mother-of-pearl-made spoon for enjoy your caviar. Is not all. Berlin is also the city of museums: from the biggest Hebraic museum in the world to the Egyptian museum, the National Art Gallery and several other ones.

Berlin is also the city of the big palaces, churches’ ruins as the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedachtniskirche, whose ruins keep the recollection of the Second World War bombing alive. At least, but not the last, Berlin is the city of the shopping centre as the Come KaDeWe, “Kaufhaus des Westens”: the most famous shopping mall in Germany and the biggest one in Europe with 60,000 cubic meters that are branched in 7 sector floors for products except the last one where you can eat at the self service restaurant. Other way, downstairs you can eat in several buffets as the one managed by one of the most famous international chef, Paul Bocuse. There is also a Lafayette store section. But the real fun, actually, is getting lost among the little shops and the street markets. Berlin offers also a lot of night bars, international top level restaurants, pubs, night clubs and alternative locals assuring fun to every kind of target of people.

Thrill-seeking people can even try bungee jumping from the top of the Hotels in Alexander Platz. In order to finish your trip, you can have a long and relaxing boat ride across the Spree river from where having a wide vision of the German capital to realize that Berlin is not just a touristic destination but a real city with its beautiful places and also its difficult realities as homeless people sleeping in sleeping bags along the streets of this great but cold city.

Por Monia Savioli de ilTurista.info

Why not take a trip to Berlin? Have a look at our flights here!

Ever since the first event in 1955, Documenta has been held in Kassel every five years. As the fourteenth edition approached, the modern cultural event packed its bags and moved to Athens for the first time. Under the title “Learning From Athens”, the 2017 event has adopted proposals with political connotations. Running from 8 April to 16 July, this the largest and most important contemporary art exhibition in Europe is being co-hosted by both Athens and Kassel. As Documenta lands on Greek soil, we leave behind the Acropolis and venture into the heart of a more contemporary Athens.

National Museum of Contemporary Art
The main Documenta exhibition is housed in the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST Museum), which was inaugurated in 2014. An exhibition featuring works by over 80 artists will form the backbone of a journey with dark overtones from colonial times to the economic pragmatism of today. One of the leading and most interesting galleries in Greece, the museum is located on the premises of the former Fix Brewery – built in 1962 and designed by architect Takis Zenetos in collaboration with Margaritis Apostolidis. The brewery closed down in 1982, having produced what was the most popular beer in the country for decades. Kallirrois Avenue & Amvr. Frantzi Str

Exarchia
Those interested in counter-culture should make a point of visiting the Exarchia district. This bastion of anarchism in Athens has often been the scene of major demonstrations during the most difficult moments of the economic crisis. Exarchia is the closest thing to one endless, open-air art gallery. It is a striking display of street culture, with every single stretch of building frontage acting as a potential canvas; indeed, you are unlikely to find any patch of wall not covered in graffiti. By way of an Athenian version of Barcelona’s Gothic quarter, Madrid’s Malasaña, London’s Camden Town or Berlin’s Kreuzberg, Exarchia also boasts some of the best cafés in Athens, as well as the most highly recommended book shops and stores selling comics, records and second-hand clothing.

Technopolis
In the Gazi district of downtown Athens you will come across a huge cultural centre which was founded with the aim of promoting the art scene and enshrining the site’s industrial heritage (it houses the Industrial Gas Museum, dating from 2013), as well as arousing public awareness about social issues. Built in 1857, this complex was originally a gasworks. Amid chimney stacks, furnaces and huge gas tanks, attesting to the site’s recent past, Technopolis is the venue for virtually daily must-visit events in the fields of music, cinema, theatre and the visual arts, such as Fashion Week or the Athens Jazz festival. 100 Pireos Street

Embros Theatre
A self-managed theatre with one of the liveliest cultural agendas in Athens. The Embros Theatre is housed in the former headquarters of one of the leading publishers in town. But, when the business went to seed, the owners were forced to sell the building, which was acquired by a popular theatre company and turned into one of the most frequented theatre venues in Athens. However, the venture was short-lived. The company split into two and the building fell into disuse. In 2010 the auditorium was acquired by the Athens City Council but, in view of it hosting zero activity, it was occupied by a group of actors. Ever since the theatre has been hosting all kinds of artistic and cultural events, as well as operating as a social centre. Riga Palamidou, 3

Former Gestapo Prison
Surprisingly, a place bearing such a historical burden as this former prison has been overlooked by most tourist guides. It is located on Korai Street, opposite the Panepistimio metro station. Visitors can venture into what once concealed a clandestine prison of the Gestapo. Now designated a Historical Memory Site, under the German occupation during World War II it was where communists and other members of the Greek left-wing were incarcerated. It makes for an emotionally charged visit, of which the highlights are the picture gallery and the carvings made by the revolutionaries during their confinement. 4 Korai Street

Booze Cooperativa
One of the trendiest venues in town. In the morning, this multi-purpose space operates as a specialty café and a refuge for the bearded crowd working on their laptops. After lunch, which in Greece ranges from three to five o’clock in the afternoon (and the Booze Cooperativa cuisine is highly recommended), it turns into a bustling bar and stays that way until the wee hours. But, the great draw of Booze Cooperativa is the exhibition room hidden in the basement. On display in this gallery are works by some of the most evocative names from the local alternative art scene, while the theatre room on the floor above is the first choice for upcoming, alternative Athenian playwrights. 57 Kolokotroni Street

Αvli
After so much art and culture sightseeing, the time always comes to replenish your strength. And, talking of good food, there is nothing quite like Greek cuisine. There are dozens of spots where you can get delicious traditional Greek fare in Athens, but Avli tops them all and it’s set in one of the most picturesque yards in the city where you can taste all the homemade Greek specialities. And, in between helpings of keftedakia, loukaniko and moussaka, be a daredevil and have a few sips of ouzo. Locally made, this is one of the most popular drinks in Greece, characterised by its high alcohol content (from 37% to 50% proof), strong flavour and liquorice aroma. 12 Agiou Dimitriou

Monastiraki Flea Market
All trips tend to end off with a round of shopping. And, when you’ve been on an alternative tour of Athens, this should be negotiated at the Monastiraki Flea Market. Monastiraki is renowned as one of the major shopping hubs in Athens, and it also features numerous boutiques. However, on Sundays, this area, particularly along Ermou Street, becomes one huge flea market where you can pick up practically anything, from antiques to out-of-print books, vinyls, second-hand clothing, furniture… This rounds off your perfect Sunday morning programme, after having tucked in to a whopping breakfast of cheese or spinach pastry, washed down with a Milko (the Greek Milo chocolate drink) or a huge frappé coffee (although this is the speciality in Thessaloniki).

Texto de Oriol Rodríguez