74. Northern Spain - the Asturias and Galicia

After a lazy week in San Sebastian at the Buena Vista, we headed west along the lush, green coast of northern Spain towards A Coruna in Galicia on the far north west cape.  Spain is 450km from east to west across the top, so we decided to stop halfway at Llanes.

Llanes takes the full force of the Atlantic Ocean via the Bay of Biscay with huge tides and a coastline that constantly battles both waves and wind. The outer harbour shelters the serious fishing boats; the second protects the pleasure craft and amateur fishers. 
Llanes is in the province of Asturias which is a principality. A few years back the King of the Asturias presented an award to my good friend, Leonard Cohen related to his poems and songs about the Resistance movement.  It all seems so ridiculously romantic to me.

Nothing very romantic about Llanes beach at 11.00am on a Monday morning. But intrepid holidaymakers were arriving to secure their spot for the day while I was still huddled in my coat at the cafe with my first coffee. May be the sun will come out - may be not. 

Onwards from Llanes, past Gijon and Oviedo and crossing the mountains into Galicia, we were in the clouds.  So are the wind turbines. 

What a beautiful sight. Elegant, gentle, silent power.

Instead of staying in A Coruna as we had previously, we opted to explore the myriad of bays, inlets, coves and beaches about 40 km to the north. 

At Perbes we couldn't resist a pension named Casa Savi. Advertised as being on the beach and having wifi throughout, it was about 650m up the inland road and the wifi only worked when it felt like it.

For our first meal in Mino, next to Perbes, Paul sussed out these lovely ladies at a local bar/cafe/restaurant who, it turned out, were cooking "little fish".  That was all that was on the menu that night - "little fish" with boiled potatoes.  

So we queued up in the street with the locals, paid our €5 per person, collected our plastic bag with fork, napkin and bread, as well as our very generous glass of locally made wine, poured from a watering can, and listened to the bagpipe players on the road while we waited for our "little fish".  Sardines so fresh they were almost still swimming.

We returned on our second night, wondering what the charming ladies might throw up at us this time, but alas they were in the normal kitchen, not in the street and we were back to the standard menu.

But whose complaining?  I had a big plate of sweet, tiny scallops and Paul had his favourite, fried calamari.  We shared a Russian salad made with local potatoes, a plate of deep fried green Padron peppers with sea salt, and a plate of local wild mushrooms with goats cheese. Fabulous.  

The man at the next table congratulated us on our great choice of local dishes and recommended we have the local cheese and honey for dessert - but surprisingly, we were full.

It turned out that Casa Savi was a child of the original, Restaurante Savi which is the part of this dynasty that sits right on the beach at Perbes. On a sunny Saturday morning the beach looked inviting despite that little tinge of constant wind off the Atlantic.

On this beach they do things the 'old way'.

Just around the corner, in a small inlet, on another tiny bay we discovered this little bit of paradise. 

Turning it's face to the sun and its back to the wind, this is the type of place you could happily spend a lazy week doing nothing but swimming, sunning, mucking around in boats and eating seafood that was caught that morning.

Moving south down the western coast of north-west Spain, we pass Santiago de Compostela and the many hundreds of pilgrims walking in from a variety of directions. 
We are heading for O Grove, past Pontevedre where we intended to stop to find the parador. However, Pontevedre turned out to be one of those citys that is so choked with cars and trucks that you can't face the difficulties of negotiating the traffic and parking no matter how beautiful the target of your visit might be.  So we gave up and headed again for the relative peace of the fishing villages.

O Grove has lots of boats and does a lot of fishing. Do I look a bit bored?  I'm trying hard to be interested in looking at boats, and more boats and more water and more marinas and ignore the wind. There is always the wind. I hate wind!

As we leave O Grove we stop to watch the locals catching clams in the sand at the neck of the river as the tides ebbs. There were hundreds of them out there - locals not clams.