The most beautiful town in Spain

Luarca names itself the most beautiful town in Spain. It has been truly lovely, and I regret that because of tiredness and injury we did not walk as much of it as I would have liked. The hospitality was almost embarrassing. The hotel owner would not let us pay anything at the bar and even shouted us breakfast on the last morning. 

We had a final walk around on the final morning and bought a picnic lunch.....a salad roll would be a bit of a change from our recent meals. After that we set off along the Asturias countryside. The hills come right down to the sea, and the rivers cut through though hills. That means some of the bridges on the motorway are truly awesome. Over a kilometer long and seriously high. In fact so high I was instructed not to look by Marjan. Later when I went to have a look in the afternoon Marjan was afraid it would drop on us. That IS our little polo at the bottom. The road,on the left is the 4 lane, 120kmh freeway. The one on the right is merely a local road.

As we had chickened out on the potentially icy roads in the mountains of Picos de Europa we needed to fill that bit of the itinerary. We liked Luarca and the people so much we considered staying. However some previous research, and a recommendation from a blog follower, gracias Encarni, led us to choose another fishing village nearby called Cudillero. It was only thirty or fourty kilometers away, so we stopped off at Cape Video( oh OK Cabo Vidio) where there was a lighthouse and an opportunity to see the coast.

Got to Cudillero, and I must say that it would give Luarca a shake as most beautiful town in Asturias, let alone anywhere else. Another fishing village, but this one has even less flat land that Luarca, and no river running through it. The place just goes straight up. It is quite colourful as they seem to have done a nice paint job. There is essentially one road through the town that leads around the port area, where you can park, and then leads through and out of town where there is no parking, except for a few lucky locals. The unlucky locals have to park between the port and the town in an area dedicated for them. The visitors like us have to park further out of town. More or less from where the first pic below is taken. Of course I am getting good at the Spanish parking thing, so I drove into town, drove up onto a curb, switched my hazard lights on, because that makes everything you do OK, and unloaded the car, then drove back out of town and parked, walked back in and checked into our hotel.

What I found most interesting is climbing around in the streets of the town. It is essentially a series of stairs and alleyways that work their way up and around the hillside. It is really difficult to explain how the place hugs the hillside and how steep it all actually is. At one point I was in a lane way where I could touch a front door with either hand and had steps leading down to someone's roof in front of me. I was fascinated by the sheer number of service hatches for water, sewage etc. in all the lane ways and stairways. Obviously they need a huge number to be able to get to all the piping.

Really all we did was walk around a bit. Have our picnic lunch......in the car by the sea, because it was really cold at lunch time, have a cofee, and walk around some more. So a rather staid day, the only real danger was having a freeway drop on us. A very pleasant day though.

Bye for now!