BULNES

Where?   Asturias, Spain

What?     Ancient mountain village, still only accessible by funicular or foot

IN THIS tiny cliff-squeezed village, life is – and always has been – lived vertically. ‘Flat’ is scarce a thing in lofty Bulnes. All is up or down. Tough or tougher. No planes land here; no cars swing by. For centuries the sole way in was to walk the well-worn tracks, no wider than a mule; a slow, relentless, zig-zagging haul from the valley bottom, amid tumbled rock, holm oaks, bears and wolves. Now the modern world is knocking at the door of this lonely hamlet in the hills, but it still feels like Mother Nature is in charge ...

The Picos de Europa got their name, so they say, because this hulking mass of mountains, close to northern Spain’s Cantabrian coast, was the first glimpse of Europe for sailors returning from the Americas. After adventuring in the New World and spending weeks at sea, it must have been quite a homecoming to see all this looming limestone – topping out at over 2,500 metres (8,200 feet) – suddenly hove into view.

And somewhere amid that massif is Bulnes, a remote little village of no more than 50 people, hiding 650 metres (2,130 feet) up a side valley off the mighty Cares Gorge. That humans thought to settle there seems incredible; that they have remained there for millennia even more so.

The Picos de Europa, designated a national park in 1918, have been inhabited since Palaeolithic times, though it wasn’t until around 2,500 years ago that people here began the practice of transhumance – moving livestock with the seasons. This agricultural method has shaped both the landscape and culture of these seemingly inhospitable mountains. It’s evolved a hardy breed of men and women who know how to survive in this terrain. It’s created a unique local cuisine, in which you can taste the very pastures on which the animals graze. And it’s spawned a web of villages among the nooks and crannies that are, by necessity, close enough to be walked between.

It’s also engendered a legendary indomitability. Maze-like, gorge-riven and swathed in impenetrable forests, this portion of Spain has been something of a fortress throughout history; a place where locals could hide from invaders – whoever those invaders might be. When Roman legionnaires came empire-building in the first century BC, the Cantabrian peaks were the last of Iberia to fall. Later, when the Moors were rampant, conquering the Iberian Peninsula, they met their match in the mountains of Asturias. It was here, in AD 722, that heroic Don Pelayo defeated an army of 100,000 Arabs at the Battle of Covadonga, forcing them to divide and retreat, thus kickstarting the long, slow re-Christianisation of Spain.

One phalanx of those retreating Moors – believed to number 63,000 – scarpered away across the central Picos via Bulnes; having made it beyond the hamlet to Sotres (the highest village in the national park), the invaders allegedly got their comeuppance near the village of Cosgaya, where a mighty landslide swept every last one into the Deva River.

Visiting Bulnes today, it seems impossible that such a turning point of history played out, in part, in this sleepy outpost. Life here has moved on a little: in 2001, a funicular railway was burrowed into the limestone, linking Bulnes to the town of Poncebos below. Wagons carrying 28 people at a time depart every half hour; the journey takes just seven minutes. But, for the traveller at least, it’s still better to walk. To stride the uphill-all-the-way shepherd trails from Poncebos or Pandébano, marvelling at the mountains.

Bulnes itself is divided in two: lower La Villa and upper Barrio del Castillo. There’s not much in either: a church and covered graveyard (to protect it from the snow), farmhouses in varying states of disrepair, a ruined tower (thought to date from the 14th century), a couple of guesthouses and a handful of cafés spooning hearty fabada (bean stew). Though low-level tourism has started to penetrate, Bulnes still offers a proper glimpse of traditional Picos life.