Hola!
Up this morning about 7, and repacked and down for breakfast at 8. Wonderful meal; we will miss Casona de Cefontes, although I still have NO idea how to find it without Emmy II! Let’s hear it for our GPS! Finally out the door a little after 9 a.m. to make our way across the top of Spain towards Santander, where we will be staying the next three nights. No problems with the drive, but when we arrived at Campo Posada, no one home…I knew we were early, but thank heavens for international cell phones! R called the contact number, and connected with the grown daughter of the house, who promised that someone would be there in 10 minutes – and by golly, they were!
I had been debating if we should just stay at Cefontes for these three days, as we liked it so much, but finally decided that a change would be good for us and that we needed to stick with our original plan. Campo Posada is in a small village near Santander, and very close to most of the caves that we want to see. We are in room 7 on the third floor – no lift – but it is nice, clean and comfortable and has a nice balcony with a great view over the backyard and countryside; looks like some sort of estuary; R is wondering what will happen when the tides come in! While our last hotel looked like it had been designed and decorated by an artist, the Campo is quite basic, but there are lovely stone walls in places, as well as beautiful beams in our bedroom; very nice, just not fancy, but that’s fine.
Dropped the luggage, then had to head almost all the way back to Gijon for our first cave visit of the day – Tito Bustillo. We had been really looking forward to this one, as it was not on the roster of the other caves we’ve been visiting, and somehow we thought that meant it was special. So, drive an hour and a half back, and arrived at the cave, only to be told that we actually had to go 200 m. further down the road for the tickets…how dumb is that? Don’t worry, it gets WAY worse! There were 13 people on our tour, and one guide – and not one Spanish speaker among us. I believe there were Americans, Brits, Irish, Germans and Poles – so I guess that means that we weren’t able to understand anything, and were all just dumb foreigners. The guide led us on a silent hike for about 15 minutes into the cave – showed us one panel of paintings, which we were allowed to look at for 2 or 3 minutes, and then we had another 15 minute silent hike back! R and I are SO unhappy. I mean how much does it take to at least learn the words for “deer” “bison” and “reindeer” in several languages? It is not that hard! Even I know some of them!! We were so disgusted that we just walked out, and didn’t bother with their museum – 200 m down the road where we got the tickets…very, very disappointed.
So…now we had to turn around and head back toward Santander for our next cave appointment, El Castillo, just on the far side of Santander. We were absolutely starving by then, so stopped at one of the Autovia rest areas for sandwiches and drinks; Pepsi for me, and H2O for R. (I thought it was very interesting that they actually have a bar in the rest area; just what people need – a drink or two to get back on the Autovia going 120 km per hour!!) Arrived on time at our next cave, El Castillo, to see our old buddy Jose, from yesterday’s Hornos de la Pena.
This time, we had a wonderful tour of a wonderful cave! Besides us, there was an Italian family currently living in Luxembourg with two lovely elementary school age daughters. Everyone was speaking something – Italian, Spanish, English – even a bit of French! Our guide, Alberto, was terrific; his English was fine, and the cave was great. El Castillo was the first cave discovered in this complex, and included both prehistoric remains from peoples living in the cave entrance, as well as paintings and engravings. Albert I of Monoco financed the original excavation of the cave, as he was apparently an avid explorer, and the excavation went through 25 actual levels of habitation. El Castillo is also famous for their negative image hand prints, which are all over the place! By negative image, someone would hold their hand up against the wall (always the left hand, for some reason) and then paint would be blown up against the hand, which, when removed, left a negative image. There is one section that contains something like 64 different hand images. Alberto said these were the oldest paintings in the cave, going back 50,000 years, but both R and I think that might be a little exaggeration. However…there were wonderful horses, aurochs and bison, as well as something which could be interpreted as two fish! Finally, there were hundreds of large (about 5” across) red dots, just running down the side of one of the caves – directional arrows possibly? Who knows?! At any rate, the cave was wonderful.
When we had finished El Castillo, I mentioned something about doing Las Monedas tomorrow. As it turns out, Las Monedas is about 600 m. away from El Castillo, at the same level, and Alberto asked if we wanted to do it right then! And we said yes! So – two more tickets, and a trudge around the mountain, and we were the last two people in the day into the cave! Las Monedas was only discovered in 1952, and is truly a spectacular geologic cave – beautiful formations; cave bacon, lots of flow stone, some amazing coloring – everything from pure white to black, and lots of colors in between. Very, very enjoyable. It is SO unfortunate that we can’t take pictures in the caves, but those are the rules, and we will abide them, no matter HOW hard it is!! Las Monedas has only one room with paintings, and they are judged to be among the newest we have seen – ranging from 11,000 to 8,000 years ago. However, in once place, a beautiful horse was painted actually on the BOTTOM of a cave formation – and when you shine the light into the pool of water below it, you can see the horse’s reflection – just magical!
Finished up the cave about 6:30 p.m. and headed straight back to Campo Posada. Now we have an entire free day tomorrow – one more cave to go on Saturday! I’m going to see what we can accomplish in the way of wash…hmmm…once we get to Paris, we’ll be fine, as there is a washer in the flat – but need to make it there first!
More later while we again try and figure out dinner!
Much love,
m
xxx
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