This is a new thing set up by the Spanish Hospitality Federation (FEHR) and the Spanish Federation of Travel Journalists and Writers (FEPET) with the aim of promoting Spanish tourism through its food and wine.

As this is the first year, we’ll have to wait and see exactly what it will involve, but expect lots of opportunities to find out more about the local specialities – and eat them, obviously. Sounds like a pretty good excuse to me.

You can find out more about it all on their website which presumably will have an English version when things get properly underway. The site is already a good source for information on Spanish food and wine tourism and gastronomic events.

Breakfast should be eaten out. Elbow your way to the counter at a local bar and choose whichever combination of stodge and sugar takes your fancy. Toast – white bread of course – is plastered with butter, browned on the griddle, then served with more butter and jam. Croissants and other pastries are also on offer, but for the true Madrid breakfast experience you should really have churros – sugar-coated deep-fried strips of batter – which must be dunked into coffee or, even better, thick hot chocolate. In Madrid, thicker tubes called porras, which taste not unlike Yorkshire pudding, are also very popular.

To do things properly, this nutritionist’s nightmare should be accompanied by a generous shot of brandy or Chinchon anisette, or even  – why not go the whole hog? – both together to create a sol y sombra.

Thus fortified, you should be ready to face an hour in the Prado. When your blood-sugar level plummets at around 11 0′clock, join the rest of the population back in the bar for more coffee and a toasted sandwich or a wedge of tortilla.

A swift hour’s sightseeing is perfectly punctuated by the hora del aperitivo. This deeply-ingrained ritual should be experienced in a traditional bodega or tasca. You can drink beer, wine or sherry, but the purist’s choice is the locally-produced draught red vermouth with a splash of soda – vermut con sel. A dish of olives, some boquerones en vinagre and a few slivers of jamon iberico will get you thinking about the serious business to come: lunch.

Gastrobars and designer restaurants may be all the rage these days, but the culinary soul of the city lies in unpretentious, no-nonsense restaurants – although it has to be said they are disappearing fast. For ultimate authenticity, try and find somewhere with a frosted-glass frontage with half a pig, three aubergines and two tins of sardines arranged into an artless still life, or go upmarket with a traditional establishment with checked cloths and a wood-burning oven. Have the menu del dia, which is not only cheap but also saves you having to tax your brain deciding between too many options. And it includes wine.

After ploughing through the obligatory three courses, it is good manners to finish off your meal with an espresso or two and a copita (the diminutive form could not be more inappropriate) of brandy or pacharan, a powerful concoction made from sloes and aniseed that tastes not unlike cough mixture.

By this time, your cultural itinerary is probably looking less appealing, so head instead for the Retiro park, where a leisurely stroll around the lake will help the digestion along and prepare you for the next calorific onslaught: merienda. This involves a large coffee and a slab of cake or toast, or perhaps tortitas con nata  - a platter of pancakes, syrup and whipped cream from a can. Or you can just go for more chocolate y churros.

As evening falls, a little light shopping up the Calle Fuencarral is followed by a few sprightly laps around the tapas bars, and before you know it, it’s ten o’clock and time for dinner, which should be an entertaining, highly social affair. Madrilenians like their restaurants noisy and lively, so choose somewhere busy and informal for optimum authenticity.

It will be well past midnight by the time you leave the restaurant, which counts as early in Madrid. And of course, you can’t go to bed on a full stomach anyway, as that would be very unhealthy indeed. So repair to a bar or pavement cafe for a few cocktails, gintonics or cubatas (rum, whisky or vodka with coke), after which your energy level will surge and you’ll be skipping off to the clubs to dance the night away with the rest of the population.

All too soon, dawn is breaking and it’s time to wind down and stave off the worst of the hangover with a comforting snack of chocolate y churros before going home for a few hours’ sleep and a drastic rejigging of the next day’s plans.

Girona10 is a special initiative taking place on January 14/15 with all sorts of discounts and events, which look pretty tempting to me.

From 11pm UK time tonight (Jan 3), there will be 1000 hotel rooms available for €10 for Saturday, January 14. You can book directly on the hotel websites, or through booking engines.

There will also be set menus on offer at 50 restaurants for €10, as well as free entry to museums and discounts all over the city.

Market stalls will be offering tastings of local produce – and no doubt the odd glass of wine and cava will be handed out too.

Shops are going to stay open till 10pm, so it should be a lively evening what with one thing and another.

More information here – not in English yet but the list of participating places is self-explanatory.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot
and never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
and auld lang syne?

In the programme, however, John Sergeant and the contributors talked about an earlier version by Burns, which went as follows:

Should auld acquaintance be forgot
and never thought upon?
Let’s hae a waught o’ Malaga
for auld lang syne

They explained that, in the 18th century, Malaga wine was really popular in England and Scotland. Now there’s a custom worth reviving. I’ll still be toasting the New Year with cava tonight, but a glass of Malaga as an aperitivo tomorrow morning sounds like a good idea. I’ve been saying for ages that it’s about time Malaga wine came back into fashion.

Tortilla at Bar Nestor in San Sebastian

Should you ever find yourself marauding around the pintxos bars in the Parte Vieja in San Sebastian at one o´clock in the afternoon or eight o´clock in the evening, you might wonder why there are people spilling out of the door of Bar Nestor on Calle Pescaderia.

It may look pretty similar to many of the other bars but, like a lot of the places in the grid of lanes, it has a speciality that draws those in the know. And that speciality is a gooey tortilla – that miracle of Spanish cuisine that, when done well, is so much more than a sum of its simple parts: onions, potatoes, eggs and olive oil.

At Nestor, the secret is the caramelised onions, together with good quality potatoes and oil, and fresh eggs. That´s it. They only make one at lunchtime and one in the evening, which is randomly sliced at odd angles – no pristine segments here – and served to 16 or 17 lucky customers. You need to get there a bit earlier and let them know you want some.

Nestor – that’s him with the moustache and the striped shirt – and his wife Piluka (she does the expert slicing) have been running the bar for more than 30 years.

They don’t go in for having the counter groaning under loads of platters of pintxos. As well as the tortilla, they make an amazing tomato salad, great grilled peppers, top-quality Iberico ham and huge slabs of steak, which is served in slices to share.

There is a lot of fancy food in San Sebastian, but sometimes the simplest things are the best.

The Catalans never say they are going to pick, collect, gather or even forage for mushrooms. Oh no, they are always going hunting. And that is not ‘hunt’ as in looking for something, but as in pursue and capture  – it’s two different verbs in both Catalan and Spanish.

Owing to the lack of rain, it is however not exactly looking like a bumper year for mushrooms. That is my excuse for the rather paltry selection in my basket, although it undoubtedly had more to do with my lack of skill or any idea of what I was doing. But it was certainly fun. I really can’t explain why peering at the forest floor, brushing branches out of the way, shoud be so enjoyable; it’s just one of those mysteries in life I am happy to leave unsolved.

I was on a hillside somewhere outside Gombren, a little village in a bucolic landscape eight miles from Ripoll, the main town in the area. Gombren may be tiny, but it does happen to have a rather good restaurant, Fonda Xesc. Housed in the village inn, which dates back to 1730, it is run by Xesc Rovira, who was awarded a Michelin star in 2009.

Fortunately Xesc knows rather a lot about mushroom hunting, and after a coffee on the terrace outside the restaurant, he handed me a basket and we set off for the woods. Foraging about in the undergrowth, Xesc was soon finding some fine specimens. At first I couldn’t seem to see any at all, but gradually my eyes learned what to look for, and I started spotting the odd mushroom and pouncing on it with glee.

Back at the restaurant, our baskets were emptied out in the kitchen and soon our mushrooms were sizzling away on the grill. I was even allowed to push them around a bit with a spatula. Me! In a  Michelin-starred kitchen! Then the sous chef told me not to fiddle with them so much, just to leave them be. Oh well. I won’t give up the day job just yet. If I even had a day job to give up that is….

“We try to make the most of each ingredient,” Xesc said. “Ceps have a slight hazelnut flavour, so we serve them with a hazelnut cream.”

I need hardly say they were the best – and freshest – mushrooms I’ve ever tasted.

Have a look at Costa Brava Pirineu de Girona for more information and ideas about travelling in the region.

The beer tasted fresh and fruity. ‘The buckwheat grown in the volcanic soil has a distinctive flavour,’ Pep said. ‘Well, everything that grows here has a particular flavour actually. It’s because the soil absorbs water, making it very fertile, but the excess drains away naturally, creating ideal conditions. Put that together with the unique mineral properties of the soil and you’ve got some pretty tasty produce.’

Pep was busy rubbing tomato on whopping  great slabs of rustic bread. ‘One tomato should be enough for six slices, because they’re so juicy.’  He poured – no messing about with drizzling here – some olive oil onto the bread and served it with slices of fuet and llangonissa, two of the local types of cured pork sausage, along with ripe figs – some of the last of the season. ‘I buy the sausage from a guy called Jordi at the market in Olot. He only has his stall once a week, but you should see the queues.’

But that was just the beginning. He was soon bashing up onions and soaking them in water before mixing them with plum tomatoes to create an incredibly tasty salad. The delicate haricot beans grown nearby in Santa Pau were combined with shredded salt cod to make empedrat, another traditional dish. ‘Until relatively recently, it was difficult to get fresh fish here. Before the decent roads were built, the coast was five hours’ away – it’s only an hour now.’

‘The concept of volcanic cuisine is to put the landscape in a pot,’ Pep explained, as he knocked up a creamy rice dish using some just-picked chanterelle mushrooms. ‘The rice is carnaroli, the Italian variety, but it’s grown near the coast in Pals.’

The volcanic cuisine movement began in 1994, when a group of local chefs came together to reclaim their extraordinary produce and traditional recipes. Although family cooking is at its heart, Michelin-starred restaurants in La Garrotxa, such as Les Cols, are leading exponents of the concept.

Now Pep was pouring ratafia, a liqueur made with green walnuts, over bread sprinkled with sugar. ‘It’s typical of what my parents and grandparents used to eat at village festivals.’

Pep himself started working in a restaurant kitchen at the age of 10, and later worked for 13 years at El Celler de Can Roca, which has three Michelin stars and is one of the best restaurants in the world. Now he passionately promotes the cuisine of La Garrotxa, reviving old recipes and endeavouring to prevent local varieties of fruit and vegetables from dying out.

His many fans include Ferran Adria and Carlo Petrini, the founder of the Slow Food movement, who was incredulous that the produce of La Garrotxa is not better known. At the rate Pep Nogue is going to bring the delights of his region to the wider world, I can’t see that being the situation for too much longer.

‘Any more of that Keks beer going?’ I asked hopefully.

Have a look at Costa Brava Pirineu de Girona, who organised my volcanic walk and lunch, for more information and ideas about travelling in the region.

The station is just one example of the city’s rich heritage of Art Nouveau architecture, known in Spanish as modernismo. A century or so ago, the city was  expanding fast as a result of the booming agricultural trade, which developed after the wine industry was destroyed by the phylloxera bug. Oranges were – and still are – the mainstay of this economy, and feature in the decoration of lots of buildings.

At the station, great ceramic bunches of them adorn the facade. Inside the central market, a short walk away, I gazed up at the main dome, where oranges are painted on white tiles. On the stalls, there were heaps of the real things, on sale for next nothing. I sat on a stool at the kiosk just outside the entrance and drank a big glass of zingy juice, squeezed in front of me, before heading for the smart shopping strets off the Calle Colon. There were more oranges here too.

On Calle Cirilo Amoros, I came upon the Casa Ferrer, a magnificent town house which is more commonly known as the House of the Oranges. Inside, orange metal discs adorn the carved doors, banisters and every other available surface.

Nearby, on the corner of Calle Jorge Juan, another Art Nouveau market has been revamped and filled with cafes. Designed by Francisco Mora, a friend of Gaudi, the Mercado de Colon is an open-sided iron structure with elaborate brick walls at each end. The mosaic and ceramic decoration features ears of corn, bunches of grapes, and, of course, lots of oranges.

The City of Arts & Sciences is a startling string of structures which has transformed a neglected part of Valencia between the centre and the sea. The elegant scheme was designed by Santiago Calatrava, who was born in the city and has clearly thrown his heart and soul into this astoundingly ambitious project, which is a 21st-century version of the great medieval cathedrals.

Architecture that looks spectacular in photographs can be a bit of a disappointment in reality, but every time I go to Valencia I just stand there, gawping slack-jawed at the structures sparkling in the sunshine, looking more like sculptures than buildings.

I have been observing the development of the City of Arts and Sciences for more than a decade now. Every time I go to Valencia another bit has been added on.

The first section was the planetarium, called the Hemisferic. The structure is like a human eye, with the auditorium in the eyeball. Visible as a semicircle by day, at night it is reflected in the surrounding white mosaic pool to form a perfect sphere.

Next to is the Principe Felipe Science Museum, a lopsided pavilion that seems to be just light and air, held up by a zigzagging mesh of tautly-strung white ribbons. It looks like the skeleton of a dainty prehistoric monster.

It is clear that Calatrava was inspired by Gaudi, as chevrons, parabolic arches and fragmented tiles feature throughout the complex, which also includes an opera house and an aquarium, the latter designed by Felix Candela.

The opera house, the Palau de les Arts, is contained within a diamond-shaped frame, with a curving spine arching over the top of the structure like a gigantic fish bone. It is hard to believe that concrete can look so soft and light, but that is the genius of Calatrava.

Along with about two dozen others, I had got on a boat in the harbour of Sant Carles de la Ràpita, a fishing town in the Ebro Delta nature reserve, halfway between Barcelona and Valencia, for a morning’s cruise across the bay. A wetland area where the River Ebro flows into the Mediterranean, the nature reserve is a popular base for activity holidays – particularly birdwatching, kayaking, kitesurfing and cycling.

We sailed down the coast, past a string of beaches, then turned out to sea towards the Punta de la Banya, a peninsula of saltpans inhabited by flamingoes, which is linked to the mainland by a spit of golden sand. After an hour or so, the boat turned back towards the shore and approached a line of wooden platforms which stretched for about a mile across the Mediterranean. Thick ropes dangled down into the depths from the platforms, on which around a million oysters and three million mussels are grown every year.

We got off the boat and climbed up the steps onto one of the platforms, where trays of oysters were laid out on trestle tables. A smiling man was deftly shucking them with a small knife. Handing one to me, he introduced himself as Agustí Bertomeu, chairman of the local union of oyster and mussel producers. “We don’t think of oysters as a luxury down here at all. We eat them all year round, and sell them for the same price as the mussels,” he said, pouring me a glass of cava, produced a bit further up the coast.

Oysters may be everyday fare here on the Delta, but their quality is certainly appreciated further afield and they are exported by the truckload to France.

I wondered why they are so coveted. “It is the mixture of the sea with the fresh water from the Ebro river, which is very rich in nutrients,” Agustí explained. “This combination gives them a distinctive flavour and silky texture. They don’t even need a drop of lemon juice.”

As the trays emptied, the crew were busy at a stove at the end of the deck, tossing dozens of mussels in olive oil. “We don’t put any sauce on them here”, said Agustí. ”We don’t want anything to detract from the flavour.”

I tried a couple. I had another swig of cava. I had a few more, and had to agree that he was quite right.