Tell an American that a beloved Spanish snack is a piece of bread topped with chocolate, drizzled with olive oil, and sprinkled with salt, and you will usually get a wrinkled nose. Olive oil on chocolate? Salt on a sweet snack? It sounds like a mistake, three or four things that seem to have no …
A reader wrote to us last month convinced that a particular Italian region had just opened a special investor visa for Americans, with a new lower threshold, a limited window, an urgent reason to act. The claim is everywhere in the relocation corners of the internet, and it is false in every part. There is …
While the beer tents of Munich are full and the world is thinking about Germany for a few short weeks, there is one dish worth making at home that captures the whole cozy, hearty spirit of the season better than anything you could order from a menu. It is called kasespatzle, and it is, quite …
For years, Portugal was the answer. Warm enough. Pretty enough. Western enough. Cheap enough, or at least cheap enough compared with the American places people were trying to leave. It had the right light, the right food, the right old-city texture, and just enough international familiarity that Americans could imagine themselves living there without feeling …
There is a small, dark, almost black bean grown in the Basque town of Tolosa that the people of that region hold in a reverence bordering on the religious, and once you have tasted it slow-cooked into a deep, glossy stew, you understand exactly why. The Basques do not merely eat these beans, they venerate …
France has its famous boeuf bourguignon, the beef stew braised in red wine that everyone knows. But just to the north, in Belgium and the cold, flat, beer-loving corner of France called Flanders, they make something that many people love just as much and far fewer have heard of, a rich, dark, glossy beef stew …
The single American woman in her mid-sixties, selling a Tampa house for somewhere around $340,000, moving to Sevilla on the Spanish Non-Lucrative Visa, and arriving at age 68 with approximately $215,000 in remaining assets, represents a specific kind of American retirement decision that has been growing over the past several years. The pattern exists because …
A €24,000 ruin in Puglia is the kind of sentence that makes Americans feel like they’ve found a loophole in the universe. You can almost hear the follow-up: “So you’re telling me I can buy a house in Italy for the price of a used car?” Yes. You can buy the structure. What you’re actually …
On any Spanish beach in summer you will see something that quietly astonishes Americans. A woman of seventy, in a swimsuit, walking to the water with the unhurried ease of someone who has never once wondered whether she is allowed to be there. No cover-up clutched around her, no towel held strategically, no visible calculation …
You are standing at an ATM in Rome, or Barcelona, or Prague, asking it for two hundred euros, and just before it hands over your cash it asks one last helpful-looking question. Would you like to be charged in euros, or in your own dollars? Dollars sounds safer, since at least you will know exactly …
There is a Basque stew with one of the loveliest origin stories in Spanish cooking. Out on the fishing boats of the Bay of Biscay, the cook aboard would take the day’s catch, some potatoes, an onion, a few peppers, and turn them into a single hearty pot to feed the hungry crew, and they …
Why Bother Knowing This? When you visit or move to Europe for the first time, you’ll encounter all sorts of small yet meaningful differences in everyday life. From kitchen appliances to bathroom essentials, European homes sometimes feature objects Americans either rarely use or haven’t even heard of. But these items are more than just quirky …