Weather change…

Week 6

Sixth week of travel, marked by a significant change: we have gone from blue skies and summer temperatures to having to turn on the heating again and look for alternatives for rainy days. This week, gold mines, bear territory, some caves and our return to the ocean…

We started the week where we had ended the last one, on the shore of the Villameca reservoir where we stayed for 3 nights, amazed by the beauty of this area. That was without knowing that what awaited us a little higher up was even more impressive, with mountains with an alpine touch reaching the edge of the ocean. To start the week, however, we arrived almost to Galicia, to visit the ancient Roman mines of Las Médulas.

Las Médulas

In the beginning there was a mountain, or rather, a hill, or maybe even several. The Asturs, the pre-Roman indigenous people who lived here, had understood that the area’s red sands contained something more than conglomerates and managed to extract a little gold from the streams to make jewelry, brooches or bracelets. The news reached the ears of Rome that, in the 2nd century BC., had invaded the province and recruited the Asturs as miners to continue extracting gold from Las Médulas, but on a larger scale.

The Romans’ needs for gold was much greater than that of the Asturs, to the point that Las Médulas became the largest open-pit gold mine in the empire, and Emperor Augustus himself supervised the works to establish a city in Asturica Augusta (today Astorga) to control and oversee the safety of the transportation of gold from Las Médulas to the rest of the empire, and to Rome, passing among others through Emerita Augusta (today Mérida) along the Vía de la Plata that linked both cities.

Between the 1st century BC. and the 3rd century, the engineering works carried out by the Romans to extract the mineral using the ruina montium method caused such alteration of the environment that the initial hills disappeared and were replaced by a sandy reddish landscape, partially covered with chestnut and oak trees. A landscape that reflects the modifications caused by the extraction works, from the disappearance of the mountains and the channeling of their rubbles to specific places for subsequent sifting and filtering, to the creation of an artificial lake thanks to the accumulated sediments, the Curacedo lake, as well as the immense hydraulic infrastructure built, with more than 400 kilometers of canals, some of which exceed 100 kilometers in length.

The technique used by the Romans (the ruina montium) involved digging dead-end tunnels in the mountain and then gradually filling them with water to soften the clay sands until the mountain collapses under its own weight. All that remains is then to search through the rubble and recover the gold…

The result is a bit like a miniature Bryce Canyon (especially with snow, according to the photos we saw in the village). It is hard to imagine, walking among the chimneys of reddish sand, that there was once a hill here, and that everything that is missing was carefully scraped, collapsed and raked by the Romans to extract gold… In 1997, UNESCO declared Las Médulas as a World Heritage Site. The Thai delegation opposed the decision, considering that the site was the result of a destructive human activity, which was detrimental to the cause of environmental protection. Germany and Finland subscribed to this position. Our opinion on this issue matters little, but the fact is that Las Médulas offers a unique landscape that is definitely worth preserving…

Asturias

To leave Castilla y León we followed the valley of the Sil River and bordered the Ancares, this tiny region that remained so isolated from the rest of Spain until the 20th century that it has its own language, its own architecture, etc. Well, okay, those who know Spain will say that, here, it is not really an achievement to have your own language. Maybe… But be that as it may, the Sil valley took us to the neighbouring autonomous community: Asturias, officially Principality of Asturias (please), made up of a single province, and which has the rank of principality due to the fact that the heir to the crown of Spain is automatically Prince of Asturias. The current Princess of Asturias is, therefore, Princess Leonor, eldest daughter of King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia.

Royalty stories aside, Asturias is also the homeland of the Cantabrian brown bear, the original, the one that resisted Man and never needed to be reintroduced (unlike its Pyrenean cousin). It must be said that in terms of territory, the bears here have more than enough to live happily!… Mountains (up to 2.000 m high) with impressive slopes covered with heather moors and chestnut forests, and only 1 million inhabitants in an area of 10.000 km², mainly grouped in the northern cities (Oviedo and Gijón). When you arrive through the port of Somiedo (in the south), as in our case, it is impressive to see how the road (quite good and wide until then) is reduced by half and slopes up to 13% to reach a downhill of more than 1.000 m over just 11 km. And as soon as we reached the bottom we went up again towards the San Lorenzo pass (850 m, uphill this time, over the same distance of 11 km) to get to the next valley. I don’t think we had ever had to climb a hill in second or third gear for so many kilometres until today! No need to say that the day was a little hard for Marvin, because after an uphill logically comes a downhill and the brakes suffered as much as the engine!… There was like a “hot” smell when we arrived at our destination… 🤓

We spent the night at Alto la Cobertoría, at 1.300 m above sea level, but the drawback of being so close to the ocean is that the climate is clearly… oceanic. Everyone will be able to confirm that in Asturias, like in Galicia or Euskadi, everything is very green… Yeah… there must be a reason! 🤓 We spent the night in the clouds, as it happened to us many times during our crossing of the Pyrenees…

Incidentally, our pass through Asturias coincided not only with Sant Jordi day (the festival of the book and the rose), but also with World Earth Day. Far from any desire to proselytise, I just wanted to recommend reading the article by Craig Foster (author of the documentary “My Octopus Teacher”, probably still available on Netflix) in the New York Times, which quite rightly points out that the idea of “saving nature” is a bad idea. Nature is doing just fine without us and will recover just fine, one way or another, if our species were to become extinct. The goal of conservation should rather be to “save humanity”, because without a healthy nature, our days are numbered… For our part, we celebrated World Earth Day by crossing 2 Biosphere Reserves (Ancares Leoneses and Valle of Laciana), and 3 Natural Parks (Babía y Luna, Somiedo and Las Ubiñas – La Mesa, next to which we spent the night). After its post-industrial depression, Asturias is investing in nature tourism and seems to have understood that the presence of bears is a major asset, and that it just needed to complement it with a few protected areas and some touches of cultural heritage to have a robust product for offer…

A study carried out by economists from the University of Oviedo revealed that the presence of the bear generates around 20 million euros per year in the Cantabrian Mountains, thanks to tourism, and creates around 350 jobs. Knowing that between 200.000 and 300.000 euros are paid annually for damages caused by Teddy and his friends, it seems that the results are quite profitable.

More than 50% of the Asturian territory is protected, and the Community is home, among other things, to the most protected area in the country, the Muniellos Strict Nature Reserve, where only 20 people can enter a day to have the privilege of walking through the largest oak forest in Spain and one of the best preserved in Europe. Some authentic restaurants to enjoy a good fabada or a good cider, and we have a business model that has proven its effectiveness and is bearing fruit…

Playa de Vega

No bear came to visit us during our night in Alto la Cobertoría. It must be said that with the rain, the temperatures dropped drastically, reaching -5ºC!… 🥶 Teddy probably must have stayed very warm in his den… In the morning, when we opened the windows, we found droplets of rain frozen on the roof… A bright sun came out quickly to warm everything and treated us to a splendid panorama of the surrounding peaks (including the Ubiñas massif, a large group of rocky peaks, just in front of us…). The mountains around here are really impressive! They are not very high, but they are very steep and with a clearly Alpine touch.

After a few photos, we headed back to the valley, towards the town of Pola de Lena, capital of the valley of the same name. There is nothing exceptional about the town itself, but what pleasantly surprised us was the friendliness of the people there. Everyone was extremely courteous, always willing to help or give information, and all very open to tourists like us, in a big, strange truck, for a mountain town…

We only had to travel the remaining 100 kilometres that still separated us from the Cantabrian coast, in the north of Spain, and reach the ocean that we had last seen in Doñana… We “touched sea” (if you say “touch land” when one sails, what is the equivalent when you go towards the sea 🤔) on the rightfully named Costa Verde, and more precisely on Vega’s beach. The coast here has little to do with that of Cádiz and its immense beaches. Here, the Sierra Cantábrica, including the Picos de Europa (with the third highest peak in Spain, at 2.650 m), runs literally along the coast, less than 50 km away, and in some points literally reaches the ocean. The beaches are thus reduced to nothing between cliffs that crumble little by little under the waves and, in general, they are reached by super steep paths that descend to the sand (dotted with pebbles or rocks, depending on the place) between two meadows where some cows (long-haired) graze peacefully.

A rocky and rugged coastline where the green of the grass meets the blue of the ocean or the red of the earth of a cliff. The weather was quite pleasant today (cool but sunny), but apparently a huge depression is coming tomorrow… Fortunately, this day of respite gave us time to repair the chimney of Marvin’s extractor hood where water entered yesterday (the Sika was completely eaten by the sun and was no longer waterproof). Our stop in Pola de Lena allowed us to buy a new cartridge at a DIY store, and in the afternoon we did a little bricolage… We are now ready for the rainy days to come!…

El Soplao

The weather for the next few days is a bit depressing… Rain until at least Tuesday (and the following days are not much better but the long-term forecasts are less reliable)… The Cantabrian coast is beautiful… It is very green!… 🤓

Having a super view over the ocean is great, but when the sky is so low that you can no longer see the difference between the water and the clouds, it’s not very useful… So we looked for alternatives. We decided that getting closer to the Picos de Europa in this weather would be pretty pointless, as we wouldn’t even see half of the mountains. We looked at what was on the other side (towards the south) and if the weather was better there, but… not much. We looked more to the east, to see if with a longer step and arriving earlier in France, for example, we would avoid the depression, but no… And then we thought about places where it never rains, and on our list, we ended up with cathedrals, museums and caves. We did a nice tour of cathedrals last week. Museums, there are not that many around here, unless you get to Bilbao (true, there is the Cantabrian Jurassic Museum with its life-size dinosaurs, or the Museum of Indians and Cantabrian Emigration, but well… 🙄). On the other hand, searching a little more, we discovered that Cantabria, the autonomous community neighbouring Asturias, where we were going to pass through anyway, was known for its caves (two of which are listed as World Heritage Sites by UNESCO) and the rock art that most of them house…

A few searches later, we had two candidates quite close to us (including one of the World Heritage sites). However, those who follow this blog carefully will know that there are many reservoirs in Spain. And it turns out that one of those reservoirs was built very close to the cave in question, so it is now only accessible when the water level is at its lowest, the bottom of the cave happily bathing when the reservoir has more water. Spoiler alert, when it rains the reservoirs fill up, and right now it is raining… 🤔

So we decided to go for our second candidate, the Soplao cave, an non-listed but equally exceptional site (at least in our humble opinion). El Soplao is actually an old lead and zinc mine, which remained active until the end of the last century. It turns out that, while digging their tunnels to find the minerals, the miners came across a natural cave. When this happens, the air in the cave (which generally has a different pressure than that of the mining tunnels, since the latter communicate with the outside) escapes into the interior of the mine, creating an air current or “blowing” (“soplado” in Spanish)… This is where the name of the cave comes from…

The entire cave has more than 20 km of galleries, but only a small part can be visited. The particularity of the Soplao cave is that the formations it houses were formed mainly by capillarity (unlike the stalactites and stalagmites that are formed by gravity). The result is that, in addition to normal stalactites and stalagmites, the ceiling of the main room of the cave is literally covered in crystals with twisted and thorny shapes, which seem to defy the laws of gravity. A bit like a coral reef, but on the roof of a cave… It’s pretty impressive!…

After our underground walk, we settled not far from the cave, in the first foothills of the Cantabrian Mountains. From our promontory we had a panoramic view of the Picos de Europa on one side (with a lot of imagination at that time, since clouds covered everything), and of the ocean and the coast of San Vicente de la Barquera, on the other. The good thing with this region is that the first mountains are so close to the ocean that it only takes about 15 kilometres to gain 500 m of altitude and get an unbeatable panoramic view. In some places, there is so little space between the ocean and the mountains that you wonder how they could have built a highway, a main road and a railway, in addition to the small villages clinging to the cliffs. In front of us, the San Vicente estuary. So we spent a good part of the afternoon contemplating the rising tide, and seeing how the estuary was filling up little by little. It is quite impressive to see how the entire landscape changes (a tide of only 1.6 m was expected, 3.2 m in total, between high and low tide, but this was enough to fill the entire estuary). From 18h30 the tide began to lower down. We monitor all this from our hill, between two rain showers… 😜

By the way, completely by chance, it turns out that when we turned off Marvin’s engine today, we had just covered our 5.000th kilometre since leaving Andorra! 🥳

Altamira and Alsa reservoir

After a rainy night, the day was shaping up… no less humid. So we decided to continue our exploration of the caves of Cantabria. But first we stopped by the farm that we had a little further down our hill to stock up on rice pudding (apparently, it is a fairly typical dessert around here…) and cheese, all directly from the producer to the consumer since Granja Cudaña produces and sells all these exquisite things directly, from a small office between two stables. A petting stop with the calves that were patiently waiting for their bottle, and off we were again to our cultural stop of the day: the Altamira cave.

As we now know, Cantabria is famous for its caves, many of which contain prehistoric paintings. But according to specialists, the Sistine Chapel of rock art is the Altamira cave, whose vault is literally covered with bisons (including one resting), horses, deer and other handprints that our distant ancestors drew there during the 22.000 years they occupied the cave, between 36.500 and 13.000 years ago.

Small clarification, like Lascaux, the real Altamira cave is closed to the public since 1977 to protect the paintings, so we visited an exact replica of it, painted with the same techniques as those used by prehistoric painters.

So yes, we must admit that everything looks a bit plasticky, and that the emotion is probably not the same when you know that what you are contemplating is a reproduction that is barely 20 years old, but on the other hand, it is probably better this way (given yesterday’s experience, in the other cave, where despite the guide’s instructions and the signs everywhere, people kept touching the stalactites)… So we quickly became equally amazed at the detail of a horse’s head, the drawing of a lying bison or the even older engraving of a reindeer. Generations of prehistoric men and women passed through there, adding their engravings or drawings to those that their ancestors had already left, and making the vault of the Altamira cave one of the most important prehistoric pictorial and artistic cycles in the world.

The “neocave” (the reproduction) is complemented by a small exhibition about the objects found in the cave (in addition to the paintings), as well as about other caves and rock paintings in the region. And a little further on, you can see (from a distance) the entrance to the real cave, thinking that we are 50 years too late to have the privilege of being able to enter there and get goosebumps looking at the real paintings with a simple headlight… We consoled ourselves by thinking that we still have the Niaux cave for that (although for how much longer?)…

The rest of our day was dedicated to food groceries at Carrefour and a visit to Iveco in Santander, after stopping by a dozen service stations to re-inflate Marvin’s rear wheels. It turns out that most of the air compressors at the stations around here only have a power of 4 to 5 bars, and are therefore useless for the 7 bars of Marvin’s tires… Fortunately, the Iveco workshop had a normal compressor, which reaches up to 7 bars and more…

Finally, to spend the weekend, we went down a little south to the Alsa reservoir. The place must be quite beautiful, but to tell the truth, our view, since we arrived, is limited to a cloud that surrounds us and does not even allow us to see the water level of the reservoir, a few meters away from us. .. Let’s see if the weather improves over the weekend and we get to see the water before leaving on Monday… 😜

Next week, whatever it takes, we change countries!… 😉

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In Cantabria, as anywhere else, LEAVE NO TRACE!

– Always travel on public ways and respect the signs.
– Limit noise and interfere as little as possible with wildlife.
– Respect the other users.
– Leave rocks, plants and other natural features as you found them and respect historic sites.
– Take your waste with you and throw it into the appropriate containers, in the nearest village.
– Do not camp inside protected areas and do not make any fires.