Lago Ercina, The Higher of the Covadonga Lakes.

Playa de Cuevas del Mar (Map)

Asturias is still as green and majestic as ever (as if it would have changed!) Where else in the world can you leave such a stunning coastline and in under an hour be high up in mountains so impressive that they even look down on other slightly smaller mountain ranges below! Thank goodness it rains so much in Asturias, to keep it all so deep green, and to keep the developers at bay!

We stayed at the extremely nice, exceptionally friendly La Rondita. And it didn’t rain once!

It’s hot. 38º Celsius (100ºF) hot. No one can sleep hot.

It shouldn’t be a surprise, after all, this happens every year in Madrid, and every year I swear it’ll be my last summer living in the capital. Oh well, perhaps we’ll all get used to it in a week or two!

Luckily we’ve discovered the most perfect escape, just an hour and a bit from the city, high up in the Sierra de Guadarrama.

La Boca del Asno is a vast area of pine-covered mountainside, with a freezing, shallow mountain river, and a huge number of fellow picnicers. In fact, when I arrived at the already overflowing car park at midday last Saturday, my first thought was to run a mile – it seemed like the whole city had followed us up the hill! (N.B. Get there before midday if you want a spot in said carpark!)

But there is so much space, and as usual so many people stick close to the car park, that within a few minutes walk up the river, you find yourself with plenty of riverside space to sit down for a picnic and a long day’s paddling.

The trick is to cross over the river at the bridge below the bar, and keep heading up stream until you feel you have enough room between fellow picnicers to really relax.

It’s 8 degrees cooler than Madrid, (being about 800 meters higher), and if you wander up the hill away from the river, you really can escape humanity completely, lie back in the long grass under the pines, and contemplate the wonders of nature. Like this, for example – any ideas as to what it is, gratefully received:

To get to the Boca del Asno, drive up to Puerto de Navacerrada from Madrid, head over the top and down the hill towards San Ildefonso, wind down the 5 or 6 hair pins, then look for the big ‘Boca del Asno’ sign and car park:

View Boca del Asno in a larger map

Last weekend we headed about 5 hours south of Madrid to the stunning Sierra de Cazorla. If you don’t know where it is, then don’t worry – hardly anyone does! Which is a very good thing, as there is hardly anyone there at this time of year. Here is our trip in photos, with accompanying notes.

First we did the Cerrada del Utrero walk, an hour’s circular ramble, the highlight of which is this stunning waterfall pouring from a vast, sheer rock face as vultures circle above:

We spent the first night at the lost-in-the-hills Hotel Coto del Valle – 4 stars, a bit more luxurious than we need, but at 60 euros a night we felt it was a good place to start. (Later we moved to self-catering accommodation down the road in Arroyo Frio.) Just outside the hotel gates a large family of wild boar wandered past, watched by a stag further up the hill:

Our main excursion was a full days walk along the Sendero del Rio Borosa, a long dirt forest track beside a crystal clear, trout-filled mountain stream, than turns into the highlight of the trip, the narrow path known as the Cerrada de Elías, one of the most beautiful gorge walks I’ve ever encountered – filled with wild flowers and fig trees overhanging the stream:

Here’s the map, below, of where to find the Sierra de Cazorla, and here are instructions for the Cerrada de Elías route. I hope you get to walk it one day!

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Ben and Marina are back, talking about Sepulveda (photo above), the Hoces Del Rio Duratón, life in the Barrio and more…. Leave us a comment if you’ve listened, or have a question or topic for the next podcast.

More photos… A typical Castilla y Leon roadside landscape:

A view over the valley below Sepulveda town:

Amusing sign on the wall in Sepulveda:

Where to find Sepulveda:

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Photo: Cabo de Trafalgar, near Vejer de la Frontera

Two very interesting articles in the Guardian have recently been pointed out to me by listeners at our Spanish learning sister site Notesinspanish.com

First, A short history of Spanish cinema – loads of trailers.

Do read the Guardian comments too for more recommendations. (As the first comment points out, you might need a 3 hour lunch-break to watch all the trailers in the article!)

Secondly, Spain’s lost generation of graduates join wave of migrants in search of jobs tells the story of those fleeing the crisis in Spain to seek work in locations like London.

Finally, a quick plug…

…a very good friend of mine has put a website together to help his mother (also a great friend of mine!) rent her very nice house in Vejer de la Frontera. Even if you don’t want to rent a holiday house in Vejer, then I thoroughly recommend looking at the photos in the galleries, they are great! This is without doubt one of my favourite parts of Spain. Check it all out here: A house in Vejer

Casteller from Mike Randolph on Vimeo.

In the city of Tarragona, Spain, castellers gather every two years to see who can build the highest, most intricate human castles. It requires astonishing strength, finesse, and balance. Not to mention courage.

Thanks so much to Mike for sending me this video. I went to this event, the Concurs de Castells, about 10 years ago (and wrote about it in Errant), and have longed to go back since, it’s one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen in my life. If you want to go in two years time, get a ticket as soon as they are released, they fly!

The Telegraph has a good article about travel to Spain by train – a perfectly good alternative to air travel, if you are coming from the UK or France at least!

During my first 5 years in Spain, I travelled back and forth to the UK exclusively by train (until my temporary fear of flying disappeared), and as I wrote in an article in 2001, sitting in the restaurant car of the overnight train speeding from Paris to Madrid, is one of the greatest ‘old-style’ travel pleasures on earth!

But the days of the overnight trains to France are clearly numbered. The Telegraph article states:

Finally, a new way to reach Spain opens for business later this year. On December 12, the first part of the new Perpignan-Barcelona high-speed line enters service, and two daily double-deck TGVs (Train à Grande Vitesse, the 186mph French high-speed train) will link Paris with Figueres, just north of Barcelona and home to the remarkable Salvador Dalí museum.

You’ll be able to leave London on a 10.25am Eurostar, change in Paris onto the 3.20pm TGV for Figueres, arriving at 8.46pm the same day.

So how long before you leave Madrid in the morning and arrive in Paris 5 hours later? Despite the fact it’s bound to do away with the overnight service, it will be a wonderful journey, I can’t wait!

Notes: The photo above is from Madrid’s fine Train Museum. Thanks to Sagitario in the forum for pointing to the Telegraph article.

We spent a few days in my favourite city on the planet this summer, San Sebastian (how can you not love a city where one of the main forms of transport is the skateboard!), where we discovered the finest tapa known to man. It was just behind surfy-cool Gros beach, which to my mind is far more interesting that it’s posh, famous cousin, La Concha, on the other side of the old town…

So to this mighty tapa, so good it has won it’s own award… It’s a sort of crepey/potatoey bacalao (fresh cod) warm, pickled-peppery sandwitch type colllection of several mouthfuls of bliss, covered in a buttery sauce. How’s that for a description!

I think you’ll just have to go and try it yourself, acutally, at only 2 Euros a go, you can try two! It’s at Pagadi, which is hidden down a little alley with a couple of other wonderful real-Gros-barrio-bars, about two and a half blocks back from the sea just off Birmingham Kalea (it’s marked on this map). If you’re looking for the ‘real’ San Sebastian, this is it!

One small problem, I can’t remember exactly what this tapa was called – but they only have two which involve bacalao, and this is the one that won the award! Try the calamaris too – wow…

This post is in response to Catavinos request for San Sebastian ideas!

Other links:

Faye Davies, who wrote with us at Notes from Madrid, has written a “fast-paced political thriller, a personal tale of pride and paranoia… Ángel Valdés, president of Zamora, has it all: women, peace – and absolute power. But when an overheard remark ignites his jealousy of a long-dead comrade, Ángel finds himself gambling everything to become the undisputed hero of his country…” Read a new chapter every week at http://theseconddeathofjuanlaroca.blogspot.com/

There is an important hold-the-mirror-up-to-reality article in El Pais about the well-advanced destruction of the Spanish coasts.

You can read the original here in Spanish or try your luck with Google Translate, which gets things totally the wrong way round sometimes in its English version, e.g. “by 2030 the entire Spanish coast is untouched by human activities.” – Err I think the article actually says that by 2030 the entire Spanish coast will be affected/damaged by human activity – that’s if things continue at the current rate:

More than 50% of the beaches and 70% of the dunes belonging to the Spanish coast have been damaged or seriously altered; 60% of the wetlands that were present in 1950 have disappeared; more than 60% of the land immediately surrounding the beaches on the Mediterranean, southern Atlantic, and island coastlines, has been urbanised.

So by 2030, bye bye to the rest. The concrete necklace that separates Spain from the sea will be complete.

But wasn’t there a ‘Ley de Costas’ (Law of the Coasts) that was passed to protect this fragile ecosystem?

According to the article it is largely steam rolled by all-powerful corporations, with local councils (who need/want the cash) in their back pockets.

What’s the solution?

I suspect it has to be ground-up – people have to choose to look for well-established and/or environmentally conscious holiday locations, rather than booking into the big new resorts that have just landed on the latest bit of ‘pristine’ coastline…

Unfortunately we are due to spend some time before the season is over in one-such new beach urbanización on Spain’s southern Atlantic coast (visiting relatives there), and having read the above article, I don’t feel overly happy about that…

We’ll think more carefully about trips like this in the future, and try to keep to the kind of eco-friendly place we were lucky enough to find in Asturias.