By Max Milano
Dusk on Laredo beach. My feet sink into the wet sand as the last surf pulls back. We’ve come a long, hot way from La Rioja, via Vitoria-Gasteiz, skirting Bilbao’s police state cameras and slow-motion speed traps on the freeways and B roads. We’ve been chasing the coast, longing for cooler air. It was an asphalt-melting thirty-five degrees today in Vitoria-Gasteiz. We find relief on the Cantabrian shore.
Laredo. A name that rings of Texas cowboys, but this beach is no Texas. The tide is low, and the wet sand stretches wide like a silver tongue in the waning light. Pink skies paint the horizon.
One end of the beach ends in a sandbar with a view of a jagged and towering headland across the water on the other side of the Ría de Treto that pours out of the estuary at the back of the beach and into the Cantabrian Sea. The towers of rock jutting out of the surf make the beach look like Thailand, but only if you look out to sea. Turn inland and you face a crescent of uninspired concrete apartments planted in sand.
The last surfers linger, black silhouettes on steel-grey waves. Couples walk their dogs along the tide line. Locals promenade the beach as if it were a boulevard. The air is mild, offering sweet relief after the furnace of Vitoria-Gasteiz.
I wade deeper into the surf. There’s shallow water for a hundred meters. Out there, a lone swimmer cuts through the dark waves. Dogs bark behind me. The apartment blocks glow yellow from balconies and kitchen windows. The air is perfect, low twenties Celsius, and a salty breeze from the Cantabrian, mildly warm but easy.
Cantabria is not just respite from the heat. It’s a break from the barren plateau south of the Cantabrian mountains. Here on the coast, it’s dunes on the beach, fishing ports, medieval castles on rocky headlands, churches guarding harbors, and rivers spilling into estuaries where sandbars stretch like tongues into the sea. It feels like Northern California stripped of wildlife (apart from seagulls), then dressed up with medieval castles and churches.
A Castle on the Beach
We’d dumped our bags in a no-frills hotel on the estuary between Laredo and Noja, where dunes fence the shore. To get there we crossed a bridge over a lagoon. It doesn’t feel like Spain, there are no whitewashed adobes, no tiled Mediterranean arches. More like Northern California, or southern Oregon. Suburban houses built in a modern style, braced for weather. Could be a suburb of Auckland, even, with estuaries and inlets leading to sandy beaches.
This is our “No Reservations” trip. August in Spain means everything worth having was booked months ago. The plan is simple: call hotels on Google Maps twenty-four hours before arrival or grab what’s left on Orbitz or Expedia the day of arrival. It’s reckless, but it works. Sold-out cities push us into small towns no foreigner has heard of, and they’ve been gifts.
That’s how we end up in Castro-Urdiales. A medieval castle on the water. A gothic church looming like Neptune’s own chapel. Streets alive, but not a tourist bus in sight.
Our hotel, by contrast, is the new breed: No desk clerk. No service. Just an access code and a keypad. Clean enough, but soulless. It’s a trend across Spain in small and medium-sized hotels where they’re cutting staff, cutting contact, cutting service. The “service” industry is forgetting its name.
But it’s not only in Spain. We spent our last night in California at a three-star hotel near Chico State. The front desk wasn’t a desk at all but a screen streaming a clerk from the Philippines. In Spain, they don’t even bother with the clerk from the Philippines via Zoom. Just a keypad and silence. Customers reduced to code.
A Medieval Bridge Over the Waters
We descend from the highway into Castro-Urdiales. The hill pushes the town down toward the sea. At the sliver of flat land by the waterfront, we are greeted by the whole town out in the street. Not a fiesta. Just the August paseo hour. Spain lives outdoors, but only when the heat breaks after siesta time.
We park underground by the marina and walk toward a medieval bridge below the Gothic church by the water. The bridge arches over a stone basin where waves crash and surge.
Teen boys race up the steep steps of the medieval bridge to the top. They stand on the bridge’s pinnacle, all sun-bleached, staring down at the churning water. Then one by one they leap. Their splashes mix with the foam rushing in from the sea.
I snap photos of them midair. They look like a lost Roman legion, catcalling and teasing each other, mocking hesitation. The bridge is high, 19 meters from the pinnacle to the churning waters. You must land right to miss the rocks, and avoid the kid who’s jumped seconds before.
Above it all, a Gothic church looms, stone pressed right to the water’s edge. It’s impossible to see where the man-carved walls end and the grottos and rocks begin. The French shelled the church and castle in 1813, during the Peninsular War. Cannonball scars still pit the walls. Now the only bombardment comes from kids hurling themselves into the sea.
People spill out of bars with glasses of white wine. The local Albariño. The air is sardines on the grill, salt on the breeze. Each dive from the medieval bridge is a flight. The kids are like strange birds, suspended for a heartbeat between the air and the green Cantabrian Sea below. Then splash, one after another.
The locals call the medieval bridge the Roman Bridge. Beneath Castro-Urdiales lies a whole Roman town, still buried, waiting for spades and patience. The legions marched here two thousand years ago, crossing the Cantabrian mountains in their slow, brutal push to the Bay of Biscay. They built roads, walls, and baths. They brought iron and Roman gods of marble. Then the empire receded, and the sea and barbarians reclaimed the edges. The town above shifted and grew, layer upon layer, until the Roman streets disappeared under plaster and time.
Mad Dash to Galicia
Morning. We wake to find that last night’s “no reservations” hotel, the one we booked from the car while waiting on Chinese takeaway in Laredo, wasn’t near Santander at all. Not near anything. It’s up in the mountains, south of Ribadeo, on the Galician–Cantabrian border. Some old mining town. Sounded romantic until we realized it was a four-hour drive away. If we want to reach it before dark, we have to make a move. Forget the lazy brunch at the Gran Hotel Sardinero in Santander. Galicia calls, and I don’t want to drive mountain roads in fog and blackness.
But first, breakfast.
We head north to Noja. Breakfast in Spain is a ritual. Old men drift into coffee shops ordering café con leche and toast with tomato and olive oil. A few add cheese or jamón serrano. The cafeteria we chose has a counter stacked with tortilla de patata, each slice cut open like a sandwich and stuffed with mayo-based spreads. Northern Spain does this. You don’t see it farther south. Shrimp, sardine, tuna, chorizo, pick your poison. I go for chorizo.
Noja is an upmarket beach town. Yellow sand. Dunes behind. Strange rock formations offshore that make the water look eerie, almost lunar. Villas on the beach and families with tanned teenagers heading for gelato at midnight.
We linger over coffee, watching the morning crowd change. Old men give way to middle-aged moms and their kids. Then Camino de Santiago walkers start to file in, with their staffs and shells, looking very Germanic. One young blond woman walks in alone. A solo pilgrim. There seem to be more women than men on the Camino these days.
We finish our coffees, duck into a Carrefour Express for picnic supplies. In Spain, if you’re hungry outside the sacred hours of lunch or dinner, you’re out of luck. At five in the afternoon, you can get a beer, maybe a stale sandwich, but if you’re the kind of lunatic who wants dinner at that hour, you’ll be waiting until 8 p.m. when the kitchens reopen. Best to pack your own.
Provisions in hand, we hit the road.
First stop, a lighthouse painted in candy-striped colors. Behind us, mountains rise. Before us, cliffs plunge into the sea. The Atlantic slams the rocks white with foam. The coastline rolls on, east to west. Cliffs, coves, estuaries spilling into golden sandbars. Fishing towns cling to sheer cliffs, medieval castles sit on the beach, and stone bridges span estuaries that merge into sandbars and the ocean. The Camino follows this coast. We follow the Camino. Galicia or bust. But that’s still four hours away. Time to drive.
Picnic by the Sea
The highway skirts the coast, framed by a chain of mountains, the Picos de Europa, that wall off this rocky green shore from the dry plains of Castile to the south. We’re driving the coastal Camino del Norte, one of the pilgrim routes to Santiago, a variation of El Camino Francés. The original Camino Francés runs inland, over the Pyrenees at Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, then across Navarra, La Rioja, Burgos, and León before turning west into Galicia. That’s the path most pilgrims take, through wheat fields, vineyards, and meseta dust. But here on the northern road, the Camino hugs sea cliffs, coves, fishing villages, and green hills rolling into the Atlantic.
The dead ride with us. William Hurt’s voice fills the car, reading Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises on an audiobook. The characters drift through the same towns we’ve just crossed: San Sebastián, Saint-Jean-de-Luz, Bayonne. Fiction and memory blur. Hemingway’s ghost lingers on the coast, keeping us company as we push west toward Galicia.
We exit the freeway at San Vicente de la Barquera, a jewel of a Cantabrian town. A medieval castle rises over the estuary, guarding it still. A long stone bridge connects the two sides of town (Puente de La Maza), separated by water and sand. Driving over it feels like sliding into a late-1800s impressionist French painting of boats bobbing on the tide, and sunbathers stretched across the sandbar.
We climb out of town, up a steep hill covered in green, and find a deserted picnic area. Just a couple of tables, no one around. We claim one, cover it in foil, and lay out lunch: hummus, fresh pico de gallo that I chop with my Swiss pen knife, a bag of Doritos, and a bottle of cold Albariño. The view below is the estuary, castle, and town, framed by the peaks of Europe rising in the distance like a row of giants waiting for snow. Bathers float in the foam far below. Only the occasional passing car breaks the quiet. In Spain, in August, that kind of solitude is rare. This feels like stolen time.
It doesn’t last. A young German couple pulls up in a Volkswagen Combi with surfboards strapped to the roof. They look like they’ve stepped out of an ad shoot. The shirtless guy in board shorts decides to sit on top of the picnic table to have his lunch while his girlfriend in a bikini with long blond hair stares into space as if she’d just smoked a joint. German plates. We’ve seen plenty here, also French, Irish, and even Swiss caravans chasing the same coast.
Soon, the picnic area fills with spillover from the caravan park below, and the spell is gone. We pack up and roll back into town, crossing the medieval bridge again, parking by the fish market. A crusty bar waits across the street. Locals sit outside, nursing beers, looking like they’ve been there since dawn.
We take stools at the counter and order cañas (draft beers). Here, the cañas are bigger, but they also pour media caña (half beers) served in tiny glasses that look like coffee cups. We laugh at the size. The barmaid grins, pulls out a tankard the size of a pitcher, and offers to fill it. We decline. Galicia is still hours away, and I’ve got more driving to do before dark.
Dark Galicia
We cross a bridge into Galicia at Ribadeo over a broad inlet that separates it from Asturias. The coast slips behind as the road veers south, following the inlet that’s wide as a bay. Green hills dotted with stone cottages make it all look more Irish than Spanish. Boats cross the Ria lazily, but the channel soon narrows, becoming an estuary, then a river, then a gorge as the hills close in.
The light fades as we climb. The green turns dark, pine forests wrapped in fog. The road twists above the river in a deep canyon. Derelict cottages flash past, roofless, abandoned. It feels primitive. Remote. Less Spain than the Pacific Northwest. More Twin Peaks than Santiago de Compostela.
At last, we reach a town. Pontenova. A narrow place cut in two by river and rail. It looks half-abandoned, but a pub catches our eye. It has stone walls and a thatched roof, more Ireland than Iberia.
Our hotel stands nearby, with its own bar attached. Inside, the crowd looks lifted from a David Lynch casting call. Strange faces, missing teeth, men who never left their stools, women with haunted eyes, down syndrome geriatrics. Some of them seem to live here. At the bar. We check in quickly and escape to the Irish-looking tavern up the street.
This bar is younger, livelier. Bartenders in black, like a pub in Dublin. Everyone speaks Gallego. We sit at the counter, order beers, and a charcuterie board. The barman suggests local honey with the charcuterie board, and he’s right, it works. We ask him about Portugal, since that’s our next stop after Galicia. He laughs, says the Portuguese are “locos, off their heads.” He explains that Gallego and Portuguese are almost the same tongue, but that the Portuguese speak with a funny singsong. “Che, che, che,” he says, imitating the Portuguese accent.
Everyone drinks Estrella Galicia. They even have 1906 on tap, rare outside Galicia. The crowd looks different up here than farther south in the Mediterranean part of Spain. Pale faces, freckles, blond hair, or black hair like coal. Irish looks, Celtic.
I ask a barmaid how to say thank you in Gallego. “Graziña,” she says. Little gracias. Everything here has a Portuguese diminutive attached, so it’s a little thank you, a little boy, a little girl, and so on.
This was a mining town, but the mine closed. Its ruins are the only tourist attraction. But the real life of the town seems to be these two bars. Our hotel bar is for the crusty punters, this one for the younger and hipper crowd.
The bartender introduces us to two young women. “Your hotel maids,” he says. Small town. Their night off. Later, I see one slip into the back bathroom with a hipster bartender, and the rest of the night blurs.
Last orders. Out into the fog. Pines rise on each side of the valley, steep and close. A short bridge takes us across the river. Back at the hotel, the old drinkers are still there, still at it. Nothing else to do on a Friday night.
In our room, I crack the attic window. Cool mountain air pours in. Somewhere in the fog, I think I hear a wolf. Maybe it’s all in my mind. Tomorrow, we head for the coast again, for Galicia’s Rías Altas, the lost coast of lighthouses and wild beaches. They say you must get lost on the Camino de Santiago to find yourself. The lost coast beckons the lost. We’ll see if we can find ourselves after all.
Stay Tuned for Part 4: Galicia
Max Milano is a travel writer and photographer based in Los Angeles, California, and Valencia, Spain. His latest photography book, Mexico City Noir, Life Under The Volcanoes, is Available on Amazon. His photographs are available at MaxMilanoPix.