A year of Europe’s sunlit uplands

The Rock of Gibraltar (photo © Sorin Colac / dreamstime . com)

In the closing hours of 2020, the Schengen area – comprising most of the European Union and some non-EU countries – suddenly gained a brand-new sunlit upland in the dramatic shape of Gibraltar.

The eleventh-hour agreement between London, Madrid and Brussels is one of many unintended consequences of Brexit. For three centuries this British Overseas Territory at the southern tip of the Iberian peninsula has been a symbol of the Britain’s strategic might. Overnight, the addition of Gibraltar has expanded the frontier-free zone, which now flows without impediment from Europa Point at the southern tip of Gibraltar to the Baltic and the Balkans.

Three decades ago, the Schengen brand was created in the deep south of Luxembourg – taking its name from the village of Schengen perched beside the Moselle where the Grand Duchy meets France and Germany. This convenient shorthand for a Europe without frontiers pops up on signs at airports – now including Gibraltar’s dramatic airport terminal, whose curves emulate the Rock on the other side of the runway. But that was where my post-Brexit tour of ten of Europe’s sunlit uplands ended. Let’s roll back to the beginning.

Luxembourg

“This will become a date anchored in history,” was how Luxembourg’s mobility ministry described 29 February 2020. “Just like the first step on the moon.”

Whether humanity will eventually see this momentous day as on a par with “the invention of the wheel, the arrival of the internet,” as the Grand Duchy’s ministers claimed, remains to be seen. But Luxembourg’s world-beating initiative to provide nationwide free public transport for all was a suitably sunny way to begin the uplands tour.

Trains, trams and buses ventured to every corner of the country, filled with non-paying passengers. From a post-Brexit British perspective, at least one certainty remains: however low the pound might sink, travellers can continue to enjoy Luxembourg’s topological drama without paying a penny.

The nation’s capital is sculpted by the Alzette and Pétrusse rivers, making any outward journey across the hills and valleys a joy. Luxembourg may be a country only the size of the English county of Oxfordshire, and slightly smaller than the Spanish island of Mallorca, but it packs a wealth of beauty and heritage.

Northern Ireland

Like Gibraltar, the six counties of the ancient province of Ulster located within the UK have become more European, not less. The two architects of Brexit, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, agreed a hitherto unthinkable geopolitical model that divides Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK and aligns it more closely with Ireland and the rest of the EU.

Citizens of Belfast, Ballymena and beyond will continue to enjoy valuable benefits of EU membership, from unrestricted import privileges to access to the pet passport scheme. In time, as the benefits of such status become apparent, I predict Northern Ireland will become something of a Celtic Singapore – and the one nation in the kingdom with a bright near future.

In 2020, though, the most immediate appeal to the traveller was that Northern Ireland eased its restrictions ahead of the rest of the UK. On 29 June it became the first location where leisure travel and overnight stays were permitted. I explored the Ards peninsula – a long, slender and hilly finger that naturally provides two coasts for the price of one: to the east, the Irish Sea (now complete with its notional border), to the west Strangford Lough. The name of this dolphin-shaped body of water, with just a narrow outlet to the sea, derives from the old Norse for “Strong Fjord”.

I took a dramatic drive along the peninsula to Portaferry, happily the ferry port at the end of the lough. An eight-minute voyage takes you across the narrow neck to the town of Strangford – with a postcard-perfect waterfront.

Ireland

As July began, travel restrictions across Europe were lifting – yet the UK had just imposed a bizarre blanket quarantine policy for incoming travellers, three months after everyone else. The broad impact of the order to self-isolate for two weeks was to prevent British holidaymakers going to Mediterranean countries with low infection rates and outdoor lifestyles. And it propelled me to County Donegal in the far north-west of Ireland, the only foreign country to dodge the ban.

My main goal was the hilly city of Derry, actually in Northern Ireland. The walls that wrap around the core remain a symbol of the conflict that has dogged the city for four centuries. Within them, Ireland’s first planned city; beyond, housing still bearing the scars of the Troubles. Local guides take tourists deep into the decades of division.

Pubs in the republic opened before those in Northern Ireland, so I took advantage of the open frontier legally to venture north to reach the “South”: the intra-Irish border does funny things, but these days it really doesn’t matter.

France

After 33 days the UK accepted that its blanket quarantine strategy was absurd and made another screeching U-turn on 10 July. I promptly flew to Nice and ascended to the sunny hills of Provence.

The south of France proved a haze of delight. After a few days of gentle warming among the pines and vines, I ventured down to the coast for a day of hiking and hitching that finally led back to the airport.

Portugal

As a long-term student of risk, I have watched both individuals and governments make profoundly irrational decisions during the coronavirus crisis. Almost continuously from mid-March to the end of the year, mainland Portugal was deemed “unacceptably high risk” for British holidaymakers because of the rates of new coronavirus infections (currently around one-third those of the UK).

When the country was taken briefly off the government’s no-go list in August, I snuck in. Above the Algarve coast, the twigs crackle in the heat as you trample through the blessed shade of wild forest, with the alluring prospect of about a million fish restaurants awaiting down on the shore each evening. I enjoyed my best meal of 2020 at Chefe Branco on Rua de Loule in Faro.

Germany / Belgium / Netherlands

By September, Portugal and much of the rest of Europe was back on the naughty list. So I set off to explore the “corona curtain” wrapped around Germany’s extravagant frontiers: basically, the frontier between where the British Foreign Office deemed it was safe to go (ie inside Germany) and its neighbours.

At the “three-country point” outside Aachen, the federal republic converges with Belgium to the south-west and the Netherlands to the north-west. For the Dutch, 332m Vaalserberg is the mightiest of peaks (not counting 887m Mount Scenery on their Caribbean island of Saba).

In another ludicrous scenario, Germans, Belgians and Dutch people could circulate freely, while I – conscious of the UK restrictions – was destined to remain in the eastern (German) sector. The sun was blessing the beer drinkers in the inaccessible Belgian portion of the summit plateau. I headed downhill in the opposite direction, thirstily.

Greece

Part of the embroidery that holds Europe together is the network of pan-European highways – which elevate ordinary roads into international arteries. My favourite is the E55, which stretches from Helsingborg in Sweden via Denmark, Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria and Italy to Greece (by ferry) and eventually to Kalamata at the foot of the Peloponnese.

In October, I boarded a bus in the port of Igoumenitsa for the journey through the mountains that line the Ionian coast in northern Greece, as far as the Gulf of Corinth. Inexplicably as the last passenger to board, I was assigned the front seat on a bus that swerved from one precipitous panorama to the next. Recommended for anyone who likes their uplands as rugged as they are sunlit.

Gibraltar

November was another travel write-off. But as soon as England’s second lockdown ended in early December I headed for the Continent’s single most spectacular upland: the Rock of Gibraltar, gateway between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, and where Europe meets Africa.

On the new glass Skywalk at the summit, you can step out over thin air and gasp at a world embroidered by humanity without a frontier in sight.

With the geopolitical future of this British Overseas Territory becoming clear only hours before the end of 2020, Gibraltar was the right place to end a tour of sunlit uplands after a year of turmoil.

All downhill from here? Perhaps. But I predict that in the coming year, Europe’s beauty, joy and people will appeal more than ever.

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