There’s a big problem of travelling in the province with the lowest incidence of COVID in Spain. Everyone else has the same idea as us. Asturias is packed with holidaymakers. Almost all are Spanish with a sprinkling of French. No Yanks. No Poms. And probably just two Aussies. The hotels and restaurants are bursting with customers. The hiking trails are chock-a-block because outdoor sports are the safe thing to do these days during COVID.

We wanted to take a hike in the Picos de Europa National Park. If you Google ‘hiking’ within the park, the first hit is always the Ruta de Cares, which is a spectacular walk along the Cares Canyon. I didn’t need to go there to figure it would be packed. But we did anyway. We drove an hour and as we approached the trailhead we saw parked cars and people hiking. We were still three kilometres from the trailhead! I did the math. We’d need to walk six kilometres on the road. That’s enough for a day trip alone for us old farts. Then we’d be walking single file with hundreds of other hikers. Nah. That wasn’t for us. We made a U turn and got out of there.

Down in the village, we found a big parking lot and I brought up my WikiLocs app. That’s a user-generated content site full of hiking trails around the world. I found a nearby hike. I then brought up my MapOut app and rubbed my finger over some paths to map out and modify a bit the WikiLoc trail to develo a hike that suited our energy levels for the day.

The result was a very quiet hike through some lovely Asturian countryside with great views, yet almost no people.