11th Dec 1988 - Cordillera Cantabrica

In Laredo I try out my Spanish - "Donde esta el correo?" (where is the post office?). The small Spanish lady looks at me quizzically and I repea­t the question. "Ah, el corrrreeeeeo" she cor­rects my pronunciation in a voice that comes from her boots and is loaded with cold viruses - I will suffer later. The post office is not far away, but our mail has not arrived.

The weather is calm and grey along the coast, and there is little out to sea. The mountains look inviting, so we make a relatively short circuit in and out of the foothills - we do not fancy get­ting caught in winter mountain weather.

The northern strip of Spain is a more or less continuous mountain range, the Pyrenees forming a barrier between Spain and France, and the Cordillera Cantabrica separating the Spanish interior from the Bay of Biscay. As in many moun­tain regions, the inhabitants were isolated and developed a culture and language of their own. About 25,000 years ago, at the beginning of the last ice age, the forebears of the Basque people settled the eastern end of the Cordillera and the western Pyrenees. The mountains are littered with archaeological remains, including cave paintings at Altimira. The Basque language, Euskadi, is considered to be one of the oldest in the world and is said to have no affinity with any modern language - except that a few french and spanish words have crept in here and there.

The Cordillera is formed from a layer of Carboniferous limestone up to a thousand metres thick with the main outcrop forming the Picos de Europa; shales and slates influence the landscape to the east, metamorphic rocks are found to the west. High precipitation from the Atlantic cli­mate has given rise to typical karst formation of fissures and caverns, some of which formed permanent channels for water courses. Raptors favour the high cliffs and ledges, while chough make use of the more sheltered cracks and pot‑holes where their chicks are safe from predators.
Mountain roads are usually narrow, and places to stop are few and far between. The first one we find has been used as a rubbish dump and smells bad ‑ a member of the civil guard drives past slowly and gives us a long what-are‑you‑up‑to sort of look. However, we are looking up at the end of a lime­stone bluff ‑ the Sierra de Hornijo ‑ there are goats up on the scarp slope, then three griffons sail over the ridge.

Another stopping place, which looks up at the dip slope of the same ridge, is more pleas­ant. The vegetation on the slopes is a mosaic of eucalypt and conifer plantations, and of evergreen and autumnal deciduous trees ‑ mostly various species of oak ‑ and sweet chestnut which is now leafless.

We walk up a steep track through a euca­lyptus plantation and then through conifers. Beyond that is lush rolling farmland. Although the rock massifs are limestone, much of the vege­tation is more acid‑loving, including the oaks, gorse and eight kinds of heather found along the track. These mostly have seed heads rather than flowers and so prove difficult to identify, how­ever they include St. Dabeoc's heath, Spanish heath and Dorset heath.

On the farmland there is a usual selection of passerines: robins, blackbirds, tits, fire­crests, chaffinches, and one female hawfinch which sits in a bare tree ‑ conveniently for us. There are some chough‑like calls and we locate eight birds flying north, high overhead but in the poor light it is impossible to decide if they were the red‑billed or alpine kind. The most common corvid at all heights seems to be the jay, noisily fly­ing from oak tree to oak tree, and usually carry­ing an acorn.

As we heed downhill, the three griffons circled the limestone bluff again and settled on a pinnacle. Later forty or fifty corvids circled the area before settling to roost.