Picos de Europa 2026. A walking and driving tour.

The Road to Potes.

Sunday morning. St Just. Chuck fired up with its characteristic puff of black smoke as if today was nothing special. As if we were off to Penzance to see mum. 

But Sunday was special. 

Sunday was the start of my first solo trip in nearly ten years. 

Equally special was that I’d be travelling in Chuck, my old L200 pickup that hasn’t been past Truro since I bought it a few years ago. 

Chuck. 

It’s a pig. 

It’s a bastard. 

It’s a joy. 

If you don’t pay sufficient attention Chuck will dump you in the hedge, but given respect and judicious use of low ratio four wheel drive Chuck will get you out of almost any trouble. 

Some crazy business in Staffordshire lightly customised it with pumped suspension, wild oversized wheels, massive tyres and more before the sponsor fell on hard times and was keen to shed some assets. 

I bought it and drove it home from Cardiff in fear of the beast I’d taken charge of, but gradually I’ve learned to love it. 

Now I’m taking Chuck to Spain.

No Minty. No planner. No navigator. I’ll miss her.

Kas. PZ Taximan.

At Plymouth docks I smile as the random selection of cars from different queues puts me behind Kas Evans, a fellow taximan from Penzance. 

My trip is silly but hopefully fun. Kas’s trip is beyond imagining. Kas is driving to Alicante for a taxi fare!

His customer has had a stroke and needs to get home to Torquay. He’s in a wheelchair and so needed a particular driver. 

Kas is that man. 

Landed. Potes. Gateway to the Picos de Europa.

A return to El Bodegón – the storied bar of Carlos the Canary. 

A small beer. A plate of meat and cheese. Bread. 

The most simple fare. And all you could wish for.

I feel a sadness as my plate nears empty. But I need no more.

For an hour I’ve slowly picked at the delicious food while watching the main event, Carlos the amazing barman. 

It’s quiet here tonight, but we’ve been here when the place has been rammed. Carlos has acknowledged every new arrival with his communicative whistle. Everyone feels included. 

I want to tell the nervous tourist hovering on the steps to come on in for great food, drink, and entertainment. 

Planning. And lights.

My room at the hostal is comfortable in a sparse Spanish way. A firm mattress. A granite bolster pillow. Awful lights.

The lighting is as bad as any who came to Spain since the invention of strip lighting will expect. The Spanish love cold harsh lights. 

The only way I can read my maps is to take them into the bathroom where the LEDs are even brighter. 

I lay maps on the tiles and enjoy the cool of sitting there plotting my route. 

More Kelvins needed (the light scale increases warmth as the number of Kelvins increases). Sounds good to me.

Walking out of Potes. Day 1. 

This is a day walk. 

A stroll. 

It’s nothing to fear. But I’m taking it seriously. 

Phone charged. 

Paper maps. Mapping apps, with downloaded routes.

Glasses for the reading of. 

Water. A few litres. 

Fruit. 

Nuts. 

First aid kit. 

Multitool. 

Warm layers and rain jacket. It seems crazy to pack these when the weather app shows a day of full sun. But these are mountains. High mountains. 

Backup battery. Where the hell is the backup battery? Could I have packed it into the little rucksack I then decided to leave at home?

I don’t want to be frugal with phone use. But I’ll have to be. 

For most people this list is sensible. For me it is revolutionary. My packing usually consists of a bank card and a £20 note. 

I’m nervous. 

I’m excited. 

I’m off. 

Three miles of flatish road. Boring, but for the distant views. 

Turn onto the track and it’s an immediate 33% gradient. It’ll get steeper. 

My companions are butterflies. 

My companions are goats. 

The scent is fig, fennel, the musk of goats, silage cooking in its black wrap. 

There’s bounty at the roadside, but none is quite ready. Apple, pear, bright red cherry, elderberry, walnut, almond and plum. 

I don’t see a soul in two hours. Then in the heat of the afternoon some crazy fool runs past in long trousers and sporting a rucksack. 

Villages with no real roads. Yet inhabited. Smart building projects going on. Escapes in the hills.

My close views are of wild flowers, butterflies, birds. My long views stretch far into the mountains, across valleys with pretty cows wearing clanging bells. 

I wonder if they notice. 

I wonder if they care. 

Bar. 

Three hours in and at the end of my plotted route there’s an unexpected bar. No one around, but I’m happy to sit in the shade. 

After 20 minutes of peaceful rest there are voices from inside. An aging Italian straight from La Cage aux Folles trips onto my private patio while chatting to himself. Once he’d got over the shock of my presence he insisted I drink a beer. I’m happy to oblige.  

Return.  

A mental check of my fitness for the return. 

Feet. Good. Perhaps some toes will suffer from the coming descent. I chose my running shoes for this first walk. There’s not much padding up front. 

Legs. Good. 

Sweat. Blimey. Plenty of that. But it’s doing its job and cooling me now. 

Down. Down. Down. 

Climbing super steep is hard. 

Descending those same slopes is so much worse. 

I’m so glad I resisted the strong temptation to carry on to the next obvious destination. 

At halfway I felt good. Not invincible, but capable at least. 

By the time I’d finished the descent I was finished.

The heat had become intense, I was barely noticing the scents, the scenes, I was putting one foot in front of the other with the brain taking over where the muscles had failed. 

Still three miles to go. 

Flat. Ish. 

But no cooling breeze down at this level. Just the torment of the River Quiviesa tumbling cool, but inaccessible 20 metres below. 

That was then.

Now I’m showered. 

I’m clean from top to toe. 

I’ve drank a couple of pints of water. 

An espresso. 

And next there’ll be a glass of wine. 

What a day!

Another mile of climbing would have made the return extremely difficult. I hope I learn. 

A tight shin seems to be the only thing to worry about. 

Boots tomorrow. Poles too I expect. My planned route is shorter, but harder than today’s. 

Now I just need to stay awake until places open again for the evening. Unfortunately my favourite is now shut until Thursday. I’m glad I made it last evening. 

Short walk. 

I’m pleased to remember how nervous I was yesterday morning. Anyone who takes to the mountains alone should exercise a high degree of caution. 

I wasn’t planning on tackling any difficult routes, but just the distance, and especially the distance from supplies, demands respect. 

My second route was a quick one. An hour and a quarter up. Forty five minutes down. 

Bloody brilliant. 

Seriously hard climbing that levelled out before exhaustion kicked in. An incredible view over Potes. Then carry on down. 

Foreign supermarkets. 

I love foreign supermarkets. 

And they’re even better alone as there’s no one to question the weird stuff you come out with. 

Five tins of assorted fish? Great protein if you’re low on the trail. 

More fruit than most families have ever seen? Well, have you seen the colours. It’s beautiful. 

I drew the line at tinned offal in tomato sauce. It wasn’t so much the offal I was worried about it was the translation that suggested a tin of calluses!

Drive. 

It’s about the walking. 

It’s about the drive. 

Only a few kms out of the fabulous little town of Potes the road starts to climb. 

There’s a great sign that warns of extreme bends and gradient for 21kms. 

Other than a few British bikes there’s little else on the road and I enjoy Chuck like never before. Its excessive exhaust note reverberates off the cliffs, the gearing feels built for the climb, and at 30mph tops it’s tolerably cool with all four windows down. 

I meet Rainer and Heike in a lay-by. They’re heading down. I’m on my way up. 

Rainer recommends Posada de Valdeón. I show him photos from our visit there last September. We quickly realise that we have a similar eye and have taken photos of the same scene. Even down to pictures of tree bark. 

We swop cards like some staged business photo shoot. 

Riaño. 

It was a couple of years ago in a worker’s bar in Riaño that I first discovered orujo. 

As I began that paragraph the boss came up to me where I’m eating and asked if I’d like an orujo. Really.

Today as I approached the town I remembered the petrol station and was glad. 

Chuck has been climbing well, but its thirst is prodigious. I suspect I have enough fuel to get back to Cornwall, but I know there’s a point just above a quarter full where the gauge fails for a few litres and suggests you’re completely empty. You do a little wee, drive ten miles worried as hell, then it bounces back.

I don’t want that panic. I top up with super at 50p a litre less than at home. 

After Posada de Valdeón. 

New territory. 

Google suggests it’ll take four minutes a mile for the last six. 

People run faster. 

But the suggested speed is about right for driving along cantilevered goat tracks with massive drops to the side. 

The scenery deserves time. 

The road deserves respect. 

I take it slow. Stop for photos of sky scraping mountains. Stop to breathe. 

Finally Caín de Valdeón hoves into view. The end of the road. The high Picos. Wow!

Thunder. Rain.

Dinner is served late. Spanish style. 

I have time so I decide to recce the Cares Gorge before taking on a 25 km walk trip through the gorge tomorrow. 

I didn’t get far. 

I’m sheltering now opposite a salmon ladder where the tremendous noise of the river drowns out the fearsome claps of thunder. 

Rain drops the size of 2p pieces pelt down and make new rivers of the paths that were so dry just minutes ago. 

I suspect I’ll be here a while. There’s a hint of sunlight in the distance, but no sign of this inundation letting up. 

I’m happy to observe. In fact the air is so charged with energy it’s truly exciting. But the plummeting temperature makes me wish for that warm layer I have in my pack. The pack that I left in my room. 

Fabada.

My diet has been so good so far I have even impressed myself. 

I could have eaten wall to wall crisps, there’s no one to stop me. 

Instead my fuel for my walks has been a handful of almonds, a couple of apples and a couple of satsumas. 

By the time places start serving in the evening I’ve almost gone beyond hunger and could sleep instead. 

Until I saw a bowl of fabada being served. 

You can keep your steaks and pizzas. For me a hearty dish of Spanish bean stew is what I crave. It’s probably best not to question what the meaty bits are. 

Cares Gorge (Ruta de Cares).

It’s likely to be a six hour walk. Ideally I’d start early, get back before the heat of the day.

But my hostal doesn’t serve breakfast until 8.30am.

Everyone here is walking. Everyone here wants to eat early. No one here can.

That said, the coffee is good. The cheese croisant doesn’t sound like much, but have you seen a Spanish croisant? It’s a monster compared to its French cousin. It’s fuel enough.

9.15. Here we go.

It’s cold. There’s steam rising from the river. 

I was concerned it’d be busy, but it’s more than an hour before I see anyone, and even then I only catch up with a few couples.

The Cares Gorge is phenomenal. 

The Cares Gorge path – the PR3 is a wild feat of engineering.

The limestone gorge that splits the western and central massives of the Picos range. In the late 1800s an audacious engineering project commenced to build a canal fed by the Cares River to power a hydroelectric scheme at Camarmeña.

The PR3 path that’s one of the major walking draws of the Picos range was cut into the mountains to provide maintenance access for that canal.

Low tunnels hewn from the rock.

Narrow paths with nothing between you and the hundred metre drop to the river.

Skinny little bridges.

All too familiar?

Well how about a cantilevered wooden platform, at least 100m above the river below, with a metal grill that lunatics can stand on to show their fearlessness?

In general the 12km walk is fairly level revealing stunning view after stunning view. 

As the sun warms the rock lizards get lazy in the heat.

The occasional chamoix goat sends a tumble of rocks in your direction. 

Alpine choughs with their yellow bills contrasting with the orange of their Cornis cousins. I want to tell them that at home choughs fly out over the sea instead of the deep gorge here.

In the afternoon Griffon’s Vultures wheel above it all.

After two hours of barely noticable gradients the path suddenly starts to climb. The climb is short enough, perhaps 30 minutes, but I notice that there’s a stream of people coming down.

They look destroyed. 

Everyone I’d passed so far had a jolly “Hola”, “Hello”, “Bonjour” or similar.

These folk could barely lift their heads.

At the top of the climb I chatted with some English. They told me they’d been there for half an hour trying to recover from the climb they’d endured.

I was about to go down. And down, and down, and down.

I’d been walking for nearly three hours, and an imperceptible turn to the right had brought the sun directly onto the path. I was tired. Dog tired. And concerned about the retrun walk that awaited me.

At about two hours fifty I was seriously thinking of turning back without reaching Poncebos at the head of the gorge.

When a sight lifted my spirits.

Not a bar. Not a taxi.

But a couple carrying a baby and walking a French bulldog.

There was no way they’d walked far. 

Ten minutes later I was installed at a restaurant and I’d ordered a beer, a milky coffe and a disappointingly thin tortilla.

There have been few occasions in my life when a simple lager has tasted so good. Perhaps ordering the 6.5% wasn’t the best idea. But my god it was good.

Serge.

I started the climb. Nervous. But energised.

After 30 minutes there was shade, an idea place to rest, drink another pint of water.

And there was Spanish Serge Gainsbourg.

Reclining in jeans. Smoking a strong cigarette the like of which you don’t smell these days. He even had a beer. 

If he got no further he was impressive.

If Jane Birkin happened by I’m sure they’d have slinked off into the shadows.

Up and up.

As I shouldered my day pack two young lads stood and hoisted their full rucksacks.

I hope they’re not going up I thought, I don’t need my competitive edge kicking in.

They were going up.

A sensible man in his sixties would have stepped aside.

This one dug deep.

I figured their heavy packs would outweight the 35 years age difference. 

If I could stay in front until the top there was no way they could descend as fast as me with their packs pulling them every which way.

They might not have known they were in a race, but they pushed me hard.

Fearing a false summit we were all three quiet as we rounded what turned out to be the final bend. We all three cheered, and possibly shed a tear of relief. The climb had been climbed, there was only ten kilometers to home.

Home.

Just as breakfast is served late, so dinner starts at eight.

Just as there’s a queue for breakfast, there’s a queue for dinner as two dozen hungry eaters hussle for their table and beer.

Could there be learning here?

At my hostal, the Casona de Palmira, I have the familiar scenario of setting out my maps on the bathroom floor. The bed however is comfortable, and the pillow perfect. I look forward to eating soon, and sinking into bed soon after.

I’ve just checked my word count. I’m enjoying this, but if I hope for anyone to read this far I’d best stop, add pictures, and publish.

Who knows? There may be more.