Why Spain makes for the perfect flight-free destination

“Why would you do that?”

It’s early on in my trip, standing in astonishment as I watch dolphins lithely bopping above the sparkling waves in front of Brittany Ferries’ new Salamanca vessel, that I think back to the words of my taxi driver and smile.

He was talking about my method of travel – wondering aloud why, as a woman of apparently sound mind, I would voluntarily opt to sail to northern Spain, a crossing of around 35 hours, rather than catch a two-hour flight. I had answered his questions as best I could on the swift drive from Portsmouth station to the ferry port, explaining that the climate crisis had forced me to reassess my travel choices and swap planes for trains, boats, coaches et al. But, by the time he dropped me off, he seemed no less perplexed.

“Have a good trip?” he said, his voice tilting up at the end in an invisible question mark as if he couldn’t quite believe such a thing possible. I remained unfazed by his incredulity – it was hardly the first time I’d seen such a reaction to ditching flying – but I wished he could see this, now: my fellow passengers and I all silently agog at the cetacean spectacle before us, viewed from the Salamanca ferry’s floor-to-ceiling windows.

I am a full-on ferry convert these days. I sleep like a log in my cabin, or “travelling hotel room”, as I refer to it; I spend hours idly watching the seascape, dipping in and out of my book without the usual litany of distracting “pings” from messages and emails (my phone is, somewhat ironically, firmly in Flight Mode); I eat a proper meal on proper crockery in the onboard restaurant, alongside my chilled glass of Spanish white. For me, the holiday doesn’t start when I reach the city of Bilbao – it starts from the moment I set foot on the ship.

Of course, as enjoyable as the journey is, the destination is pretty spectacular too.­­ Or destinations, plural, I should say. For another joyful element of slow travel is this: it forces you to get creative with the itinerary. After all, if you’re going to spend 35 hours traversing the ocean, you may as well see a bit more of the place than just your drop-off point. So it is that I find myself planning a multi-stop adventure, taking in five different towns and cities across two countries in 10 days.

In fact, Bilbao doesn’t even make the cut on this particular trip – I visited in September – as I hop straight on a bus bound for…