With only an hour’s drive between the mountains and the sea in parts of northeastern Spain, we had trouble deciding which type of beautiful scenery to focus on. After we left Oviedo, we bounced around among several villages and towns in Asturias and the neighboring province of Cantabria. Two of the places we stayed were in the mountains, and the rest were on or near the ocean.
All of the villages and towns we visited were reachable by bus, and each had its own attractions—such as medieval buildings, sandy beaches, dramatic peaks or seaside bluffs, and prehistoric cave paintings. All of these places can get crowded during the summer tourist season, but they were much quieter in November, which let us experience them more like their residents do.
Cudillero, Asturias (population 5,000)—This fishing village looks like it belongs in the Cinque Terre region of Italy. A jumble of houses, some brightly colored, tumble down a ravine to a small harbor. Cudillero is the only place in this post where we didn’t spend two or three nights. Instead, we visited it as a day trip from Oviedo, partly because we didn’t want to try to pull our suitcases up and down the steep hill from the bus stop to the center of the village.
The main things to do in Cudillero are to eat very fresh seafood caught by the local fishermen and wander along the narrow lanes and stairways between houses to various viewpoints around the village. Some longer seaside hikes leave from Cudillero, for visitors who have more time than we did.
Llanes, Asturias (pop. 14,000)—This coastal town is a beach destination for Spanish vacationers. It has a miniature sandy beach right in town (perfect for little kids) and many larger beaches nearby. Llanes also has a medieval core with some of its old walls still intact and a lovely walking path on the bluffs above the sea. Llanes also has a wonderful little collection of fancy houses and civic buildings from the late 1800s and early 1900s erected by “Indianos” (townsfolk who made fortunes in the Americas and returned to show off their wealth).
Three miles outside Llanes in the village of Porrua is the Ethnographic Museum of Eastern Asturias, an old farm complex that has been turned into a museum about traditional rural life in the region. After exploring the museum, we had a lovely walk back to Llanes through the rolling green countryside, past some of the cows that make Asturias famous in Spain for its dairy production.
Las Arenas de Cabrales, Asturias (pop. 900)—Little Arenas is one of the gateways to the Picos de Europa, a section of the Cantabrian Mountains that was Spain’s first national park. It’s also a base for people doing one of the best day hikes in Spain, which runs along the gorge carved by the Cares River.
Getting to the gorge trail or elsewhere deep in the Picos de Europa requires going by car or taking the special buses that run during the summer. Since we didn’t have a car and we were visiting in the off-season, we knew we wouldn’t be getting up into the Picos. But we were eager to visit the towns at their edges, so we could indulge in one of our favorite pastimes: gazing at mountains. Arenas provided us with lots of pretty views as we took walks around the outskirts of the village, along small rivers, and in the nearby woods.
Asturias is the self-styled Land of Cheeses. One of the best-known varieties is a deeply mottled blue cheese called Cabrales, which is made around Arenas and aged in the many caves found in the local limestone. Never a fan of multicolored cheeses, I think Cabrales smells and tastes appalling. But lots of visitors eagerly flock to the cheese stores, cheese museums, and cheese caves to see how it’s produced and to buy big wheels to take home.
Potes, Cantabria (pop. 1,400)—Potes was probably our favorite place in this post. It’s one of the other gateway villages to the Picos de Europa mountains. The weather was cloudy for most of our two days there, so we couldn’t see the high mountains. But luckily, the village has lots of charms at ground level, too.
Potes has a beautifully preserved medieval section, full of stone houses, narrow lanes, arched bridges, and a square 15th-century tower whose roof offers wonderful views of the village and surrounding valleys. The tower is now a surprisingly interesting museum focused on Beato of Liebana, an 8th-century monk who lived near Potes. Beato wrote many influential works of theology, including a book about the Biblical Book of Revelation that was recopied at monasteries around Europe throughout the Middle Ages.
Like Arenas de Cabrales with its stinky cheese, Potes has a product that is known throughout Spain: a potent alcohol called orujo, which is distilled from the grape pressings left over from making the region’s quite decent wines. The two days before we arrived were Potes’s annual orujo festival, when a distilling contest takes place in the center of the village, and all of the orujo produced must, by law, be consumed that weekend. When we got to Potes, it smelled like a college dorm the morning after a party. But the rain soon took care of that.
We were glad to have missed the festival and glad that residents seemed to have recovered from their hangovers enough to get back to everyday life. And we got lucky: The morning we were due to leave Potes, the clouds lifted, and we caught a glimpse of the spiky limestone peaks surrounding the village. We also saw beautiful views of river gorges on our bus rides to and from Potes (although the views were hard to photograph from the bus). Any mountain lovers who come to Spain should be sure to take the road between Las Arenas and Potes.
Santillana del Mar, Cantabria (pop. 4,000)—Santillana regularly shows up on lists of the most picturesque villages in Spain, mainly because of its cobbled streets lined with stone houses built from the 1300s to 1700s. The village grew up around the 12-century monastery and church of Santa Juliana, from which the name Santillana derives. (Despite the “Mar” in its name, the village is 3 miles inland, with no views of the sea.)
Santillana is a pleasant enough place, but to us it felt a bit soulless. It suffered by comparison with Potes, where we’d just been. Potes also has a picturesque medieval district, which is very much lived in, whereas Santillana seems mainly given over to tourism. Thus, it was very quiet in the off-season. Still, we enjoyed our cozy room with old wood floors, beamed ceilings, and a wooden balcony a few doors down from the church, just above the covered fountain that was the village’s laundry place in earlier days. All night we were serenaded by burbling water and tinny church bells.
Underwhelming as we found Santillana, it’s just a half-hour walk from something extraordinary: the cave of Altamira, whose ceiling is covered with prehistoric paintings of animals made between 15,000 and 19,000 years ago. The mouth of the cave collapsed about 13,000 years ago, preserving the pictures inside remarkably well. After the cave was rediscovered in the late 1800s, it eventually attracted such a flurry of visitors that their presence endangered the fragile paintings. To preserve them, the authorities closed the cave, and the site’s archaeologists and craftspeople built an amazingly authentic replica of the cave and its art for visitors to see up close.
I wasn’t sure facsimiles of cave paintings would be very interesting, but the creators did a fantastic job giving you the feeling of being inside the large, low cave and seeing how the painters used the contours of the rock to give dimension to their images of bison, deer, and other animals they hunted. The site also has a good museum showing how the paintings were made and illustrating other prehistoric sites in the cave-riddled region.
Castro Urdiales, Cantabria (pop. 32,000)—This very pleasant seaside town (also pictured at the top of this post) was our last stop before flying home from Madrid. Castro Urdiales’s strength is its beautiful setting. The town sits on a wide sweep of harbor at the edge of a headland where a medieval church and a stone castle with a lighthouse seem to spring out of the rocks. There are low green hills just behind the town and views down the rocky coast as far as the port city of Bilbao. Castro also has sandy beaches at either end that draw enough vacationers to double or triple the population in the summer.
During the off-season, Castro felt lived in, not just touristy. At lunchtime and at dusk, the big waterfront promenade was full of local families strolling, enjoying the carousel, the 50-year-old churro stand, and the many bars and seafood restaurants. People walked their dogs on grassy parts of the headland and jogged or fished on the long, high breakwaters.
One of our most vivid memories of Castro Urdiales was seeing a fisherman on the breakwater pull up a net and land a big, thick eel, maybe 4 feet long. We figured it would soon be on its way to one of the restaurants than line the harbor—like the one where, not long after, we were sitting outside eating roasted red peppers stuffed with creamy seafood and drinking sparkling water and some of northern Spain’s fine white wine, while watching the lights come on around the harbor. A person could get used to this.
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