You could arrange most of this yourself, or reserve a ten night Cantabrian coast trip here
Ten nights in Spain, three beds, from $2,640 per person. The honest part first: you could arrange most of this yourself. The houses answer their own email, the car is a web form, and two of the three timed tickets go on general sale months ahead. Reserve a ten night Cantabrian coast trip here if you would rather hand over the dates and the timing.
- Starting figure, per person
$2,640
- Nights
- 10
- beds you will learn
- 3
- Country
- Spain
- How much of this you could arrange without us
- you could arrange most of it yourself
Confirmed as a final figure once the supplier holds the dates. Getting to the country is not included.
- Whatever is agreed comes back to you in writing from the supplier, before any money moves.
- No card is asked for on this site and none is stored: the supplier takes payment on its own terms.
- A request sent through the form is answered in writing within one working day.
Ten nights, three beds, and the part you do not need an office for
Four nights on the eastern Asturian coast, three in the foothills of the Picos de Europa, three in western Cantabria. Two moves in ten days, neither of them more than an hour behind the wheel. That is the whole structure, and it is why this page opens by talking itself out of a reservation: you could arrange most of this yourself. The small houses along this coast answer their own email, usually inside a day. The car is a web form. Two of the three timed tickets go on general sale online months out, with nothing to queue for.
What is left is the joining. Three houses have to hold the same ten dates, and the third one you like will be the one with a Sunday to Wednesday gap in it. The painted cave at Ribadesella releases a fixed number of places a day, shuts two days a week and closes over the winter, so it has to land on a morning you have not already given to the mountain. If you have reserved Spain before and you have a free month of evenings, do this yourself; the office earns nothing and that is the right result. If you have three weeks and one evening a week, the joining is what you are handing over.
Weather, ground, and what it does to a plan
This is limestone and pasture running straight into the Atlantic. Fields stop at a cliff edge with no fence, coves open in gaps of a few hundred meters, and forty kilometers inland the Picos de Europa stand above two thousand meters, which is the reason the coast is green. Something like 1,200 mm of rain falls on this strip in a year, spread across roughly 140 days, so it is rarely a downpour and often a fine wet drift that Asturians call orbayu. It soaks you slowly and it does not clear the way a storm clears.
Two consequences for a ten day plan. The mountains can sit under cloud for three days together, and the walk you came for shows you forty meters of white. And a good deal of this coast is tidal: the blowholes in the cliff meadows at Pria only sound with a big swell behind a high tide, and the small inland beach near Naves fills and empties through a gap in the rock. Both are timetable items, not scenery you drive past. The sea reaches about twenty one degrees in late August and sits near fourteen in June, which decides whether the swimming here is real or notional.
The three stops, in the order they work
Stop one, four nights, on the coast between Ribadesella and Llanes. Short drives, long walks: the cliff path above the coves, the blowholes at Pria on a rising tide, the inland beach near Naves, and one morning underground at the painted cave in Ribadesella, which takes groups of about twenty five and fills up in August. Evenings are a cider house, where the bottle is poured a finger at a time from arm's length.
Stop two, three nights, in the foothills near Cangas de Onis, about forty five kilometers inland. The road to the mountain lakes is shut to private cars in high season and at Easter, and the shuttle leaves from the town on a fixed timetable. The gorge walk from Poncebos is twelve kilometers each way on a ledge cut into the rock, six to seven hours, no shade, long drops on the open side. The blue cheese is matured in caves in the valley and sold in Arenas de Cabrales.
Stop three, three nights, in western Cantabria near San Vicente de la Barquera, an hour east on the motorway. Estuary, marsh, a long bridge over tidal water, a modernist villa in Comillas, and the reproduction cave at Santillana del Mar.
Two kinds of traveler, and only one of them should reserve this
It suits people who drive, and who do not mind a road with rock on one side and air on the other. It suits people who can eat at Spanish hours, which means lunch at two and kitchens waking up again around half past eight. Walkers with a whole day in their legs will manage it; the gorge runs twenty four kilometers out and back, and once you have started there is no short way home.
It does not suit anyone who wants to unpack once, since three beds in ten nights means two packing mornings. It does not suit anyone who needs the weather to hold: this coast is green for a reason, and a week here can take four wet days without anything having gone wrong. It does not suit a party that will not split up for a day, because the walkers and the swimmers want different Tuesdays. And it does not suit a beach fortnight. The sand is real, the coves are small, and the water is around fourteen degrees in June.
What $2,640 covers, and what it leaves you to pay
From $2,640 per person covers ten nights across the three houses, breakfast where the house serves it, a small car from the day you land to the day you fly, the cave entry and the mountain shuttle on named dates, and a sheet with the tide times, the opening days and the two drives written on it. The figure moves with the calendar and with which houses are free, it is confirmed in writing before anything is held, and the middle of August sits at the upper end of it.
Not in it: your own flights, which stay yours to reserve, because this office arranges no carriage by air or sea and holds a contract with no carrier. Fuel comes to roughly seventy to ninety euros over some eight hundred kilometers. The motorway along this coast is free, so budget nothing for it. Meals are yours; a set lunch is commonly fourteen to twenty euros a head, and dinner for two in a cider house forty to fifty five. Town parking in August is a coin machine at about a euro fifty an hour, and in Llanes in the second week of August it is a competitive sport.
Short answers to the usual doubts
Can we do this without a car?
Partly, and the office would rather tell you which part. The narrow gauge line along the coast serves Ribadesella, Llanes and the towns east of them, two or three services a day, about five hours end to end. The coastal stop works on it. The mountain stop does not: the lake shuttle starts in Cangas de Onis, the gorge trailhead has a thin summer only bus, and taxis at both ends make a mess of the arithmetic. Without a car this turns into a two bed coastal plan, and it will be written that way rather than sold to you as the same ten nights.
Can you get us inside the original cave at Santillana del Mar instead of the reproduction?
No. Not on any date, not at any price, and not through anyone this office knows. The original was closed to ordinary visits because breath and light were taking the paint off the ceiling, and what stands beside it is a full size reproduction built for that reason. The cave at Ribadesella is a different case: the art in it is original, it opens to a fixed number of people a day from spring into autumn, and that one the office reserves for you.
What happens if it rains for six days?
You get wet and the sheet bends. The mountain days are written as a pair with a spare, so the gorge can move from Tuesday to Thursday without disturbing the cave slot. The wet weather list is short and it is not filler: the maturing caves in the cheese valley, the reproduction cave, the modernist villa at Comillas, and a lunch that runs to four o'clock. What you will not be offered is a dry week. Nobody moves an Atlantic front, and a page that hints it can is selling weather it does not own.
What do we pay the office?
Nothing, at any stage. Each house takes its own deposit on its own terms and the rental desk takes the car, none of it passes through here, and no card number is typed into anything this office runs. Payment reaches the office later, from the suppliers, out of their side of the same reservation, which is worth knowing when you weigh what you are told. It also means that on a week like this one, where most of the arranging is inside the reach of anyone with a free evening, saying so out loud costs the office money and is still the right thing to print.