Day 5: Canero to Navia

 

Our hotel from last night

Yesterday's hike brought us to a nothing little town that I remembered from last year.  I remembered it because there was this hotel/albergue/restaurant that looked pretty popular, and I had another 10 kilometers to go to get to Luarca.  It didn't seem fair, at the time.  When Tina suggested that we stay there, I jumped at the opportunity.

First off, look at the roof of the building in the photo.  What's that thing coming out of the top right?

It's the A8, of course, one of mankind's engineering marvels.

 

Our mantra this year is to take everything in stride, so we took a walk down a path from the hotel to our fourth beach of the day, Playa de Cueva.  It was stunning.  The Rio Esva passes by the hotel and empties into the Atlantic at the beach.

 

Playa de Cueva, wow.

When we got back to the hotel, we decided to get a drink at the bar before heading upstairs.  Well, let's just say that a really drunk Madrileño (seen standing in a previous photo) decided that we were very interesting (especially me apparently) and that we could not be permitted to buy our own drinks.  That was a trip.  Don't worry, all ended well.

We asked the restaurant about gluten free beer.  Sorry.  How about take out coffees?  Nope.  They lobbied that we stick around until seven AM when the restaurant would open to get hot coffee in the morning.  We mistakenly said yes.

Why was that a mistake?  In retrospect, it's obvious.  Getting coffee at seven means hitting the road closer to 7:30 AM.  That's an hour or more later than usual.  With the day's plan calling for 28 kilometers, that would mean arriving an hour later at our destination in the afternoon sun.  That's how you define a bad idea.  If it were a short day, no problem...

The plan was to walk two hours to the port city of Luarca, where I stayed last year.  From there, we'd walk another 20 kilometers to a town named Navia.  I liked this plan because it would be the third place I'd never stayed before on this trip. (Something new for each of us.)

Farmland, fog, and the ocean. The Camino is magical in the morning.

The first part of the hike was a climb of 200 meters, more than 600 feet through the woods on narrow, rocky paths.  At the top, we walked through farmland and forests with views like the photo above.

The stone marker says, "Stop staring at the sea, and walk left along this dirt path".

Then stop when you come face to face with some cows.

 

We also walked through burnt forest areas abutting the A8 highway, areas I didn't remember existing a year ago.  Lots of burnt trees and more that had been cut down.  After about an hour and a quarter, we came across this:

The Moorish Cemetery of Barcia

What's a Moorish cemetery doing in Asturias, a part of Spain that was never part of the Caliphate, pre-1492?  The explanation was fascinating.  In 1936, the Spanish Civil war started when General Franco invaded Spain with troops garrisoned in Spain's North African colonies.  This Nationalist army included a lot of Muslim troops from Spanish Morocco.  (Needless to say, foreign troops in a Civil War weren't very popular on the mainland.)

As they suffered losses, the Muslim troops spoke up.  They wanted an appropriate cemetery for their dead.  That's what we stumbled across in the forest--the final resting place of a few hundred of Franco's troops.  No headstones, no hoopla, one historical marker.  Fascinating.

About forty five minutes later, we walked down from the heights to the city of Luarca.
 

Luarca, as seen from above for the first time.

Descending to the city center.

We got to the center of town and decided to make a pit stop at a bakery cafe.  Sure enough, we saw the Six Spanish Girls from Day One, plus a girl from our albergue hotel yesterday that we called "Face Cream Girl". (She probably has a real name.)  A little while later, a couple we met at breakfast in Santa Marina yesterday, a Frenchman and his American girlfriend, showed up.  That's apparently, our cohort.

Our second breakfast.  Sorry! I ate most of the tortilla before snapping the photo.

Having a second breakfast was another mistake.  That added another half hour to our trip.  It's not the time that's the issue--it's the eventual temperature as we ended up walking in the afternoon sun.

For the next three hours, we walked to our next pit stop.

Down sunny roads.

Over a mountain overlooking the sea.

Through fields where the Camino was only a footpath.

And past every rural church, open or not.  What's it's name? No clue.

At one PM, after three hours, we reached the tiny town of Villapedre, the first place with an open restaurant.  Who was there having lunch?  The French couple and Face Cream girl... of course.  All we wanted was some cold cans of Coke and use of the rest rooms.  We left everyone behind and booked it through the afternoon sun towards the town of Navia, 7.5 kilometers down the road.  We got here at 3:10 PM, famished and soaked to the skin.

We checked into a decent hotel (without air conditioning...), changed out of our wet clothing, and headed down the street to the first restaurant that would take us!  Lunch was potato salad, fish, and Albariño, the crisp white wine from Galicia, the province where we're going next. On the way back from lunch, we stopped in a market and bought fruit for the road tomorrow and cold coffee drinks so we can get an early start.

Back at the hotel, Tina did the laundry while I've been writing this, and now she's taking a nap.  The room, as usual, is draped with drying socks.  Tonight, the town is all done up for a Medieval fair of some sort.  We're hopefully going to check it out later.

As the plan now stands, we're going to walk 32 kilometers (20 miles) to the first city in Galicia, Ribadeo.  We'll then take a day of rest, after six days of walking.  (Sounds biblical, but it's just a coincidence.)  The day of rest is a way of making sure nobody gets hurt.  The 32 kilometers?  That's a throwback... what can I say?

Tina will pick up the story in our next installment.