Picos de Europa
Spain's first national park — three limestone massifs above the Cantabrian coast, holding the Covadonga shrine, the Cares gorge and Europe's deepest caves.
Sailors named them: the Picos de Europa were the first European rock a ship from the Americas raised, snow-streaked limestone standing 2,600 metres within twenty kilometres of the Bay of Biscay. Three massifs — Cornión in the west, the savage central Urrieles, Ándara in the east — are split by river gorges so deep the range reads as three islands of bare karst floating over green Atlantic valleys. Spain's national park system began here: Alfonso XIII inaugurated the Parque Nacional de la Montaña de Covadonga in July 1918 on the Cornión massif, the country's first, enlarged across all three massifs and renamed in 1995.
Covadonga was no accidental choice. The cave-shrine at the park's gate is where Pelayo's victory over an Umayyad column around 722 became the founding myth of the Reconquista — "Spain begins here" is the operative slogan — and the 1918 park was consciously a national monument with mountains attached. Above the basilica, the road climbs to the lakes Enol and Ercina, shallow green tarns among limestone knolls and grazing cattle that are the park's postcard and its most crowded square kilometre. The genuine spectacle is underneath: the Picos karst is among the deepest on Earth, with the Torca del Cerro del Cuevón dropping 1,589 metres — a world top-ten cave — and international expeditions still pushing new systems every summer.
The central massif holds the icon. The Naranjo de Bulnes — Urriellu to Asturians — is a 550-metre orange-grey monolith whose 1904 ascent by Pedro Pidal (the same marquis who wrote Spain's national-park law) and the quarryman Gregorio Pérez founded Spanish climbing; its west face remains the country's most storied wall. Beneath it, the village of Bulnes had no road until a funicular was bored through the mountain in 2001, and the Cares gorge — the "Garganta Divina" — carries the range's great walk, twelve kilometres of path chiselled into a vertical wall between Caín and Poncebos alongside a 1920s hydro canal. Chamois are everywhere above the treeline; wolves have recolonized the massifs, brown bears prowl the park's western edge, and the sheep-and-cave economy still produces Cabrales, the blue cheese matured in the gorge caves.
What's worth knowing before you go
Cangas de Onís (Asturias), Arenas de Cabrales (for Bulnes and the Cares) and Potes (Cantabria, for Fuente Dé) are the three gateways, each keying a different massif. The Fuente Dé cable car jumps 750 vertical metres onto the central plateau in four minutes and turns serious karst country into an afternoon; in high season both it and the Covadonga lakes road (shuttle-bus only when saturated) reward early starts. The Cares path is flat but exposed and best walked from Caín. Atlantic weather is the standing hazard — the massifs brew fog from a clear coast in an hour, and people die of losing the path more often than of falling. June and September beat July for visibility.
The connoisseur's night is the Vega de Urriellu refuge under the Naranjo's west face, when the alpenglow works the wall and the headlamps of the last climbing parties come down the Amuesa shoulder in the dark.