San Vicente, Spain - San Vicente in the North of Spain

Once again it rained overnight to leave us with a wet tent to pack, at least when we woke up there was not a cloud in the sky. The weather has been quite cool at times along the coast, but today we had the sun. We were up earlier today compared to usual. It’s very easy to sleep in past 9, mainly because we just don’t seem to go to bed before midnight, and because we’re on holidays and we just don’t have to get up. We were on the road by 9 and headed further west. We stopped off at Santander, which I think is the capital of Cantabria, the region we were heading through. We stopped here to stock up on food and to visit Decathlon, the store where we have bought most of our camping gear. The pump we bought to inflate our airbed had carked it after only 3 inflations. They swapped for a new one no questions, so no more manual pumping for me… hopefully.

Our camp for the next few days was only another hour up the road. San Vicente is a small coastal town, complete with a 16th century bridge, a castle and a monastery, and a beautiful white sand beach, which gets good waves apparently, but as it’s still flat so I’ll never know for sure….

The campsite is sandwiched between the beach and the river. Upstream from the bridge at low tide there’s mud flats over 200 metres wide, then you go for a drive a bit later and the whole thing is river. The tidal variations are massive. Surf or no surf, it’s a nice place to be.

We arrived here Friday, and since then have explored the area in both directions, including the far end of the beach, where livestock enjoy million dollar views. They were good enough to share the view with us while we had a picnic of fresh ham and salad rolls. We’ve walked the beach, town and monastery and thought we had seen all there was to see, until Sunday morning broke clearer than the previous days to reveal the Picos de Europa mountain range just inland to the south of us. We were lying on the beach (warm as), swimming (cold as) and behind us were snow covered mountains. Tomorow we leave the coast to go and explore them…