Late Evening at the Rambla: a winter dispatch from Alicante

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Heladería Borgonesse, Rambla Méndez Núñez, Alicante, January 2026

Text and Photo © 2026 JE Nilsson, CM Cordeiro

Travel  ·  Alicante, Spain  ·  January 2026

Late Evening at the Rambla: a winter dispatch from Alicante

We had not planned to stop. But the light from Borgonesse was warm, the evening was mild, and it seemed like the right thing to do.

January 2026

Alicante in January is relatively quiet. The Rambla Méndez Núñez, which in summer fills with bodies and noise, opens up in winter to reveal itself: a wide, mosaic-paved boulevard lined with bare-branched orange trees, lit softly at night, designed at a pace that invites you to slow down. We had been walking it for a while, not going anywhere in particular, which is perhaps the best way to get to know a city.

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TP Ristorante, Alicante: A Late Afternoon in the Palacio Salvetti

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Text and Photo © 2026 JE Nilsson, CM Cordeiro

There are restaurants you stumble into and restaurants you return to. TP Ristorante, on Carrer Castaños in the heart of Alicante’s old town, belongs to the second category from the first visit.

The building is the Palacio Salvetti, constructed in 1887, and its foundations are still very much present: high ceilings, generous arched windows opening onto the street, stone and plaster that have absorbed a good deal of Alicante history. What the current owners have done with the interior is worth pausing over before you even sit down.

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Alicante in January: The Mediterranean’s Best-Kept Off-Season Secret

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Alicante, January 2026

Text and Photo © 2026 JE Nilsson, CM Cordeiro

There is a particular kind of pleasure in arriving somewhere and realising you have timed it perfectly. Alicante in January is not the city at its loudest, and that is precisely the point.

The days run to around 16 degrees Celsius with nearly nine and a half hours of sunshine, and rain is almost theoretical, perhaps one day in ten. The crowds of summer are gone, the light is clear and low, and the city belongs, more or less, to itself. You get to slip in alongside it.

The city, experienced in layers

Alicante did not arrive at its present shape quickly. The city sits on foundations that span Iberian, Roman, Moorish, and Spanish colonial periods, each leaving something legible in the streetplan and stonework. The old town, known as El Barrio, climbs the rock beneath the castle in a pattern that follows Moorish-era paths. The Explanada de España, the grand promenade along the waterfront, was laid out in the nineteenth century and is paved with some six and a half million marble tiles in a wave pattern that local craftsmen still maintain. Walking it slowly in January, with nobody particularly in a hurry, you begin to understand that this is a city accustomed to its own beauty and not especially concerned with performing it.

Castillo de Santa Bárbara occupies the summit of Mount Benacantil, a rocky outcrop that rises 166 metres above sea level directly above the city. The site has been fortified since at least the ninth century, when it served Moorish rulers of the region. What stands today dates largely from the sixteenth century, built and expanded under Spanish Habsburg rule following the Reconquista. From the upper ramparts in January, with the air clear and the haze of summer completely absent, the view extends across the coastline in both directions, the mountains of the interior close and detailed, the marina directly below. It is the kind of view that asks for quiet rather than commentary.

The marina

From our vantage point above, the marina is the natural next destination. Yachts moored in the winter calm, the water a deep and steady blue, the Paseo del Puerto running along its edge wide and unhurried. In summer this waterfront fills quickly, boats come and go in numbers, and the pace is a different thing entirely. In January you can walk the full length of it, stop wherever you like, and take in the surrounding landscape at a genuinely languid pace. The castle above, the mountains inland, the Mediterranean ahead. It is a generous composition and January gives you the time to notice it.

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Pineapple tarts and pirate coins Pieces of Eight

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Making pineapple tarts in semblance of Spanish ‘Pieces of Eight’ colonial ‘pirate money’ or cob coins, to the value of eight reals, along the west coast of Sweden.
Text & Photo © CM Cordeiro & JE Nilsson 2020

Pineapple tarts, the making.

I last wrote about making pineapple tarts in March 2010. My thoughts then were focused on the method of making pineapple tarts. The open-faced tarts with a cross over the top was something I grew up learning to make in the Eurasian household. As a child, I remember that there were many more rules from my mother about how to make pineapple tarts. It had to be shaped in a certain manner, crossed over the top and pinched over the crosses in a certain manner. I thought these were rules of good, and proper baking. I was never told why we made tarts in the semblance of a coin with a cross on top. I always thought it was a show of kitchen craftsmanship and that you tried to make the tart as pretty as possible.

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Pintxos, a culinary signature of Basque Country, Spain

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I sit in the shared dining space of the stalls of the market place at the Mercado de la Ribera, Bilbao, Basque Country, Spain. The glass of deep burgundy Viña Real Crianza 2014, is a wine made in the region just south of Bilbao.
Text & Photo © JE Nilsson, CM Cordeiro 2017

I resesarched the weather forecast ahead of landing in Bilbao, a city located north of Spain in the autonomous Basque region, Bay of Biscay. It was advised that the days in Bilbao during the RESER 2017 conference would be rainy and I should bring an umbrella. I had not however read up too much on the culinary scene of Basque Country Spain. I assumed it would be plenty of tapas, sangria and wines, perhaps much like that to be found in Barcelona, when I was there for the International Faculty Program (IFP) 2011 program at IESE Business School. I was pleasantly surprised that it was not so much tapas as pintxos to be discovered as a social event with the intention that one could move from eatery to eatery, exploring in one evening, different atmospheres of different places*. If living in Bilbao or Basque Country Spain in general, I would expect to slow down the nomadic pintxos eating, taking one place for one evening at a time, if not making your own creative version at home. And instead of sangria to the food, Txakoli, a very dry white wine produced in the region, was suggested as accompanying drink to pintxos.

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Guernica, Province of Biscay, Basque Country Spain

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Guernica (Basque name Gernika) Town Hall, Basque Country Spain .>
Text & Photo © JE Nilsson, CM Cordeiro 2017

About an hour’s train ride away from Bilbao, Spain, is the town of Guernica or Gernika-Lumo. Basque Country outside of the provincial capital influences and its industries is heterogenous. Passing by in a train, a fleeting glance could make one label agricultural Basque region as ‘rural’ or ‘traditional’, termed as such because these places have either remained untouched by urbanisation, with no evident applications of modern technologies and/or have not reached mass consumerism [1]. But a closer study indicates that alongisde a mixed agricultural economy is an impressive inshore fishing sector supported by small and medium enterprises complements local agriculture, whose economic influence is impactful enough to make changes to the daily lifestyles of its people from how they allocate time between work and leisure, and what forms of entertainment they prefer [1].

For Gernika-Lumo, not a hundred years have passed since the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s. Under the soft drizzle of the late summer’s rain, Guernica, or Gernika which is the Basque spelling, looks very different than anyone more familiar with Picasso’s representation or indeed the old journal films of the late 1930s would have lead anyone to expect.The bombing of Guernica on 26 Apr. 1937 was made on the personal request of Francisco Franco, who at the time enjoyed military support from nazi Germany and fascist Italy. The devastation of Guernica was an experiment and a way to decide in a discussion within the new Nazi Luftwaffe, if an enough horrible attack on defenseless civilians would lead them to give up and surrender, or to just fight harder. This was the first intentional terror bombing of civilians in the history of modern warfare. The torn civilians of Guernica did give up. The lesson was learnt, and this dragon seed led to names of events that we know more of such as Dresden, Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

At the time, the bombing of Guernica created a worldwide uproar and made visible the divide between the power hungry and the artistic, more civilized part of humanity. The latter are best represented by Picasso’s masterpiece Guernica, which in my view, might well also have been the inspiration to the architecture of the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum.

Today, Guernica has become an international symbol of peace [2] due the senseless violence and waste its people endured during the hours of uninterrupted destruction. The onslaught left 70% of the town completely destroyed and most of the rest, seriously damaged. Guernica was in the early 1900s, a small market city with hardly more than 6,000 inhabitants. Some accounts say that almost one third of them perished in the attack that went on in wave after wave with different kinds of bombs, from light to heavy to fire bombs. The central idea was to force people into shelter, and then set fire to the rubble. Today, the city is inhabited with slightly more than 16,000 people.

For someone coming from outside of Spain, I find the beautifully kept surroundings and quiet streets difficult to reconcile with its painful past.

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Orange almond cake, petite madeleine Escribà Barcelona

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Orange Cake 091a 598

Spanish orange almond cake: a variation of the sémola bizcocho de almendras.
Text & Photo © CM Cordeiro 2014

It was the search for that perfect xocolata calenta in Barcelona 2011 on a weekday morning that found me wandering the streets of El Raval in the neighbourhood of Ciutat Vella, also known as Barrio Xinès or Barrio Chino, close to the quarters of Barri Gòtic, that landed me tasting the most wonderful variation of the Eurasian semolina almond cake, infused with orange.

Working on the batter of this cake, I can’t help but return to the words of the protagonist in Proust’s Swann’s Way, the first of seven volumes to À la recherche du temps perdu (published between 1913-1927), on when the petite madeleine, crumb soaked in tea, touched his lips: Continue reading “Orange almond cake, petite madeleine Escribà Barcelona” →

BARCELONA

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Timelapse of Barcelona by Alexandr Kravtsov. Just beautiful.

As David Bickley wrote, of A.Kravtsov’s 480gb of images:

“What’s even more impressive is what Alexandr went through to make this piece. In his words it took “a broken camera, lost flash drive, near 100 subway rides, 24 000 photos, endless hours of post production and rendering and 480 gigabytes of material.” That’s insane!”

BARCELONA. MOTION TIMELAPSE from Alexandr Kravtsov on Vimeo.

Antonio Gaudí: Casa Batlló and Casa Milà

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Barcelona is a city that can truly inspire and touch the soul of a visitor. Not in the least because of its education institutions, of which I especially was taken in by IESE, but rather by looking at what is silently said through its culture, art and architecture.

Antonio Gaudí is one of the many geniuses of Catalonian descent that have left their unforgettable imprint on the city. His art speaks loudly, but only to those who can listen with their eyes and peek into each wrought iron entanglement and crack of a mosaic, rearranged to a new meaning.

In this post, a walk-through of Casa Batlló and Casa Milà.

Casa Batlló

There’s a constant stream of people to visit these buidlings, so having some quiet time whilst walking around the conserved apartments is not quite possible. Still something fun to do and worth discovering.
Text & Photo © JE Nilsson, CM Cordeiro 2011-2013

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