The Green and little known Side of Spain

The Northern coast of Spain is where the high central plain changes into dramatic mountain ranges with green alpine valleys reminiscent of the Swiss Alps, before falling to the sea with impressive cliffs.

This coast consists of four autonomous regions Galicia, Asturius, Cantabria and Euskadi (The Basque Country) three of which still have their own languages in everyday use. Many people along this coast only have Spanish as a second language. Although briefly occupied these regions were never subdued by the Romans or the Moors and were the last areas to be subdued by Franco. Only in 2017 was the final agreement for ETA (the Basque terrorist group) to lay down their arms concluded.

So this was to be our cruising ground for 2012, starting from Hondarribia. While preparing the boat to go back in the water we had to stay somewhere and, as usual, we thought that we would plunge into the atmosphere by finding a really rural Basque lodging, which we booked in advance. At first approach our hearts sank.

But when we went around to the front things improved!

In the following days we quickly learned that things were very different from the tourist images of Spain. A list of family names posted nearby was unpronounceable, the basque beret was ubiquitous, and the sports were weird. It felt that we were in an exotic and distant place.

Many pictures are hyper-links.

Basque Family Names

Policeman in Hondarribia

Pelote with the zesta punta

Hiru oholtzar

With the boat  finally back in the water and having gorged ourselves on the superb local pinchos we set off. The complete log of our outward leg can be seen by following this link to Google Earth, Hondarribia to La Corruna  make sure that you have the ‘temporary places’ box ticked and the files within it ticked when it is open. Clicking on the yellow push pins will open log entries. However, if you do not wish to do that here is the picture.

The Outward Leg with Stopping Points

We explored the the coast and poked our nose into Pasajes harbour but our first stop was San Sebastian, the 'Cannes of Spain', situated on a beautiful  bay with fabulous scenery. The 'beautiful people' come here for the annual film festival. The town itself is picturesque with old streets and fabulous pinchos in the bars. The marina was very small and crowed so we were forced to moor in the bay and take the dinghy ashore but it was well worth the effort.

Imposing Entrance to Pasajes

The Crew in a Pinchos Bar

Old Quarter San Sebastien

Enterprise Moored at San Sebastien

From the above map it is clear that the continental shelf comes relatively close to the coast with underwater canyons reaching like fingers even closer. As deep water currents push up onto the shelf swells are caused which add to the effects of distant Atlantic storm generated swells. These are only of consequence when sailing broadside to them, which causes excessive rolling, on shelving bottoms, which often occurs on the approach channel to a harbour, and when crossing a bar. When choosing our destinations these last two effects were often dominant.

The next three ports were Getaria, Motrico and Bermeo. Former fishing ports built for donkey traffic and untouched by mass tourism, they are having to re-invent themselves. Since we were there a marina has been built in Motrico as part of this process. We were intrigued by these small Basque towns.

A street in Getaria

This little fellow made the whole street echo with his song.

Motrico

Our Reception Committee - Pressure on the skipper's docking skills.

Then it was on to Bilbao; well actually Getxo, as Bilbao is inland, up an industrialised river that is in the process of renewal. There is a huge  harbour with one of the outer walls submerged at high tide; a real trap for a skipper who does not do his homework. In its industrial heyday Bilbao was very wealthy as witnessed by its grand boulevards and magnificent mansions built out of town around the harbour.

Where the Wealthy Industrialists Lived

Elegant Boulevards

The Transporter Bridge

A Scary Perch which Flexes and Rattles When the Transporter Travels Underneath

Bilbao's genius in it's re-invention was to host the Guggenheim Museum with its fantastical architecture which has triggered growth of the metro system, a cruise liner dock and other modern architecture. Now the city feels dynamic and vibrant; a must see.

Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum With the Cat in Flowers

Transformed at Night

The Elegant Older Section

We spent a week here and explored some of the back country. It was full of surprises. World class architecture in the most surprising places.

Santiago Caltrava's Spectacular Ysios Winery

Remember many pictures are hyper-links.

Frank Gehry's Hotel Marqués de Riscal

This passion for modern architecture is not just restricted to skyscrapers and iconic buildings but to modest homes and apartments. When winding through the remoter valleys up to the Basque capital of  Vitoria-Gasteiz we stopped to photograph a new apartment in a tiny village.

Modern Design in a Small Village

This coastline and countryside was such a feast for the senses that we rather got stuck in Getxo and were reluctant to move on. But there is a darker side to this exuberant Europeanism, for every week there is a newspaper article revealing some new aspect of the Franco era. At this time they are still excavating mass graves to identify victims. Franco killed and enslaved people in a frenzy of retribution for years after the Civil War and it all received very little coverage by the outside world because of the Second World War and subsequent Cold War, (when Franco provided air bases for the Americans). Because there was a a peaceful transition to a monarchy after his death there was no cathartic cleansing of  state institutions. The re-established monarchy had to appease the Francoists and extreme right who still held many positions of power and although an amnesty was declared it excluded many Basques; hence the birth of ETA. The angst drags on.

The 26 April was the 75th Anniversary of the bombing of Guernica by the German Condor Legion and the newspapers published special editions. The German bombers appeared in the skies over Guernica in the late afternoon of April 26, 1937 and immediately transformed the sleepy Spanish market town into an everlasting symbol of the atrocity of war. Unbeknownst to the residents of Guernica, they had been slated by their attackers to become guinea pigs in an experiment designed to determine just what it would take to bomb a city into oblivion.
The town was nearby and we had to visit. Apart from the above mural there is little to see as the town has been rebuilt and Franco did not want anything to witness the event. However, there is an excellent and very moving museum which is well worth seeing.

From Bilbao we moved along the coast towards Santander, stopping at Laredo along the way. This is a rugged coast reminiscent of the Jurassic coast of the previous season.
We had arrived in Spain a year after the economic bubble had burst and the country was full of under-utilised apartments and infrastructure. We marvelled at superb auto-routes plunging through tunnels and flying over viaducts to minimise the environmental impact; until they came to an abrupt halt when the money had run out.
We were heading into Santona when we saw a large marina  in Laredo that was not on our chart. Suddenly we were face to face with an example of the spending spree.

The office building was new and luxurious but the money had run out before the toilet facilities were built! We loved Laredo with its old town and fort up on the hill. We climbed to the fort and watched falconry in action and strolled through the innovative sculpture park

The footpaths had wavy lines incised into them to evoke the maritime heritage. The result was that you would swear that the footpath undulated but, of course it was perfectly flat.

The down-town marina in Santander has little or no space for visitors so we sailed on by to a marina that is located right next to the airport runway and rather a long way out of town. Santander is the capital of Catalonia and a large elegant town with developed beaches and promenades. Elegant, but it was a big city and it did speak to us. Once again we headed off to the mountains, the Picos de Europa, precipitous and dramatic.

The Picos de Europa

These mountains have many caves containing palaeolithic and neolithic wall paintings and more discoveries are being made all the time. It is thought that these caves were the refuge of early people in the ice age and when the ice retreated they were the source of the re-population of Europe.

From the Altamira Caves

Continuing West from Santander the mountain ranges approach ever closer to the coast producing a rugged coastline with numerous headlands, also the continental shelf with numerous canyons approaches close to the shore. So there is seldom a day without significant swells even if the weather is fine. Our first stop was San  Vicente de la Barquera, one of many ports that requires an act of faith when entering for the first time with a swell.

The Entrance to San Vicente de la Barquera and our Anchorage off the Beach

From seaward the right hand entrance is not clear, it looks like a continuous line of breaking waves but as you get closer the 'escape' becomes clearer; much to the relief of the skipper! It was good that we visited this one first as the next one required even more faith.

The next stop was the port of Ribadesella and another 'interesting' entrance on a moderate swell. This time the 'escape' is invisible from the seaward side and the turn to port seems awfully close to the beach when you are not used to it.

Ribedesella and our Mooring to the Harbour Wall

Moored at the Wall

View from Seaward

The 'Escape' to Port

The Beach Seemed Awfully Close

The Harbour Wall Appears

The largest city of Asturius is Gijon our next port of call. A town with many charming buildings but extremely vibrant, there seemed to be street events taking place everywhere. The music and revelling went on until the early hours of the morning and since the marina in located right down-town we can testify to that. How people managed to get up and go to work in the morning was a mystery to us. We were here for two weeks as we found a very competent company to fix our auto helm. At the end of the previous season we had had trouble with it holding a course and shortly after leaving Hondarribia it had packed up altogether. Having to be at the helm constantly was a real drag. The wind vane steering works well on open sea passages but is not well adapted to coastal cruising so we determined to get it resolved and had a whole new auto-helm and navigation system added. We took the opportunity to install transmitting AIS. Once on the bridge of a ferry crossing the North Sea we were appalled to realise how difficult it is to see a yacht, even on a reasonable day. So now we rest easy knowing that we show up as a signal on every radar screen and chart plotter.

Gijon Down-Town Marina

A Party Town

A Watering Hole Close to the Boat

Arcaded Streets

Aerated Cider and Iberica Hams

All along this coast we found that cider was as popular as beer and probably more powerful. It was always aerated by pouring from as high as possible and the skill of the bartenders was often impressive. A glass of cider and some slices of the dry Iberica ham was a very pleasant way to pass an hour.
 On leaving Gijon we first had to round Cabo Penas with a nasty swell rolling us and knocking us back. Here we re-learned  lessons that we had learned many times before; firstly that if you neglect a job or fail to do it correctly it will catch up with you and probably at the worst possible moment; and secondly a job that takes 5 minutes at the dockside can take an hour when you are trying to do it at sea. Just off the point we looked behind us and saw the dinghy floating away! We had only attached the painter (and obviously not well) instead of a second safety line. The struggle to retrieve and reattach the dinghy in that heavy swell with the boat rolling and pitching took half an hour and much discomfort reaching over the side with the boat hook.

So we surfed on the swell into Luarco, feeling like we were old hands at this game, and did a quick turn to port into the calm behind the harbour wall. The inner harbour is most attractive but jammed full of fishing boats and the life boat, so visiting yachts have to moor on buoys in the outer Harbour and take a stern line to the harbour wall.

Taking the Stern Line Ashore.

The Inner Harbour, picture perfect.

The next port, Ribadeo. had three leading lines to enter. Leading lines fall into three categories; those to follow, those that define a point to change course and those that do both. Ribadeo had all three. The outer one defined the course to enter to avoid a bar in the harbour mouth. The second defined the point to change course and the course to follow and the third defined the point at which to change course for the inner channel. They are great when you can identify them but useless when you are looking into the sun, when the back markers have not been maintained and the paint faded from an unlit mark, and the trees have obscured the back marker.

Many of the old fishing villages deliberately build their prominent features like church spires, gable ended buildings and lighthouses so that they could serve as markers for leading lines.
We liked Ribadeo, the main town was a stiff climb but they had thoughtfully provided an elevator for lazy people. Several towns in Spain have installed outdoor escalators for steep main streets. This is the only country that we have ever seen this.

The last part of our outward trip was to prove the most challenging as this North West corner of Spain consists of jagged headlands and strong currents. The country behind these headlands is sparsely populated and the roads are not the best so it is not a coastline seen by many from the land side; or from the sea side for that matter since unless the weather is very good it is best to keep well offshore. We had one of those rare weather windows when the weather was perfect and so had the privilege of getting up close.

Rugged North West Spain

Punta Estaca de Bares

Punta do Lima

Cabo Ortegal

West of Cabo Ortegal are some of the highest cliffs in Europe down this coast known as the Altas Rias. Because we were in so close we could see the tiny sanctuary of San Andres de Teixido, but not the wild horses that roam these cliffs. This Saint had himself reincarnated as a lizard; a place of pilgrimage but the pilgrims never step on a lizard! There is a strange festival on 8th September each year which is on the weird side of strange. We continued down this coast and came to anchorage in the beautiful Ria de Cedeira.

But there is always a sting in the tail with sailing when everything seems to be going well! When we came to leave we found that our anchor was caught in old fishing tackle on the sea bed and we had not rigged a trip line. We had been told of such situations in many of these old fishing ports. After going back and forth and winching excessively we managed to collapse the anchor platform so had to finally cut the chain.
That was not to be the end of our challenges that day for immediately upon exiting the Ria we found ourselves in thick fog. Our new transmitting AIS and chart plotter stood us in good stead as we crept down the coast, the only danger is from small vessels that do not transmit. Luckily another yacht about half a kilometre away from us was following a parallel course so we could keep in touch by VHF. That yacht had a close encounter when it came across a fisherman sat in a rowing boat and not making any fog signals in the fog. Some people seem to have a death wish. The fog persisted until the entrance to A Coruna. With the fog we were unable to see the famous Roman lighthouse called the Tower of Hercules which dates from the first century AD, although greatly modernised since then.

There was no chance of getting into the City Marina as it was the week of the Tall Ships and every berth was taken so we went to the New Marina. A Coruna is a stopping point for yachts from  Europe travelling to the Mediterranean and we had some impressive neighbours.

A Maxi Yacht on the Way to the Mediterranean

Repairing the anchor Platform

There was so much to see and do that we hardly knew where to start. Not only were the ships on display but there was the city to explore and aerobatics over our heads every day.

But now there was a major decision point; did we carry on down the Portuguese coast to winter in the Mediterranean or return the way we had come? If we continued we would spend two years in the Mediterranean and then three years back to the Baltic. We had lived a year in the South of France so we were a little familiar with the sailing environment there and we were not enthusiastic about it. If we had been 5 years younger we would probably have gone on but we made the momentous decision to return the way we had come.
The complete log of our return journey can be seen by following this link to Google Earth, A Coruna to Hondarribia  make sure that you have the ‘temporary places’ box ticked and the files within it ticked when it is open. Clicking on the yellow push pins will open log entries.
We determined to try some different ports on the way back but it was not just that that made it a very different journey.

Our Attempts to Round Cabo Ortegal

The weather was changing, the wind was building from the West and so was the swell. We started our return journey with an unpleasant day of rolling. Arriving at our first stop in Ria Cedeira we were careful to drop our new anchor in a different spot. It was now equipped with a trip line rig that yet had to be perfected; we were going to get plenty of practice in the next few days!

Anchored in Ria Cedeira

We tried to continue next day but once out of the Ria conditions were bad and we were pitching and rolling badly. Besides only making 2 knots on full throttle we did not have the stomach for a 14 hour slog. So we returned and dropped anchor again.  For 5 days we sat on the anchor while the wind howled and running the engine to charge the batteries from time to time. Just to compound matters the outboard would not start and the wind and distance were too great to try rowing; so the cook really used her ingenuity as supplies dwindled. The wind seemed to have dropped on 4 September so we thought that we would try again. The wind was less but the seas were not. We pushed on to Punta Candellaria but we had a strong wind on the nose and were really being tossed about and only making 2 knots. At that rate we would have taken another 5 hours just to reach Cabo Ortegal. So we turned back and flew in the opposite direction over that ground that we had fought so hard to gain. Once again we anchored with out tail between our legs, for what turned out to be another 3 days. Luckily another yacht took pity on us and ran us ashore in their dinghy (with an outboard) for supplies.
Later when we took the outboard in to be fixed we discovered that the people who had overhauled it in Hondarribia had put two-stoke fuel in the tank instead of gasoline!

Our Rescue Near Luarco

Our next excitement was just the opposite, a still, overcast day with a Northerly  2 to 3 metre swell. Two hours out of Luarca the engine started choking and then finally died. We unfurled the foresail but there was hardly any wind. The first step was to change the high pressure filter but the engine only ran for two or three minutes then stopped. It appeared that the water pump belt was slipping and, after our experiences of the previous season, I jumped to the conclusion that the engine was overheating without the alarm going off; so I set about changing the pump belt which is a big job because it is located behind the generator belt. After achieving that with my head down in a rolling boat I felt thoroughly sick and the engine still did not go. The last thing left was to change the low pressure fuel filter, I had a spare but it was another upside down job and the breakers at the bottom of the cliffs seemed to be getting awfully close! We could not afford to waste more time on the gamble that the filter change would work, for if it did not we would be on the rocks. So we called for help on VHF 16; to our horror there was no response! Suddenly things took on a very different aspect. I found that I had the phone number of the Marina in Gijon and got the receptionist to call the rescue services. Immediately they responded on channel 16 and thanks to our transmitting AIS could immediately see our position. The lifeboat was dispatched from Luarca while we spent an anxious hour and a half watching the breakers get closer.

Once the tow line was secured the life boat took off at 10 knots without giving me time to get off the foredeck. These life boats don't seem to realise the power that they have compared to a yacht. In A Coruna we saw a yacht that had been towed and the tow had ripped out the front end of the fibreglass yacht. Once again we were thankful that we had a steel boat, tough as nails! It was a scary ride back to Luarca. Once docked in the inner harbour mechanics came aboard and changed the low pressure filter, blew out the lines and everything was fine. A good job that I did not try to do it myself as my spare filter was the wrong model!

They said that they were sorry that they had not answered my Channel 16 call but it was siesta time! I could not tell if they were joking. Anyway the service was great.
At the end of the previous season I had noticed that there was black diesel bug in the filter and had the tank flushed and steamed out in the winter, as well as larger tank flushing valves in the tank sump. However, the compartments in the fuel tank make it difficult to get a good flush. I knew that I should have flushed out the sump and changed the filter in A Coruna  but neglected it.

We called in a few new ports on the way back and were enchanted by them all.  Llanes, Elantxobe, Orio and St. Jean de Luz.

Llanes with its Entrance Sills

The Cubes of Memory by Basque artist Augustin Ibarrda

 to become a work of art.The above photograph was taken at low tide showing the outer sill. We tried for the old harbour but were directed to the new marina over a 2m sill to the inner harbour. This is the only harbour that we have seen that painted the breakwater blocks. It was a nice touch.

Llanes New Marina

The Coast between Llanes and Gexto

A Geology Lesson Up Close

Elantxobe - We tied to the Wall in the Centre

Elantxobe was hanging on a cliff face and all charm. In  fact the roads are so steep and tight that when the local bus drives in it has to turn around on a turntable! We tied up at the harbour wall behind a fishing boat. In the middle of the night we got up to see fishermen sat around the harbour walls fishing with luminous floats. It was quite a sight.

Everything was Charming

A Nail Biting Approach to Orio

 Orio was another of those nail biting experiences on a first approach as the 'escape' cannot be seen, only the waves breaking in front as the swell sweeps you in. Once you make the turn all is suddenly calm.
Orio is a new and immaculate marina, quite the best we had visited. We took the dinghy up the river to the old town.

The Old Town of Orio

Finally St Jean de Luz, a French Basque town, before arriving at Hondarribia and the fantastic pinchos at El Gran Sol

St. Jean de Luz

Back to Hondarribia

Market in St. Jean de Luz

Old Trades Still Exist

It was with great regret that that we ended a fantastic sailing season. However we finished off by exploring the back roads of the Pyrenees, but that is another story.

For other Cruising blogs see the Archive links in the sidebar at the top of this page.
Other blogs of interest are The Retirement Dream and How to Live Your Dream

Technical Blogs are Nail Biting Experiences #1 Crossing the Bar , The Changing Nature of Sailing and Cruising and Yacht Docking Skills for Northern Europe