Head to the hills
If it’s a Bank Holiday weekend, it must be time to hit the road. Ever since I started work I’ve been a firm believer that you need to make every holiday count. Plus we’ve got a whole new world to explore here and we intend to get to know this corner of northern Spain — Green Spain, as it’s also known — pretty well.
With two whole nights at our disposal, where should we go? Galicia is somewhere I’ve wanted to visit for years. Its green hills, deep valleys and own language have long conjured up romantic images. I imagine it as full of small hamlets where plagues of cats are cured by mute virgins playing the violin. I think I need to visit it to discover that it is in fact a real place and not from the pages of one of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novels.
I’m currently as close as I’ve ever been to Galicia, but two nights is not a long time to find plagues of cats, so we decide to visit the Picos de Europa instead — they earned their name by being the first peaks of Europe that explorers saw on their return from the New World. We didn’t know much about them, but they came recommended by my brother who travelled through this area a couple of years ago. And when AirBnb turned up a log cabin we could stay in, well, it was a done deal.
We packed our walking boots, waterproof coats and off we went.
My brother wasn’t wrong. The scenery was stunning. Great towering peaks rose up from green plateaus until they were enveloped by clouds. The road wound itself along the side of the valley, great rocky overhangs making me glad I wasn’t driving a taller vehicle. “Imagine if that rock just fell down on top of us,” says J cheerily from the back. Is his disaster-fixation new, or have I just not noticed it before?
We stopped in the town of Potes. A pretty place with an old stone bridge crossing a stream. We were intending to buy waterproof trousers — it’s Green Spain for a reason — but we’d arrived at siesta time and those types of shops were closed. Instead we bought postcards and settled in a café with hot chocolates, coffee and tea.
Although Potes is known as the gateway to the Picos de Europa, we were still an hour and a half from our log cabin. The views from the road got more and more stunning with every hairpin we rounded.
We climbed higher and higher, until we were driving through the clouds that we’d been looking up at from the valley floor. I wondered if my children would remember this journey forever, the way I still remember driving through a cloud in Sri Lanka when I was young. The trees on the hillsides went from being covered in a pale green moss to being covered in snow. Every branch of every tree transformed from brown to white, it was magical. At the side of the road the snow was piled three or four feet deep, but the road itself stayed clear.
The idea that our weekend away might be in a snowy landscape hadn’t crossed our minds when we were in San Sebastian. We started to go through the different pieces of clothing we’d packed, would we be warm enough in snowy conditions? I had a hoodie but no fleece, Steve had pyjama bottoms but no top. I felt smug in the knowledge that at least we all had slippers.
At 1,609m (5,278ft) we hit the highest point of the San Glorio pass, and the road started going downhill again. Gradually the outside temperature climbed up from -1°C to a heady +2°C, the snow got sparser and we were back in green pastures again. We arrived at the cabin — there were daisies and grass out the front.
There’s nothing like a living space of a few square feet to make you want to hunker down and wrap up. The duvet came through from the bedroom to the living room; we taught the children rummy; Steve cooked up a pasta marvel on the tiny hob. It was pretty much perfect.
Our little idyll continued when we woke the next morning to beautiful weather — no need for the waterproof trousers after all. We drove to the next village along to walk one of the best known routes of the area, la Ruta del Cares. The Cares is the river and this route was made by workers as they built a canal alongside the river to power an HEP plant. The path follows the cliffs. At times it goes through tunnels that the workers cut, but mostly it winds along the cliff edge like a balcony several hundred feet up. The gorge towers above, up to a mile deep at times, while a clear green river thunders along the bottom. The scale of the scenery was incredible and the path puts you right in the heart of it.
It was stunning, albeit slightly nervy at times, being on an open path with a vertical drop. I spent a lot of time telling H and J to “keep away from the edge”, “don’t turn round when you’re talking to me”, “don’t push past each other”. I’d like to have been able to relax a little more, but one little trip up here and they would have plummeted over the edge.
We stopped at a bend where we could sit on rocks off the path to eat our sandwiches, but the local goats obviously knew about this picnic spot too. They were nosing into the backpack before we’d even got it open. Our second spot was more successful. Across the gorge we could see a tiny path zig zagging down the mountain side, reminding us that people work on this incredible land. In the distance eagles were circling a peak. Two flew past, huge and elegant, covering hundreds of metres in a matter of seconds.
The next morning we awoke to huge snowflakes falling around us and a light dusting of white on the daisies in front. Our plan had been to go up to the highest point of the park in a cable car, but that didn’t seem so tempting now that the weather would have wiped out the view.
I went in to the hotel which managed our cabin to see what they recommended. “It’s more the road,” the owner said. “It has been snowing in the night and I don’t know if they’ll have cleared the San Glorio pass.” Ah, roads. They had been so well maintained on our journey in, that it hadn’t crossed my mind that nature could touch them. “And the other way, how will that be?” I asked. “That should be fine,” she said.
And for the first few hairpins it was. It was gently snowing but the road was clear. And then, as we climbed higher the snow started to creep onto the edges of the road. A couple of bends higher and it was covering the road, but there were tracks from cars that had gone before us and we followed those, slowly. And then we rounded a corner to see four cars stopped in front of us. The road had turned icy and they couldn’t make it up this bit.
I got out to join the huddle of drivers and find out what happened next. “He’s calling the Ayuntamiento (council), to see if they can send a ‘maquina’,” someone told me. My mind flashed to BBC images of drivers stuck on Scottish roads overnight. I was glad it was still the morning, there was still time before I had to decide whether we walked back down or hunkered under our coats and the one scarf in the back. I’d also learnt from the BBC that you keep the engine on, don’t get cold. So there we sat, listening to the audiobook of Kid Normal (I recommend it). Every now and again I’d get out and see if there was any more news. Cars came round the corner above us, one skidded into the ditch. Nobody was hurt, but they were more stuck than we were. Cars came up behind us. Some joined the queue, others put on their snow chains and carried on as normal.
And then while we sat listening to tales of a boy with no super powers beating an invasion of robot wasps (I still recommend it), one by one the cars in front of us were pushed up the icy patch and off they went. There was just us, the in-the-ditch car and one car behind now. Land Rovers full of tourists on 4x4 tours drove past. And then a mini bus without 4x4. As it slipped slowly down the hill towards us, I calmly suggested to the children that they get out of the car and come and wait in the snow. The minibus slowly skidded into the barrier alongside us, worried faces of tourists filled the windows as their hands grabbed the headrests in front of them.
And just at this moment of high drama, flashing lights appeared round the corner and the great orange snow plough arrived. The minibus carried on its tour to remember, and the snow plough tucked its scrapers into a thin enough shape to squeeze past and scrape snow off the road. Its scrapers scraped and its grit dispenser dispensed. The car behind us was off first, but not without help from Steve and the men from the in-the-ditch car pushing behind.
So now it was just us, the in-the-ditch car and a slightly less icy road. With the gearstick of our automatic car next to the ‘1’ setting I’d never used before, and the manpower behind us, our little blue C’eed skidded and edged its way up the icy patch. “No para, no para,” (“Don’t stop, don’t stop”) shouted the men from the in-the-ditch car, so slowly we kept on. “What about Daddy?” came the worried voices from the back. “It’s OK, he’ll have to get in to the moving car, we’re not going fast,” I said. And in a manouevre that was more Mr Bean than Dukes of Hazzard, he tucked himself into the front seat and we were off.
“Gracias, in-the-ditch men.”
I think that might be a journey the children will remember — and not just for (spoiler alert) Kid Normal’s heroic defeat of the robotic wasps.
