Next on the itinerary was a day hike that Ness had seen pictures of on Pinterest called El Ruta del Cares in the Pico Europa National Park area. Considered one of the most breathtaking walks in Spain it took about 6 hours and was well worth it. The hike began about 6km from a tiny town called Arenas de Cabrales which we stayed at for one night. There wasn't really a whole lot to do there, but it was a gorgeous little place. I did finally get to try a white bean stew dish which is famous in the region which I'd been meaning to try for a while. It was delicious.

So on the second day we caught a taxi out to the starting point of the hike. The hike starts uphill for about the first 2km, but then after that is mostly flat and just amazing. The trail is mostly carved right out of the cliff face and mostly follows a canal which takes water from the top of the mountain to somewhere down the bottom often running through the mountain and other times above or below the trail and on the odd occasion right next to it. I never have been able to figure out why the canal was actually built, but it's quite a feat of engineering and seems like a lot of effort seeing as how the natural river seems to do the job of moving the water just as well. But in any case, it's awesome.

The hike was certainly up there as the most picturesque of any days walk we had done in all our days of walking. And it was certainly one of the easiest and most relaxing also. We didn't even need to bother with our backpacks as we were able to leave them back at the hotel. It's really just another one of those things that is pretty hard to put into words. A picture is worth 1000 of them as they say.

As we were walking we started to joke about finding a pub at the end of the walk, similar to how there was that very isolated one at the top of the mountain on the GR-105. We really did completely mean entirely as a joke with no actual expectation of finding a pub, but we actually almost did. Turns out there was a small cafe up the top, where we could get a Coke if not a beer. The trail wasn't circular, so after having our Coke we had to walk back the way we came, which was totally fine by us because the views were worth seeing again. This time from another angle and with the sun in a better location for certain photos.

We also started to run into a lot of people on the way back. It was a very popular hike apparently. And when we got back to the start and started walking back to town (couldn't be bothered trying to figure out how we could possibly get a taxi back) there were cars parked along the side of the road for several km. Hugely popular it would seem. The 6km walk back to town only took us an hour. For some reason we both remembered the drive in the taxi there being a lot more memorable view-wise and were actually looking forward to the walk back. Somehow though the walk back wasn't particularly nice at all, so I'm not sure what we thought we had seen. Maybe it just no longer looked very good in comparison to the hike we had just done. Once we were back we had about an hour to wait to catch a bus to Bilbao.