EDITOR’S NOTE BY GEORGE!
Two summers ago I crossed the Nervión River in Bilbao, walking from the titanium waves of the Guggenheim to the cobbled streets of the medieval Casco Viejo neighborhood. I was on my honeymoon, and northern Spain’s Basque Country beckoned with its adventurous spirit and herbaceous vermouth. I felt unexpectedly at ease there, and I wondered why I felt so familiar in a region so far removed from my home. Up the hall from my office in Washington, D.C., there’s another enchanting space: the studio of Fernando G. Baptista, who is a creative genius behind National Geographic’s illustrations of fire-eyed Vikings and models of woolly mammoths. A Basque native, Fernando frequently returns to Bilbao, and so I asked if he would write about his city. He did, but because artists see the…