Hi all, I came across a fascinating article about the wild bears of Asturias in Northern Spain, from National Geographic. While many travelers probably think of Spain as a land of dusty plains, overdeveloped beaches, Flamenco, and Paella, the regions of Northern Spain aka Green Spain may come as a shock.
Between its dense green forests, jagged mountains, wild bears/wolves, Celtic cultures, and mist covered highlands one would think they are in Scotland or Norway rather than Spain, but the north has all of that and more. I've traveled a fair bit around this area and have always felt an underlying wild magic in the air, the people, food, climate, and landscapes all feel refreshingly different. Here are my favorite snippets from the article:
In Spain’s northwesterly Asturias region, Cantabrian bears lurk in misty, forested reserves, wolves coexist with livestock in high-altitude pastures, and hikers follow the same routes taken by centuries of pilgrims and herders.
The first bear, or rather its ghostly heat signature, appears almost as soon as we start looking through the thermal binoculars. It’s before dawn, and we’ve pulled up to the crash barrier on a high and lonely road above the Xunceras river valley. Without the expensive piece of kit, nature guide José García Gonzalez tells me, we’d never be able to see these creatures in the dark. But there one is, visible through the high-tech lenses: a brown bear showing white against the black of the steep mountain slope opposite us.
Asturias is also cider country, and the bears will sometimes break into orchards for apples. Some might say this is a trivial crime, but the smell of ripe fruit can draw them so close to villages that the inhabitants have felt compelled to scare them off with fireworks. More often, the bears conduct smash-and-grab raids on apiaries, stealing fistfuls of protein-rich bee larvae coated in honey, then running away sharpish to evade the furious stingers. On a short walk though ancient woodland in the nearby Muniellos reserve, García and I come to a row of cortíns: arcane-looking, circular, stone enclosures that have served for centuries as bear-proof storage areas.
On a grassy bluff above the water looms an ancient stone hut with a sharp-angled thatched roof, haunting the scene with its own pre-industrial energy. These are called teitos, and they used to be something like croft houses for families. Today, they’re relics; further down the valley, a cluster of them have been repurposed as a local folk museum, while a few other survivors still serve as cattle shelters in this quiet corner of the country.
More ubiquitous all over Asturias are hórreos: wooden grain stores pieced together without glue or nails, and raised on stilt-like pillars to keep their contents safely high and dry. The oldest of these have stood since the 16th century, reposing in as much mystic architectural genius as the region’s landmark pre-Romanesque churches.
Moving east into the Picos de Europa mountain range, we hike around the Lakes of Covadonga, two glacial pools whose verdant banks are a magnet for visitors. As I’m averse to anything resembling a crowd — although there’s only a scattering of people at this autumnal time of year — Abarquero leads me off the main loop on a drover’s path through backwoods and across rolling fields dotted with tiny farmers’ lodges. This landscape, he says, was shaped over aeons. First by millions of years of slow-moving ice, then by many generations of herders, who lit fires on the mountainsides to clear grazing space for their sheep and goats. Those nimble, nibbling ruminants were part of a seasonal cycle that saw them moved to lower grasslands in the winter, then back to high ground in summer.
The full article is here: https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/travel/2023/02/hiking-the-wild-highlands-of-asturias-spains-bear-country