GO SPAIN: A journey through the magical-sounding provinces of Galicia, Asturias and Cantabria gave ADAM ALEXANDERa brief taste of a Spain he hardly recognised
THANKS TO Agatha Christie, one of the first things you think about when you board a luxury train is murder.
Which is hardly fair when so many more pleasant possibilities surely await you. Like enjoying one of the easiest, most relaxed journeys of your life, discovering people and places you will never forget, or as is possible on all great romantic journeys, falling down drunk at the bar.
But because you just can’t help it, murder is the thing you keep coming back to.
Perhaps it’s because lying on a double bed in nothing but an embossed towel-dressing gown with a glass of champagne in hand is a state you’re not only entirely unused to, but start to hope that murder – not yours hopefully – will keep you in indefinitely . . . or long enough, anyway, for an eccentric little Belgian balancing a dead, tapered slug on his top lip to work out that this was the obvious motive all along.
The only real mystery so far though was where exactly this train was going.
The answer it seemed was all along Spain’s shipwrecked “Coast of Death”, beginning first in the burial place of St James “the Moor Slayer” in Spain’s most northwesterly corner, and ending on the other side of the country in the violently patriotic haven of the Basque country.
But this was not nearly all. Along the way, the train would overnight in towns and cities belonging to magical-sounding provinces such as Galicia, Asturias and Cantabria, to allow us a brief taste at least. Places fiercely proud of their own unique topography – from the subterranean wonders of Europe’s oldest cave-paintings in Cantabria, to the jagged, heady peaks of its unexpectedly Alpine-like mountains in Asturias.
And each of them engaged in such a fiercely competitive war over who has the best food, that the fallout seemed to have left the entire northern Spain sprinkled liberally in Michelin stars.
But before any of this, before the train even began in fact, came a visit to the third most important pilgrimage site in the world after Rome and the Holy Land. Santiago de Compostela, possible resting place of St James the apostle, is a truly medieval city of narrow alleyways; where horses clatter along cobbled streets, musicians serenade the passing hordes of pilgrims (with bagpipes), and above all, people wait in massive queues outside churches offering absolution for their sins, and equally long lines you can’t fail to notice outside shops selling lottery tickets.
Each year, hundreds of thousands of people – devout religionists, compulsive long-distance walkers, and people with no other hope perhaps – march for weeks, even months, from as far as France and Portugal entirely on foot just to get here.
In fact, some of them I was told, the compulsive ones presumably, even keep going beyond Santiago to a place called Finisterre (literally “Land’s End”) to where only the sea can stop them.
‘DON’T BE TOO optimistic,” as a famous cynic once said. “The light at the end of the tunnel may be another train.”
I couldn’t help it though. I knew I loved Spain already, and trains, and as the Transcantábrico finally got underway from the town of Ferrol in Galicia where Franco was born, here I was on one of the world’s most luxurious methods of travel about to do almost the entire St James’s Way pilgrimage in the laziest, most sacrilegious way imaginable.
Not that I was going to allow myself to feel guilty for a moment, having already convinced myself that train travel had to be the least invasive, most environmentally-friendly form of travel there was. Which might have been before I discovered that my shower also doubled as a sauna. On a train!
One thing was for sure though, as I stared out at rolling green hills, black and white cows, and a jagged, fiercely-beaten coastline full of deserted beaches, this was not the Spain I knew at all.
Strong evidence suggests that Galicia and Ireland may have been linked by the Celts. But apart from the surprising number of native redheads, the richness of the countryside, and the high probability of rain, Green Spain, as the Spanish tourist board gingerly calls it, is really nothing like home at all.
Step off the train as you berth for the night in say Ribadeo, walk into the old town, and you will find yourself immediately in an unspoiled world of lantern-lit streets, smoky taverns and perfectly-preserved medieval churches still very much in use today.
Here, voices echo through the narrow streets, birds twitter, coffee cups clatter, and mopeds hum like enormous mosquitoes. These old towns feel lived-in and cosy, as only Spanish towns can. Witness old men playing cards in the bars and drinking double brandies still in their bedroom slippers; women window-shopping long after the shops have closed, and children running about as late as midnight.
This is more like “Secret Spain” then, a region they appear to have been trying to keep from us for years. A part of Spain with arguably the best scenery, beaches, food and wine in the country. Where the Spanish themselves like to holiday, where the wealthier own second homes, and where, most notably, you will still see very few other foreign tourists.
It’s a land that magically took me back to the Asterix comics I had read as a child. A place that evokes images of bears, wolves and even witches; of lived-in medieval villages with corkscrews of smoke drifting up from the chimneys; of bucolic pastoral scenes, wild boar feasts, and secret potions that may even make you go “hic”!
And as any Asterix fan will appreciate, Roman ruins as well.
WHAT IS ALSO a surprise though, and confusing even, is how suddenly and dramatically the countryside here can change, feeling humidly at times, as we cut through forests of alien eucalyptus trees covering this part of Spain, more like Australia than anywhere else.
Then next you’re in Switzerland, as you leave the train behind briefly and venture into the Picos de Europa (literally the peaks of Europe) – a stunning alpine mountain-range of clear lakes, cows that look straight off a Milka bar wrapper, and rugged shepherds who chase after these cows from one bucolic valley to another, if only to keep the tourists happy.
I missed not seeing bears, wolves and wild boar, the original inhabitants of these mountains presumably. But with as many as 600 wolves still left roaming Galicia, colonies of brown bears on the loose elsewhere in Asturias, and a pair of the ugliest vultures you ever laid eyes on having just been released in the Picos de Europa, there is comfort in knowing they are still here . . . if only just.
Woody Allen apparently once said that if he had to get away from the world (as he once did of course) Asturias would be his number one choice. I might have agreed, until I got to the Basque country and discovered what I think could be an even better place to hideaway.
Perhaps it’s the love-fest that you immediately find yourself in here if you so much as even mention being Irish. Or perhaps it’s because Bilbao, where the Transcantábrico sadly ends, feels like it could give fashionable, good-looking Milan a serious run for its money.
Whichever it is, I knew even Alfred Hitchcock would have been proud of how quickly I had managed to vanish from the train, to a place where the grass is most definitely greener.
* The Transcantábrico (00-34-902-555902, transcan tabrico.com) runs from April to October and costs from €2,600 per person for eight days, seven nights, including all meals.