Cangas de Onís, Asturias

At our inn, over the door way, the date Sixteen-Twenty-Eight is carved into the stone. Above that are two stone coat of arms. The structure was a monastery. It is two floors surrounding a courtyard. It is all in heavy golden stone, burnished dark wood glass and warm lighting with comfortable chairs. Classical music wafts through the inn. Schubert's Trout quintet. Mendelssohn's Hebrides overture. Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. Mozart string quartet. In addition to local wine, local hard cider is popular here. In the Sidreria (Cider House) in town they make a show of pouring it into your glass from the farthest distance their arms will stretch. We looked forward to our first sip. We expected fruity apple something. What we got was yeasty, acidic, vinegary tang. It tasted alive. The life in it fairly overwhelmed the nose. I am certain, had we grown up here drinking it, it would have tasted delicious.

Cangas de Onís is nestled in the Picos mountains. They are stony topped, forested in the middle and down below are carpeted in lush green grass—they get a lot of rain—with cows and sheep and goats lounging, living a good life of slow pasturing.

The Sella river snakes through these parts. (Sella is pronounced Say-Yah). The narrow two lane road snakes beside it and passes through tiny villages that end as quickly as they began. Little stone houses, some cozy with smoking chimneys. Others barely standing with heavy red tile roofs sagging into their old aging wood beams. There are bridges, impressive stone bridges, some are two thousand years old, the newer ones are eight hundred years old. Built to last.

We are near the center of Spain's north coast which is on the Bay of Biscay and the Atlantic Ocean. What tourists there are are Spanish. Where as Barcelona was international, here we are immersed in the sea of intense Spanish culture.

At this moment we are driving the above mentioned narrow lanes, passing the villages, admiring the cows, en route to old churches built one thousand two hundred years ago. How many generations have passed since they were built? And probably in some nearby village there are folks whose great-great-great ancestors were part of that church community.

Wes and Marlow
3 November 2014
Canvas de Onís, Asturias, Spain

Photos of two spectacular Romanesque churches from the 9th century outside Oviedo.