Annabel and Dave's Awesome Adventures: Cares Gorge

Looking down to the Cares River

The first walk we did was in the Cares Gorge, this was a 24km walk following the Cares river. It was basically a walk through the mountains from the village of Poncebos to the village of Cain and back again. The day was quite wet, so we decided to leave the spectacular view walk until tomorrow, figuring a gorge is going to be spectacular even with low hanging cloud. I guess this is what happens when you have 2,600m mountains next to the Atlantic Ocean, a bit of precipitation.

Apparently this is one of the more popular day walks in the park, given it's ease of access and incredible views, so it was probably good it was a bit wet, otherwise I think it would have been fairly packed. There isn't much parking in Poncebos either, so I can imagine on busy days just getting to the start of the trail could be a bit of a hike.

The weird canal of death

Dave admiring the views next to the freaky canal

For most of the walk the trail is literally cut into the side of the mountain. It was meant to have been built in the late 1940's and it's main purpose was to enable the maintenance of a canal which takes water to a hydro-electric plant. Why you need to build another canal parallel to a rushing river is a a bit of a mystery to me. We noticed the canal during the walk, at the time we couldn't really work out what it was. It's quite eerie though, it's incredibly fast flowing, and is underground for most of the time, or at least inside the mountain you are walking alongside. Every now and again it will emerge though, and the lack of sound it makes is really spooky. Normally a river flowing that fast has turbulence, things fall in, there are rocks, leaves, fish, logs. But this one was perfectly smooth, and quiet. If you ever want to see what the River Styx might be like I think this is definitely a contender. It was actually a little scary, if you fell in you wouldn't be able to fight against the current, it was also a couple of metres deep, so you couldn't stand up, and there would only be a couple of metres before you would be sucked underground, possibly never to resurface. Definitely River Styx territory.

Entering Cain, looking forward to lunch!

The ridiculously large mountains

The walk was stunning, almost impossible to capture in photos, particularly with the low hanging cloud. The path itself was quite incredible too, cut into the mountain, with no walls or fences, nothing between you and the river 500m below. You wouldn't want to suffer from vertigo in some parts.

Inntravel again gave us wonderful walking and driving directions. That was a bit of fun, driving on the wrong side of the road, it was easiest on the highways, but on the small country roads there were quite a few times where we had positioned ourselves incorrectly when trying to turn onto another road. Luckily there weren't that many people around.

It was certainly a wet walk this one, it has made me realise that I definitely need a better raincoat, it just

doesn't seem to offer the head protection that I need.

The lovely colours of the Cares River

Waterproof gloves are another thing, after wringing them out a few times I just had to accept that my hands were going to be cold and wet. At least I had rain pants though, so the only things which really got wet were my head and hands. Poor Dave though, he didn't even have rain pants, so he got pretty wet and cold by then end of it. The beauty of this walk was that you walked along the gorge from one village to another. So halfway through the walk, when you are just getting quite sore, and wet, and tired you pop out in this tiny village. But this tiny village has about 5 pubs in it, all set up to cater for tired, wet, sore walkers. Rather than our usual walking fare of slightly squashed nut bars, and bruised fruit we had a full 3-course meal. Let me tell you a plate of luke-warm pasta has never tasted so good. It also gave Dave a chance to warm up, it was definitely a bit of a lifesaver this lunch. Yet again Asturias proves itself to be a region of food, there were no calorie deficits after that lunch!

Just couldn't get enough of these mountains

The narrow gorge, near Cain, with the path literally cut into the rock face

The trip back flew along, what with a belly full of food. The cloud cover slightly lifted, so I tried to get as many photos as I could, but I just don't think they capture the true scale of the mountains. We even got to see a couple of herds of mountain goats, which was pretty cool. I'll leave you with way too many, slightly cloudy photos. My camera really started to struggle from the moisture towards the end, the auto-focus just didn't want to work.