Week 3 – Friday 18th July – Santillana Del Mar and San Vincente de le Barquera

With two nights in Suances, today is road trip day. Just down the road from Suances is Santillana Del Mar, which is a very old well preserved Spanish town. Despite its name, it is not by the sea, but about 3ks inland. No mind, there’s plenty to see by the seaside around here, so this was a nice change. I’m not sure why, but cows and bison are the big thing in the town – lots of statues and tourist shops selling “cow”y things. It has an old church, some very rustic old buildings, a wide range of tourist tat, some nicely decorated squares, some uneven cobbled streets – all that sort of stuff. We did see an ATM machine that was installed behind the iron bars over the window of a bank, which was something a bit different.

Although its not coastal, it is a much nicer town than Suances, and in hindsight we should have stayed there. One of the reviews we read of one of the hotels in Santillana, said it was really noisy, but looking at it, I’d have to doubt that very much. The town isn’t big enough and there aren’t enough people around to throw a decent party.

From Santillana we did a drive through the countryside and around the coast to San Vincente de la Barquera. This coast of Spain is known as Green Spain and with all the mountains around, the whole area from across the Pyrenees all the way across the coast of the top of Spain is very green. The drive today was no exception and with the rolling hill sides, fields, forests it is a scene much more reminiscent of parts of New Zealand than what I usually think of as Spain - the dry arid olive grove covered countryside we experienced in Andalusia a few years ago.

San Vincente is on the coast, with a castle and church on the hill over looking the town. The harbour is tidal, so when we arrived it was a mud flat with little boats all sitting on the bottom, waiting for the tide to return. We did our customary walk around the town, up to the top of the hill, past the castle, round the church and then back down the other side to find a restaurant for lunch – nice chairs, white linen table cloths, large wine glasses being the criteria to identify possiblities. A walk up and down the strip identified the candidates, and then a selection criteria as rigorours as that for the candidates was used to select the actual restaurant (I think it was the one that didn’t have the sewerage truck outside it pumping out the storm water drains). Lunch was a very nice Paella.

After lunch (about 4:30) we wandered back to the car, which was parked by the harbour. By this stage the tide had returned and all the boats were bobbing in the water and the arched bridge across the harbour had the incoming tide sweeping past it – a much prettier scene. (Anne’s just told me I’m sounding poetic so apologies if I’m prattling on too much).