American in Spain

Last weekend we went to the annual festival in Ampuero, a neighboring town of 4,000 residents. Every year, they hold a miniature version of the San Fermin festival in Pamplona, complete with all night partying in white clothes and red scarfs, a running of the bulls, and bullfighting. Of the six years we’ve lived here, we’ve gone several times. We knew from past experience that it’s nearly impossible to park in a small town that’s hosting three times its inhabitants in a festival, so we parked on the outskirts of town to save the time and stress of finding a closer spot.
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When discussing what sort of mischief and/or tourism we could get up to last Sunday, my wife mentioned that a friend had recommended visiting “the oldest town in Cantabria”. With only this tidbit to go on, I turned to Google and discovered a Cantabrian tourism site with the sentence, “It is said that [Bárceno Mayor] is the oldest town in Cantabria, and possibly even all of Spain.” Yet nowhere on the great big internet could I find out how old the town was thought to be. It was also unclear how one would even determine how old a small town is when it’s nestled in the mountains near a cave with 15,000 year old Paleolithic cave paintings.
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Taking full advantage of our temporary childlessness, my wife, sister-in-law and I had an exhausting weekend. After sending Nora on her way, we grabbed our swim suits and our always-prepared-this-time-of-year beach bag and drove the five minutes to Laredo’s beach. We parked right at the midpoint of the five kilometer (3.1 mile) crescent-shaped beach and walked to the main town center on one of the beach, where we found a restaurant to have lunch.

After lunch, the desire for siesta was strong, but we had to walk back to the car to get our beach towels, and the sky had clouded over, much to the chagrin of my companions. I suggested we take off our shoes and walk back in the surf, so we did. But when we reached the midpoint where the car was parked, we were enjoying the walk so much that we continued all the way to the tip, where we stopped for a coffee at the bar there. Heading back, the same thing happened, and we continued all the way back to the other end. On the third time passing the midpoint, we did stop to go home, though. That’s a total of 15 km (9.3 miles), most of it in a foot of water.
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Today, my wife and I we took full advantage of our childless weekend to do a little local tourism. One of the “must see” attractions of Cantabria, the northern region of Spain where we live, is the Cueva El Soplao, an ancient cave discovered by miners in the late nineteenth century and only opened to the public in 2005, containing some of the finest known specimens of stalactites and stalagmites in the world.

The stalactites form at a rate of about one centimeter every 150 years. Some of them are two or three meters long. That’s 45,000 years old. It’s rather mind boggling to look at a stalagmite standing as tall as I am and think that, in the time that it takes to have all the happiness, sadness, pain, pleasure, and joy of one entire human life, this structure gains a couple millimeters. And then, once you’ve contemplated the single tree, you take a step back and see the whole forest of thousands upon thousands of stalactites and stalagmites… You can’t help but have a transcendent moment and appreciate the transience of your own existence. (more…)