The heart of Northern Spain and in many ways it’s most beautiful part. Certainly the rugged scenery of the Picos de Europa, with its plunging valleys and deep gorges, offers some of the finest views to be seen in Europe. There are lush forests, a colourful array of wild flowers and all manner of wild-life, [...]

Laredo is the nearest thing you’ll fmd on the coast of Northern Spain to the big beach resorts of the Mediterranean costas; but by costa standards it is quiet and dignified, with very little of the brashness of Benidorm, and its glorious, long sweep of a beach is backed mainly by apartment blocks rather than [...]

Like several otherwise generally unremarkable places in Northern Spain, Gijon has been blessed with a Parador and so demands attention. But why a Parador in Gijon? Certainly it’s an attractive enough place with its wide, sweeping San Lorenzo beach pounded by huge Atlantic breakers (and a beach packed as tight as Blackpool’s at the height [...]

If Disneyland were ever commissioned to produce a Spanish village of seigneurial mansions, it would look like Santillana del Mar. But Santillana is no stage-set town preserved solely for the delight of tourists. Cows are driven up and down the cobbled streets by busy farmers’ boys, careless of the fact that they are blocking the [...]

Some towns, it seems, acquire a Parador through their outstanding merits as a tourist attraction — Santillana del Mar, for example; others have a Parador thrust upon them for no particularly obvious reason. On the face of things Villafranca del Bierzo falls into the latter category. It has a Romanesque church or two, and a [...]

For those who make the tortuous and extremely bumpy drive west from Oviedo and Luarca, Ribadeo seems forever in the distance, like the Celestial City. As you twist and turn round the endless bends, almost certainly engulfed in the exhaust of a milk tanker, the signposts for Ribadeo become an insistent reminder of your slow [...]

You can choose from three pronunciations: in Galician it’s A Coruna, the Castilian way is La Coruna, while we British call it Corunna. It’s perhaps the only city in Northern Spain that many British people have ever heard of, because it has played a couple of walk-on parts in English history. It was from here [...]

Northern Spain is a predominantly mountainous area — across the whole breadth of the country is a band of high ground which is never less than rugged, and often positively wild. It is at its most extreme in the Picos de Europa, which may not equal the Alps in scale — they reach only 2600 [...]