Camping Lagos de Somiedo is up such steep and twisty roads that not that many campers (and even fewer caravanners) make it up here. If you do the journey by car you’ll be clutching for first gear on a couple of the hairpins. The winding roads cling to the sides of these deep limestone valleys and the resulting rock crumble means you’ll have to keep an eye out for rock falls. Sometimes it’s just a slip of pebbledash, but occasionally you’ll find a chunk the size of a half-decent watermelon sitting in the middle of the road.
Luckily you leave the rocks far behind when you arrive at the site, high up in the unspoilt village of Lago. It’s a fairly compact campsite by the side of a small stream which runs down from a nearby lake. Cars are confined to an entrance car park, so the camping area is blissfully free of clutter and there’s plenty of room to spread out and make yourself at home. There’s even a discreet little hideaway patch of ground on its own across the stream, accessed by a rather charming rickety old wooden bridge.
Lago itself is a throwback to an earlier era, the only real signs of modernity being the telephone wires strung from house to house. Spring comes late in these mountains – the trees can still be budding in May and there can even be flurries of snow – but once summer arrives there’s everything that you require for that supreme high-mountain feel: birds of prey wheeling through the skies, cow bells clanking on the hills, lazy dogs and horses blocking the road.
The locals are enthusiastic bee-keepers, so there are plenty of stripy stingers swigging nectar from the flowers and bumbling around drunkenly looking for a dust-up. And then, of course, there are the bears. And the odd wolf. But at least you can console yourself with the thought that they’re likely to be more scared of you than you are of them. Yeah, right.