Earlier in the year – the pre-COVID times – Padma and I started dreaming of buying a holiday home in Spain. All of the land agent websites seemed to direct us to the south of the country … to the classical hot and dry Spain with abundant sun.

One day as we were looking at the map of Spain, Padma said ‘what about up here?’ No, I said, that’s Bilbao and Basque Country … way too expensive for us. She slid her finger western along the northern coastline of Spain … ‘Why not here?’ In contrast to the south of Spain, the map showed a very green region and place names I had never heard of … Asturias, Guijon, Oveido.

I googled ‘Asturias’ and absorbed myself in it … a land along Spain’s Green Coast that is blessed with mild temperatures and abundant rains … a land of towering mountains and quaint fishing villages … and a land of very reasonable home prices. It seemed perfect so for several months Padma and I scoured the property listings and started making our shortlist.

And then COVID hit and everything just started to get too hard and too unpredictable. We kind of put the home purchase on the back burner but the lure of Asturias remained.

In July, Spain started opening up to visitors so we made plans for an August visit. Fortunately, Asturias has the lowest incidence of COVID in Spain, so we have made a break for it and have spent now a couple of days getting to know the province.

We’ve started our visit in the mountainous area and today visited Ponga National Park and hope to visit Picos de Europa National Park in the coming days. We found a quiet guesthouse in a rural area and really don’t need to leave our room to get a feel for the verdant beauty of Asturias. We’ll hang around till COVID tells us to do otherwise.