Wondrous landscapes, a nation that oozes passion and colour, memorable food, a rich culture and history, exciting cities, cheap prices and beautiful beaches… who doesn’t love Spain?
Since spending one of my first proper pay cheques – crisp notes folded in brown envelopes back then – I’ve enjoyed crowded sun-kissed Spanish beaches up and down the Costas, and on the gorgeous Canary and Balearic islands.
Fast forward 30 years and the infernal heat becoming the norm for summer travel to southern Europe’s baking beaches and stultifying streets forces holidaymakers to think about summer getaways without extremes.
Spanish and French holidaymakers flock to Costa Verde, Spain’s ‘Green Coast’, in the provinces of Asturias and neighbouring Cantabria, returning year after year to medieval towns and elegant coastal resorts to escape high summer in Iberia’s central and southern coasts.
Remember the old saying, the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain? Well it often drenches Asturias, evidenced in the greenness of the countryside, like Ireland delivering four seasons in a day. Yet the sun regularly shines in Costa Verde, a region hardly touched by the mass tourism of the Mediterranean due to less reliable weather.
The weather gods are smiling during my late autumnal first ever visit to Asturias. The sky is bright blue, the temperature is a pleasant early 20s and the sea in Gijon, famed for Roman remains, is warm enough for a glorious dip amid the rolling surf.
Stone-built villages, splendid medieval towns and elegant small cities, spectacular national parks where bears still roam, endless cliffedged sandy beaches – it’s all here to explore.
The culture and renowned cheese, wine and regional dishes are worlds away too from touristy Spain’s laminated English breakfasts, fast food menus and sport blaring day and night on giant bar screens.
We begin a five-day tour, stopping off for lunch in Cudillero, a perfectly formed fishing port with an old town featuring tiered fisher family homes accessed via steep steps, with restaurants below serving inexpensive fresh local fish and seafood.
Oviedo, cultural and commercial capital of Asturias, is a lively university city with plenty of buzz. We base ourselves for the first night at Hotel Fruela, a boutique hotel on one of the quieter traditional shopping streets.
Most of the action happens along cider boulevard, ‘El Bulevar de la sidra’, which is always busy.
The choice of cider for my generation represents flashbacks to clandestine teenage disco parties, before summoning up enough courage to hit the dancefloor. Cider drinking in Asturias, on the other hand, amounts to a near religious ritual.
You take a seat and wait for a waiter called the escanciador to arrive with a green bottle and a single glass which he holds at his knees, bottle positioned high over his head.
A mouthful of cider is poured by him into the glass while he stares in the opposite direction to the pouring. So it continues around a group for the whole evening.
Our escanciador Salvador, an ex-karate fighter born in equatorial Guinea, has won cider-pouring championships and though he doesn’t drink alcohol himself, tells me that cider ‘never gives hangovers because it’s so healthy’ – a claim that I beg to dispute.
Woody Allen, who chose Oviedo as one of the settings for his 2008 film Vicky Cristina Barcelona, is immortalised in a good bronze likeness to mark his link to the city.
Our guide Ernesto reveals that Oviedo is among the cleanest cities in all of Spain, having won the national ‘Silver Mop’ urban cleanliness award. This spotless navigable small metropolis boasts an elaborate cathedral and delightful foodie palace, the 19th century Mercado El Fontan, a stone’s throw away. Here you can purchase countless varieties of cheese as well as olive oil and eye-wateringly cheap wines.
A street filled with Siderias (cider houses) serves local Fabada, a heavy stew made with beans, chorizo, ham knuckle and the Spanish version of black pudding. But a word of warning – Asturian food is not for the faint-hearted. The region is proud of its cheese, notably spicy blue-veined cabrales, which is aged in caves and is transported down from the mountains by donkey.
One of the most expensive and exclusive cheeses of Spain, I gasp learning that a 3.5kg cabrales was recently sold at auction for €32,000. A grinning group newspaper photo certainly gives a whole new meaning to ‘say cheese’.
From Oviedo, we strike out for coastal Asturias, touring its magnificent beaches and coves at Ribadesella, Lastres and Llanes.
Famed for the local take on calderata fish stew, we overnight in a Llanes tourist hotel, minutes away from the picturesque harbour, meeting Gerard Depardieu’s double at his waterfront bistro.
From awesome coastal views, we head inland and upwards into Parque Nacional de Los Picos de Europa, following narrow winding roads with perilous bends, framed by streams and waterfalls that cascade from sheer rock encompassing the park which stretches over 647sq km.
The mountains were reputedly christened the ‘peaks of Europe’ by returning sailors for whom this was often the first sight of their homeland. It is rich walking territory and after reaching the summit to enjoy the awesome panorama of the Picos peaks and valleys the lazy way by the Fuente De cable car, the hikers are much easier to spot in their bright jackets than any traces of wildlife apart from eagles hovering in the sky.
Reputedly 300 bears roam the park as do seldomspotted Iberian wolves and the curvy horned chamois.
Cantabria, centred on the city of Santander, long a conservative bastion amid the separatist learnings of coastal dwellers, has a string of lovely seaside resorts such as Castro Urdiales and San Vincente de la Barquera to the west, which get crowded and pricey in high summer but are quieter and exceptional value from September.
Spanish tourists converge on scenic Santillana del Mar, which grew up around a monastery, once an important pilgrimage centre, and its stunning Romanesque church and cloisters. Laredo is another popular seaside resort with an old town of narrow streets and balconied houses, the setting for a famous Battle of the Flowers every summer.
Don’t miss Comillas, a gorgeous resort town and setting for Gaudi’s El Capricho, a Mudejar-inspired fantasy, featuring a minaret-like tower covered in green and yellow tiles. Gaudi, not yet 30 years of age and fulfilling his first commission, created quirky ingeniously designed Caprice El Capricho (house of sun and music) far from his native Catalonia.
It seems he accomplished the task remotely for he never visited the site under construction. Another mustvisit Cantabrian gem is Cuevas de Altamira, caves which contain some of the world’s finest examples of prehistoric art and whose earliest engravings and drawings discovered in 1879 date back to around 30,000 BC.
Amateur archaeologist Marcelo Sanz de Sautuola made the extraordinary discovery, with a little help from his young daughter. He caused massive controversy when the find was made public in 1880, with many calling him a fraud and hoaxer. However, tests proved Sautuola right – that the paintings of horses, antelopes and bison were really made by prehistoric man.
The cave became so popular that the carbon dioxide from visitors caused the paintings to deteriorate and it was closed to the general public. But a painstakingly accurate reconstruction of the treasures can be enjoyed, the paintings reproduced using the same techniques of old that tell the story of our subterranean ancestors and of local hero Sautuola.
My discovery of Green Spain is an early romance but this whistle-stop tour of Asturias and Cantabria has the makings of an enduring future love affair. I have a date with a formidable lady named Marga Pereda, custodian of the holy Monasterio de Santo Toribio, where pilgrims converge and walkers completing an onerous long-distance walk queue to have their official Camino passports stamped.
Every seven years, the monastery’s Forgiveness Door is opened to penitents who walk through it, absolving them of a lifetime of sin. Now that’s too good an offer to miss.
TRAVEL FACTS
Isabel was a guest of the Spanish Tourist Board (spain.info), Asturian Regional Tourism (asturias. com) and Cantabria Tourist Board (cantabriaspain. co.uk). Ryanair flies Dublin to Santander Monday and Friday in winter from €40 return (ryanair.com). Brittany Ferries’ winter schedule sails Rosslare to Santander on Tuesdays and Rosslare to Bilbao twice weekly. See brittany ferries.ie.
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