This is my fifth trip to Spain.

You would think by now I would have a pretty good idea of what Spain is.

I don’t.

Or perhaps more accurately, I am beginning to understand that there may be no single answer.

Spain is not one place.

It is a collection of very different places that happen to share a country.

That has become especially clear to me on this trip.

Over the years, I have been to Madrid.

Barcelona.

Sevilla.

Córdoba.

Granada and the Alhambra.

Bilbao and San Sebastián.

Santiago and Galicia.

Mallorca.

And now Valencia, Alicante and the Costa Blanca.

Each time, I think I am coming back to Spain.

And each time, I discover another Spain.

 

Galicia, in the northwest, feels almost Celtic.

Green.

Wet.

Rugged.

Seafood everywhere.

Pulpo.

Pilgrims walking toward Santiago.

A language of its own.

A landscape that could not feel more different from the dry Mediterranean coast where we are staying now.

Then there is the Basque Country.

Bilbao and San Sebastián feel different again.

Different food.

Different architecture.

Different language.

Different sense of identity.

Pintxos instead of tapas.

A culture that feels intensely local and distinctly its own.

Then Andalusia.

Sevilla.

Córdoba.

Granada.

 

Moorish architecture.

Courtyards.

Heat.

Flamenco.

The Alhambra.

An entirely different historical layering.

Madrid is something else again.

Grand boulevards.

Museums.

Government.

Royal history.

Nightlife.

The Prado.

A capital city that feels European in a way that is quite different from the coastal regions.

Barcelona, of course, has its own personality, architecture, language and politics.

Mallorca feels like another world entirely.

And now we have spent three weeks in Calpe on the Costa Blanca, between Alicante and Valencia.

This Spain is Mediterranean.

Mountains dropping toward the sea.

Beaches.

Rice fields.

Paella.

Padel courts.

Promenades filled with families late into the evening.

A remarkable mixture of Spaniards and foreigners who have decided this is where they want to spend part — or all — of their lives.

We have driven into the mountains.

We have explored Guadalest.

We have gone through the rice fields around the Albufera.

We have been to El Palmar.

We have eaten and cooked paella.

We have taken Spanish lessons and dance lessons.

I went looking for pickleball and discovered padel.

We attended a local Rotary lunch and talked with a former mayor of Calpe.

And after five trips to Spain, I found myself thinking:

Where has this Spain been hiding?

Of course, it wasn’t hiding at all.

I simply had not been here.

That may be one of the most interesting things about this country.

The differences are not merely scenery.

They run much deeper.

Several regions have their own languages alongside Spanish.

Catalan in Catalonia.

Galician in Galicia.

Basque in the Basque Country.

Valencian here in the Valencian Community.

Food changes dramatically from region to region.

So does architecture.

Climate.

Music.

Local history.

Even the way people seem to identify themselves.

Ask someone where they are from and the answer may be much more specific than simply “Spain.”

Galician.

Basque.

Catalan.

Valencian.

And those distinctions matter.

For an American, this takes some getting used to.

We certainly have regional differences at home.

Texas is not Vermont.

Seattle is not Miami.

New Orleans is not Denver.

But Spain seems to compress an extraordinary amount of cultural variation into a relatively small geographic space — about the size of Texas.

Within the same country, I have walked through wet green Galicia with pilgrims heading toward Santiago, eaten pintxos in San Sebastián, wandered through the Moorish courtyards of Andalusia, and driven through rice fields outside Valencia on roads barely wide enough for a tractor and our rental car.

You can take a train for a few hours and arrive somewhere with different food, different architecture, a different language and a noticeably different sense of place.

And yet, somehow, it is all unmistakably Spain.

The crowded plazas.

The importance of food and family.

The late evenings.

The willingness to linger.

The layers of history everywhere you turn.

The pieces are remarkably different, but they still belong to the same puzzle.

That may help explain why Spain attracts so many repeat visitors.

You can come back without really coming back to the same place.

A week in Madrid tells you almost nothing about Galicia.

A trip to Barcelona does not prepare you for Andalusia.

The beaches of Mallorca do not tell you what the Basque Country feels like.

And three weeks on the Costa Blanca have introduced me to yet another version.

Maybe that is why, after five visits, Spain still feels unfinished to me.

Not unfinished in the sense that something is missing.

Unfinished in the sense that I am nowhere near done discovering it.

I used to think that returning to the same country meant seeing more of something I already knew.

Spain has changed that idea for me.

Here, returning can mean starting over.

A different region.

A different language.

A different landscape.

A different table.

A different history.

A different Spain.

Five trips ago, I thought traveling to Spain meant deciding which Spanish cities I wanted to see.

Now I think the more interesting question is:

Which Spain do I want to experience next?

And perhaps that is the best reason I can think of to come back again.

Not because I have seen Spain.

Because I haven’t.