Ruta Valverde de Laredo

I just thought I'd throw these in at the top of the post, just in case AlanR drops by

After our few days in the Urkiola Natural Park (i.e. where we were when I last posted here), a couple of nights were spent in Bilbao, where all of our walking was of the 'city tour' variety. From there we headed to a spot with a cracking view at the top of a low sea cliff overlooking a bay, popular with surfers...

The view to which we awoke yesterday morning
...unfortunately the location was a bit of a disappointment in terms of doing anything beyond watching surfers, there being a lack of access to walk anywhere (unless we wanted to walk along a main road, which we didn't).

Yesterday we arrived in Laredo, which hadn't been entirely our intention. A quick shop was done at a supermarket on the edge of town, but their car park wasn't a suitable place to stay put for elevenses, and I was too hungry to wait until we got to our destination. So, we drove a couple of kilometres to the beach, and we're still here now. It's a huge beach - 5km long and very wide:


It wasn't until this morning that my mind turned to wonder whether there are any walking routes hereabouts. I wasn't optimistic, but a quick search on wikiloc.com showed my pessimism to be misplaced. I soon had this downloaded:

The arrow on the left shows where Bertie is parked; the arrow on the right shows to where we extended the route

A bit of trouble was had with following the route through the old town, so we ended up ascending the hill to the left of the church, rather than to the right, then looping back around on a pleasant cliff-top path to rejoin the route. It afforded a good view of where we were going:


After walking consistently (and sometimes steeply) uphill, the advertised route would then have had us join a road to drop straight back down again. I couldn't understand why it didn't include the 350m each way detour to take in the nearby high point, as marked with the arrow in the above photo. We did make that detour, which afforded good views over Laredo...

...and of shapely cragginess of the coast to the east:


It was the best bit of the outing.

There must have been quite a small-holding community up in that area within the last fifty years, but now there's a scattering of abandoned buildings. Some had been abandoned after substantial building work - including one in a stunning position (albeit with no road access), that was marked as being for sale. The outside and roof were in good nick - it just wanted for windows and a bit of work inside (like floors, fittings, fixtures, plastering etc.).

The stats were around 5 miles walked with 900' of ascent.