Northern Spanish roads
Spanish roads
Diesel fuels
Navigation
The Camino and Lugo
Luarca and Gijon
Oviedo
Ribadesella and Comillas
Santillana, Santander and Altamira
Onto the meseta
Burgos
Santo Domingo de Silos
see also Fit the First of the European pilgrimage - Bologna, Ferrara, Ravenna, Siena
Fit the Second of the European pilgrimage - Pisa and the Cinque Terra
Fit the Third of the European pilgrimage - Barcelona
Fit the Fourth of the European pilgrimage - Santiago de Compostela
Fit the Sixth of the European pilgrimage - Salamanca, Segovia, Madrid and home
21 June - Santiago to Gijon. Having hired a car in Santiago, we took to the roads, driving east and north through Galicia and then further east along the north coast of Asturias to the seaside town of Gijon, close to the old capital of Oviedo.
22 June - Gijon to Santander. Further east along the north coast of Asturias and Cantabria to the royal beach playground Santander.
23 June - Santander to Burgos. Trying first for the caves of Altamira, we turned south and headed over the Cordilleras onto the Meseta and into Castilla y Leon to a village just outside Burgos where'd we stayed for two nights.
24 June - Burgos and Santo Domingo de Silos. Enjoying El Cid's town and the monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos.
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The roads go ever on and on
The one-day road trip along the Rias Bajas of Galicia had indicated we would be able to survive the trip. We had a large book of road-maps of Spain that included one-page maps of the larger towns and cities we intended to visit but we still expected that there would be trouble along the way - and there was. The Spanish road system consists of roads graded by quality: at the top end are the autopistas (tollways), which can be quite expensive. We decided to avoid these for the most part because they would keep us from seeing the countryside. (In fact on the trip from Salamanca to Madrid via Segovia - that will form part of the last Fit of the pilgrimage in Necessity 65 - we used tollways twice: the first time, on the way to Segovia, we ended up on a tollway unintentionally and paid a fair amount for the privilege, only to leave the tollway a few kilometers later and get a sizeable and, unexpected, refund. The second time was deliberate: because we left Segovia so late, we needed to speed our trip to Madrid, and took the tollway. Naturally we drove straight into a traffic jam.) There were some highways that are toll-free and these roads are classed as "A" roads. The rest of the main connecting roads, and the ones we used most often, are the carrateras nacionales, "N" roads, usually two lanes wide, enabling us to see something of the countryside and see some sights. On the odd occasion (particularly when we got off the highway onto coastal roads) we were forced to use "C" or "D" roads, one lane each way, and not in a great state of repair. But, overall, we ended up with a good impression of the state of Spanish roads, which were generally well maintained and well signposted.
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Diesel powered
The Ford Focus that we had hired was fuelled by diesel. Apparently, I later discovered, over 60 per cent of sedans in Europe are diesel-powered. Because diesel gives a better fuel economy than petrol, the outcome of this is less pollution. To encourage greater use of the cleaner fuel, the price of diesel is cheaper than petrol in Europe. (This is an interesting contrast to Australia where diesel is consistently more expensive than unleaded petrol and about the same price as premium unleaded. To pay 0.10 Euro less for diesel than was the unleaded price was a pleasant surprise.) We were expecting the cost of fuel to be horrendous but the combination of fuel economy (we averaged about 5.5 liters/100 kilometers over the eight days we had the car) and cheaper than expected diesel meant that we didn't have to spend all that much on fuel. For a relatively small car, the Focus also proved to be adequately powered for our needs and good in both country and city driving. I have this largely on authority, as Cath did almost all the driving, while I had the navigation responsibilities.
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Losing oneself
Given the possibilities for misdirection involved, particularly arising out of the generally crude city maps that we were using, we got lost only rarely. We found it a challenge getting into some of the cities, particularly as we had hotel bookings made on the Internet, and were trying to finesse our way to those hotels. This resulted in us missing the right entrance into the town. Gijon was the worst case in point, as we missed the turn-off I was looking for and had to circle back to the south of the city and back in through some interesting sylvan settings, off the highway we had been using. There were also problems finding the village just outside Burgos where we'd booked accommodation, first in finding the right exit and then in making a turn in the right direction in a small, unsign-posted village. In all cases, the delays were minimal and we were never really lost. We also ran into some troubles in some cities in trying to find parking. We took the decision that, when the car was loaded with our luggage (with three of us the luggage overflowed the boot and some needed to be stored on the backseat), we would avoid, where possible, on-street parking. We had discovered that most larger settlements had plenty of underground parking facilities, at relatively cheap rates by the hour (at least in comparison to the charges we were used to in Sydney). In Oviedo, particularly, we ended up not seeing the inner city areas because our map didn't show, and we couldn't find, adequate underground parking. In the end, we saw almost all that we wanted to, and there were a few bits of serendipity. We made one major error of choice and, as a result, missed out on a sight we wanted to see, but I couldn't say that we were disappointed by what we did find.
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Travelling north
Coming out of Santiago de Compostela, we travelled east for about 100 kilometers, generally paralleling the last part of the Camino Frances, which we could see next to, and as much as 100 meters off, the road we were travelling on. There were a large number of walkers on the road, in groups ranging from 2 to 20. Depending on their speed, most were within a day or two of their destination, and most were striding out in the mid-morning sun. At the point where the Camino turned south-east towards Ponferrada, 
the last large town before Santiago on the Road, we turned north, towards the coast, and our first stop, Lugo, a town that had been founded by the Romans. 
Its Roman wall, upgraded in medieval times, still surrounds the old town - 10 meters high and about 2 kilometers in circumference. Having found an underground car park, we walked into the old town through one of the ten gateways in the wall. 
I walked up on to it from the area in front of the Romanesque cathedral and noted a phenomenon that told me much about today's world: no matter where we went, if there was a piece of roadway, there was a jogger. 
Obviously the two kilometer track along Lugo's wall was an ideal lunchtime runway. For me, it was something else: a reminder of the ancient and medieval worlds surviving into the modern and placed inside a major highway through the new city surrounding the old. The church, dating from 1129, Romanesque, with Gothic and Baroque additions, was spoiled by the enclosure of the choir which cut it pretty much in two. Y otra iglesia. From Lugo, after lunch, we drove through some pretty sierra country to the coast, to the east of the Rias Altas, seeing the sea at about Ribadeo.
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Asturias coast
The northern coast of Spain is the area where Spaniards go for their summer holidays. The Mediterranean coast has been built out by the tourist enclaves of the Costa Brava and the Costa del Sol, and the presence of the barbarians from the north - Poms and Swedes among others - is a disincentive for the locals to use these more sunny climes. The weather along the north coast may be more questionable, but the coast, as we discovered, is dotted with seaside towns and villages, long, sandy beaches and nary a coconut-oil-drenched northern European turning purulent. Cath had seen a picture of a seaside village she wanted to see, not far east of Ribadeo, Luarca. We eventually found it, via serendipity. 
As we went along the road, we tried to find the turn-off to it but missed. Stopping a little further on to fill 
the petrol tank, we happened across a side-road that fortuitously led to a road overlooking Luarca harbor, as shown here. We were able to drive in, around a hairpin turn over a ria-like cliff and walk around the town, which had a nice beach on the other side of the river mouth. 
Gijon (pronounced 'hee-hon') is the seaside resort close to the old Asturian capital, Oviedo. We had a room in an hotel close to the northern end of town, 
with a beach on the east and the harbor on the western side of the promontory at the northern end of the town. Cath and I had a great walk around this promontory at about 10 at night, with old gun emplacements, and a much newer parkland and pathway. The harbor is protected by a seawall of reasonably modern construction, functioning as a fishing and sea port. The area near the hotel was largely a pedestrian mall and we had to park the car about four blocks away in an underground car park.
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The last Christian stronghold
As the Moors invaded Spain from the south, during the rapid expansion of Islam in the century after Mohammed's death, continuing its expansion until Charles Martel was victorious at Tours. That stopped the Moors advancing into France but they still occupied most of Iberia. One area in the north-west of the Iberian peninsula held out as Christian territory, largely because it was protected behind mountains, in an area which seemed unhelpful to conquer. It was from this small corner of Spain, Asturias, that the Christian fight-back started, and the Asturian capital was Oviedo. When, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries the Christian holdings expanded south, the capital was moved to Leon, but it was from Asturias that they started. (The heir to the Spanish throne has been, since 1388, the Prince of Asturias in recognition.) Naturally we wanted to see it. It is about 50 kilometers inland from Gijon. 
First we drove to a site just outside the city, where there are some ninth century buildings from the time of Ramiro I. 
The better of these is the Iglesia de Santa Maria del Naranco, a two-storey stone building that demonstrates that simplicity of line is the basis of all good architecture. It was originally the audience chamber of the summer palace of the Asturian kings. From the hill on which it stands, four kilometers outside the city of Oviedo, the Iglesia, and its nearby chapel (below left), 
command a great view (below right) and you can imagine why the medieval rulers of the city chose this place for their own use. 
We proceeded from this height into the city in the hope of finding parking to enable us to survey the old city. We didn't, so we drove eastward, heading back again towards the coast.
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Cantabrian coast
The road east took us out of Asturias into Cantabria, a coast road that followed the littoral between the Ocean and the Picos de Europa, a range of mountains, part of the Cordilleras Cantabrica (the Great Dividing Range of northern Spain), about 30 kilometers from the coast. Between the scenic mountains and the cliff-faced coast there was a narrow band of arable land, and a series of fishing villages and beach resorts. We found two really nice seaside villages, Ribadesella and Comillas, as well as the "the most beautiful village in Spain", Santillana del Mar, and Altamira, 
the site of cave paintings dating back to 25,000 BCE. 
Ribadesella is indicative of the reason that lots of Spaniards come to the north coast. It is a great, old-fashioned resort town: a long, sandy beach stretching between two peninsulas, one a grassy knoll and the other a rocky outcrop, quite unlike the pebbly beaches that dot the Mediterranean, with sand that is not as pure white as the Pacific coast beaches of Australia, but darker color, a light brown. 
Behind the beach is a wide paved boardwalk a meter or two above the sand, and adjacent to the boardwalk 
a series of lovely houses, two or three storeys high, in pastel greens and browns, with gables and towers and crenulations, probably once the holidays homes of the well-to-do but now hotels and pensions, with large gardens backing onto the boardwalk, along which flew various flags, Spanish, EU and, I assume, Cantrabrian. There weren't huge numbers on the beach on the pleasant summer's day and we regretted the lack of time to bask thereon, but Margaret took the opportunity to traverse the beach to the water, and dip her toes in the Atlantic Ocean.
Comillas is also a coastal resort. Although we didn't see the shore, the information office indicated it possessed another long sandy beach similar to Ribadesella. 
However, we did find a charming village, replete with a 'Universtidad Pontificia' high on the hill into town, overlooking the ocean (how typical that the Church gets the high-point of the town), founded in the nineteenth century as a university-level seminary, and the Palacio Sobrellano (left), a neo-gothic mansion that dominated the centre of town. The most amazing and unexpected find was 
a Gaudi-designed building in a back street of the village. El Capricho, built in 1883, at the request of a relative of the local Marquis, as a summer house, now serves as a restaurant. Like many of Gaudi's buildings in Barcelona, it is an elaborate modernist stone building. 
This one is completely decorated with ceramic sunflowers giving it a slightly oriental look, accentuated by the tower and the entrance. Again time was against our complete exploration of Capricho or Comillas but we have marked it down as a place that we will stay on our next trip to northern Spain, when we will have more time for lying around on beaches.
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A poor choice
That afternoon, as we headed further east towards Santander, we had to decide in what order we would deal with the village of Santillana del Mar and with Altamira. 
We had time to see one of them on the way in, and planned to see the other the next morning on our way south from the coast towards Burgos. In the end we chose the scenic village and, as a result, we missed out on the full Altamira experience. The village has been preserved largely in its late-medieval state, with narrow cobblestone streets that are restricted to foot traffic. 
The two narrow main streets that parallel each other lead to the twelfth-century Romanesque church at the end of the village. While the village is pretty enough, it really has become just a tourist trap, these days, with the usual array of tourist tat shops - a sort of medieval-world theme park. 
The church, on the other hand, is rather lovely in its simple forms and is graced by beautiful cloisters - one of the three lovely cloisters we were to visit in the week. 
These were quite simple and restrained, but the columns were decorated with some finely carved capitals, plant and geometric motifs on the earlier ones, and allegorical and biblical scenes on the ones carved half a century later, 
and they enclosed a plain grassed courtyard. None of us were elated by Santillana del Mar, and it was not the highlight we had been led to expect - at least not for us. And this disappointment was exacerbated the next morning when we discovered that we would not be able to see the replicas of the Altamira caves. For good reasons the caves themselves are no longer open to the public - some scholars can gain admission but only after a pile of paperwork is completed. They have constructed on the site a replica of the caves through which tour parties are conducted,
and have also built a museum which details the information known on prehistoric art, not only in western Europe but world-wide. We were able to tour the museum, educational and informative as it was, 
and look longingly at the countryside, but the first vacancy on a tour of the replica caves was not till the early afternoon, too late for us as we had to head to Burgos. Altamira is also on the list for a return visit. Perhaps, if we had chosen the caves in the afternoon and the village the next morning, both experiences would have been better. But that was the luck of the draw and we headed inland without much regret, 
having had a number good coastal experiences, including a nice visit to Santander, the beach playground of Spanish royalty. Our hotel was built right on the beach, with the grassy cliff faces on the left, 
near the entrance to the harbor, and a rocky eminence on the right on which stood a great gothic pile - the local palace for the royals who came to bathe in the sea. El Sardinero, the locale in which we were situated, seems to be the last remains of the older style holiday resort, 
with a number of newer hotels being built to cater for the increased numbers arriving in the summer, but my preference would be for one of the smaller townships along the coast, Comillas or Ribadesella or Luarca. Whichever we choose, you can be sure that, anywhere we stay on the north Spanish coast will fit that desired McDonnell-Herman location, a scenic situation between mountain and sea, close to both.
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Passing through
The central part of Spain is on a raised plateau, between 600 and 1000 meters above sea level. This is the Meseta, separated from the north coast by a series of ranges that extend west and south from the Pyrenees. Coming south from Santander, via Altamira, we had to drive up into the Meseta through a series of rises. The main road from the north, the A1, comes from Bilbao, in Basque country, 100 kilometers east of Santander. We came via the N623, a road that rose up to about 1000 meters at the Puerto del Escudo, about 40 kilometers south of the coast. This was at first a very pleasant drive, that didn't really start climbing much until the last 10-15 kilometers, except for the fact that most of those last 10 kilometers were in a thick fog. I can suggest to you that there are more pleasant ways of spending your holidays than ascending on the 'wrong' side of a two-lane road, in a strange car, geared on the wrong hand, through twisty mountain country with which you are unfamiliar in a pea-souper that doesn't allow more than 5 meters of visibility, and gives you little warning of what's to come. Worse there were two further mountain passes (puertos) further south, one 20 kilometers further and one 40 on from that, each higher than the Puerto del Escudo, both which we had to pass through, and the vision of fog-bound road for 100 kilometers wasn't doing my psyche much good. Fortunately there was not much traffic on the road mid-week and we were able to reach the summit, after some ultra-careful driving. Even more fortunately, we found that the fog did not survive the summit and we had come onto the Meseta at that first pass and travelled roughly level, in reasonable sunshine, for the remainder of the journey into Burgos. There were some switchbacks, and narrow passes, even some parts of the road where we hang out a little too close to sheer drops, but the difference that absence of fog makes to a drive in the mountains is immeasurable. Our room was booked in the village of Villagonzalo Pedernales, a few kilometers outside Burgos, and finding it was half the fun, as noted above. It turned out to be a pleasant country hotel, largely catering for the tourist buses plying the trade between Lisboa and the French border and Madrid and the border. As the European Cup (football) was being played in Lisboa at that time (we were following the progress of teams from the time we landed in Italy and the tournament continued through our time in Spain), and the England-Portugal quarter final was due to be played the next day, we had a number of Poms rushing to Portugal for the game. We met quite a few coming back later in the week in Salamanca and Madrid.
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Cid city
Burgos boasts the third largest cathedral in Spain, a huge Gothic pile that dominates one end of the old town. It also made itself into the central city in the mythology of Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, the eleventh century adventurer and captain, whose exploits earned him the monicker, El Cid (the leader). While he fought as a mercenary on occasion for the Moors, he later led Christian armies, often against the wishes of the Castillian kings, 
in conquering large tracks of eastern Spain, and set the agenda for the reconquista that wasn't completed until the late fifteenth century. The third leg of Burgos tourism is its place on the Camino Frances. In the pilgrimage from Puenta la Reina, Burgos and Leon were the two big cities along the way. 
We dutifully paid our respects to the Cid (top right); observed the pilgrims coming in to have their Santiago Pass stamped; had coffee in the Plaza Major (left); toured the narrow streets of the old town (bottom right) and 
joined the throngs on the concourse between the old town and the river in the evening as clowns, buskers and acrobats turned the place into an ad hoc circus, to the delight of the perambulating locals and the tourists seated at the various cafes and bars. 
We also did the obligatory tour of the cathedral (top and bottom left) and of its associated chapels, aisles and museum, and were duly impressed by its sheer size, if not by any other aspect of its construction. But these were sidelights because the main reason we had stopped at Burgos for an extra night was to enable us to attend Vespers at Santo Domingo de Silos, where the monks still conduct their ceremonies in Gregorian chants.
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Enchanting
The drive through the afternoon across the Meseta, via Salas de los Infantes, 
was pretty enough but the village of Santo Domingo de Silos was something else again. This is, like Santillana del Mar, a village preserved largely in its medieval form where you walk through the village, 
this one mostly downhill, to a church at the end of the street. Unlike the other place, Santo Domingo doesn't make a big deal of itself and seems much more attractive as a result. The church now standing is of a later period (eighteenth century) but 
it backs on to an eleventh and twelfth century cloister that was the most beautiful we saw. They form part of the Romanesque monastery, built on the ruins of a seventh century Visigothic abbey. 
We traversed the ground floor gallery, which is the one open to the public. Above it was second gallery, apparently similar, which is used by the monks at the monastery. The pillars are built in pairs, one behind the other as you face the centre of the cloister, 
each pair sharing a capital, carved in three phases, distinguished by the styles of the three master craftsmen who did the carvings. In the middle of each side is a central pillar constructed of three intertwined pillars, and at each corner are large, more ornate carvings. 
The carvings, like those at Santillana del Mar, include geometric and natural shapes, as well as representations from Biblical stories and mythology. 
There is a greater sophistication and complexity in these carvings, particularly those of the second craftsman.
The wooden roof is panelled and decorated in the Mudejar style, Christian motifs and themes, painted with Moorish technique and the floor of the cloister is decorated in ornate cobblestoned patterns, of discrete colors and shapes (below right). 
In the cloister is also a large ornate thirteenth century tomb of St Dominic (below left), 
and in the centre a circular fountain in the midst of a geometric pattern of grass and stone paths, with a single cypress tree in one corner. This cloister was one of the most serene places I have seen and encouraged introspection, despite the patter of schoolchild feet and the cacophony of schoolchild voices, from the high school group that accompanied our tour. The cloister was a bit of a surprise because we'd come for the religious service, which kicked off just after sunset. We saw a Vespers service. This was conducted by the Benedictine monks in chants, with song and response. It's quite eerie, and it feels vaguely medieval to sit (perhaps standing would have been more authentic) through a ceremony in a sacred language (Latin) known only to the monks (with few exceptions), in which you are not only unable to participate, but through which you are expected not to participate, but to observe. For, like medieval times, it is the monks' job to intercede on your behalf with the deity in a way that separates them from you - you have neither the knowledge nor the skill to be involved. It was evocative of a mood of genuine faith and belief as well, as the monks went through their well-known rituals, and the congregation sat and contemplated. Not an experience that I would have missed, and far different in the 'flesh' than would be expected from those who've only heard some of the monastery's commercial recordings. The mood lasted through the return to the hotel, along different roads from those we had used to arrive, through some pleasant countryside and the towns of Covarrubias and Lerna, both of which seemed worth a longer squizz had we had but world enough and time.
Lack of time for all we wanted to see seemed to have become the major problem on the driving leg of the tour. Next time, we might leave more to chance and not book so much of the trip ahead.
Next issue. The pilgrimage concludes as we go further south, through Salamanca to Madrid and thence fly home.
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First written: June 2005
see also Fit the First of the European pilgrimage - Bologna, Ferrara, Ravenna, Siena
Fit the Second of the European pilgrimage - Pisa and the Cinque Terra
Fit the Third of the European pilgrimage - Barcelona
Fit the Fourth of the European pilgrimage - Santiago de Compostela
Fit the Sixth of the European pilgrimage - Salamanca, Segovia, Madrid and home
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