For seafarers of old, the first sighting of landfall in Europe was often the Cantabrian mountains of Northern Spain, hence called The Picos de Europa. Bounded to the east and west by great river gorges, it’s a small dramatic 650 sq. mile range of mountains that descends down to the northern coast of Cantabria and Asturias. It’s the main destination of our journey and we’ve been walking its hills and lower peaks all week. The National Park is fairly strict about not permitting free motorhome parking, particularly along the coast, but we’re adept at finding beautiful, out of the way locations..
We’re in the supermarket car park in the mountain village of Cain in the Vale de Valdeon in the Picos de Europa National Park. We arrived the day before yesterday along the narrow rough track that runs alongside the river Cares into the gorge of the same name. Drivers into Cain are discouraged by the description of the road into it as narrow and tricky, but it’s manageable with a bit of care and patience.
Supermarket car park conjures up an image very removed from our circumstances. We spent the first night in a cat and dog poo infested field next to one of several village inns, following the accepted practice of eating there to earn the parking place. The food and local white wine was cheap but nothing special so we set out yesterday evening to find a better location. We called into the small supermercado, a stone house with a red tiled roof, and bought a baguette and a back scratcher. I asked the proprietor about the field behind him, next to the river, inquiring whether it was possible to park there. ‘Si, si.’ he replied. I asked him what it cost and he said ‘Nothing, nada.’ Such is the generosity we’ve often encountered in Northern Spain.
So we’ve moved into his field, bounded by a small apple orchard and the river, overlooked on all sides by the high limestone crags of the Picos – not your average Tesco carpark. Today the sky is cloudless, and after yesterday’s exertions we’ll rest, and perhaps this afternoon, wander to a rock pool we’ve seen downriver.
The exertion was an eight mile walk, downriver, along the gorge of the Rio Cares to Poncebos and the eight mile return. It’s a long seven hour hike, made possible by a high narrow path hewn out of the rock by the local hydroelectric company in 1916.
The route through the Cares Gorge is probably the most beautiful hike in the entire Picos de Europa connecting the villages of Caín de Valdeón in Leòn and Poncebos in Asturias.
Given the perceived difficulty of accessing Cain by car, most of the walkers, and there were many, undertake the hike in the opposite direction to us, from Poncebos, where there’s only a couple of hotel restaurants, to Cain, where, despite its isolation there’s a small cluster of hostels, bars, restaurants, hotels and that friendly supermercado. The start of the walk at Cain is more dramatic than its end at Poncebos. There are waterfalls, steep drop-offs without guardrails, walkways through damp caves in the cliffs and multiple bridges including the famous green bridge, known as Puente de Los Rebecos.
The massive, deep, twisting gorge presents an ever changing vista of scene and light – awesome in the true sense of that word. Long horned mountain goats gather along stretches of the path, attracted by the fools who feed them. Griffon vultures drift overhead, perhaps in expectation of one of the fools stumbling off the narrow ledge into the gorge – there are many possibilities to do so, ending in certain death.
It’s a fabulous hike which I would have enjoyed so much more had I not carried an overloaded, badly fitting backpack, and endured the pain of a huge blister on my right little toe. After seven hours I strike the pose of a lame hunchback.
