Last night we hosted a sold out talk with Georgina Howard who spoke about her new book In the Footsteps of Smugglers published by Bradt.
“It was the enigmatic mountain paths winding their way from one Basque village to the next along smugglers’ tracks and over humpback bridges that seduced us all…”
In 2022 Georgina Howard co-presented a programme on the Basque Pyrenees with Michael Portillo. This book is her travel memoir, ‘In the Footsteps of Smugglers’, about her life in a remote Basque hamlet of the Spanish Pyrenees. Twenty-five years ago, Georgina moved into an isolated barn in a tiny, close-knit community of Basque shepherds. Taking this eccentric British woman and single mother into the fold, her neighbours helped her raise her Basque/English daughter, Marion, transform her barn into an international walking and language company and introduce her deep into the enigmatic and little-known Basque mountain culture.
The story then follows Georgina’s footfall into the Spanish/French borderlands of the Pyrenees and the heart of the former Basque smuggling fraternity. She has guided people the world over along these smugglers’ trails and focused her research on the WW2 escape routes of the Comet Line that led Allied airmen out of occupied France in to Spain. Speaking Spanish, French and Basque, she has formed personal relationships with the last remaining members of this 1941 – 1944 resistance network – then mere children – and their stories of fear, courage and secrecy are documented in detail within the pages of her book. With the help of colourful vignettes and deep anthropological insight, ‘In the Footsteps of Smugglers’ digs deep behind the scenes into all things quintessentially Basque. It also offers a rhapsody in cultural identity as this cosmopolitan nomad, and single mother, finally turns to the Basque shepherds to find home.
