San Sebastián in autumn: mushrooms, film stars and the best eating of the year
Locals will tell you a secret: autumn is when Donostia eats best. Wild mushrooms, the film festival, quiet bars and the start of cider season. Here's your guide.
Ask any chef in this city their favorite month to cook and you’ll hear the same answers: October. November. Maybe late September. Never August.
Summer gets the crowds, but autumn gets the food. If you’re the kind of traveler who plans a trip around eating — and if you’re reading my blog, you are — this is your season. Let me make the case.
The mushrooms arrive
When the first rains come, the hills of Gipuzkoa turn into a pantry. The bars’ chalkboards fill up with hongos (porcini) and perretxikos, usually cooked the way we treat all great produce here: barely. Olive oil, garlic, maybe an egg yolk on top. If you visit between late September and November and don’t eat a plate of wild mushrooms with egg yolk, we need to talk.
It’s also the season of proper, slow food: alubias de Tolosa — the almost-black beans that get their own festival in November — game, roasted peppers, and the first pots of the year that simmer for hours. This is the Basque cooking I grew up with; summer shows off, autumn feeds you.
September: the city rolls out the carpet
For a week in late September, the San Sebastián International Film Festival takes over and the city gets a little glamorous — think Sundance, but with better snacks and everyone dressed slightly nicer. Hollywood has been coming here since 1953. You might queue for a pintxo next to someone you saw on a poster that morning. Nobody makes a fuss; it’s very Basque to pretend not to notice.
The first two Sundays of September also bring the rowing regattas on La Concha — whole towns come to cheer their boat crews, flags everywhere, and the bars do their best business of the year before noon.
And then… the calm
By mid-October, something wonderful happens: the city goes back to being ours, and yours if you’re here. You get the same bars, the same bay, the better produce — without the August queues. Tables are easier, conversations are longer, and the light over La Concha turns gold in a way summer visitors never see.
Autumn is cooking season
This is the time of year when my Traditional Cooking class is at its absolute best — because the market is at its best. Four hours, a walk through La Bretxa while I show you what the season brought in, and then a proper multi-course Basque lunch you cooked yourselves, with wine, indoors, while the weather does whatever it wants outside.
And if you’re planning further ahead: winter here means cider season, which deserves — and will get — its own post. Autumn first. Book the flight for October; your stomach will thank you.