Beyond Torrelavega there is again a parting of roadways. One passes along the coast by Santillana, the birthplace of Gil Blas; and the other through Cabezon, threading the mountain glens. They reunite at San Vicente de la Barquera, another minor seaport of Cantabria, less progressive than Castro, but quite as attractive after its style. The town lies at the extremity of a tongue of land between two wide estuaries. It is the meeting-place of the two long bridges which cross them, and its precipitous acropolis and arcaded market-place afford endless studies to the lover of the picturesque.
San Vicente had got a hideous secret of its own as well as Castro, only at San Vicente it was hardly a secret—in fact, they were rather booming it as a show. An old sunken coasting vessel had recently been recovered and beached in the estuary, and its hold was positively teeming with{20} lobsters, like Sir Thomas Ingoldsby’s pockets with eels. Truly it was a gruesome sight; and a novelist in search of an appropriate ending for a really desperate villain could hardly do better than have him pincered to death in that crawly inferno by the black clanking monsters which inhabited it!
The Cantabrian Sierras, already sufficiently majestic, now reach their culmination in the acknowledged monarchs of the range—the Picos de Europa, the landmark of all the old navigators who once steered their Mexican argosies into Gijon or Santander. This vast mass of snow-crowned peaks forms a most imposing spectacle. They are great “cloud compellers,” and are seldom entirely clear. But they are sometimes seen unveiled in the calm of the early morning, an apparently impassable barrier filling half the horizon towards the south.
Yet the road which we have taken to guide us aims right at the very heart of them, and at the little village of Unquera it bears up square to the left. A copious sea-green river (officially known as the Tina Mayor, but invariably styled the Deva by the inhabitants) comes hurrying down at this point from the mountains, and charges the great ridge of limestone which edges the coast-line like a natural sea-wall. We look in vain for the outlet:{21} the barrier seems absolutely unbroken. But a stream that has pierced the Picos recks little of minor obstacles, and the waves are booming to welcome it but half a mile beyond.
Turning our backs on the sea, we enter a noble valley, walled in by crags of Alpine grandeur, and populated by families of Imperial eagles swinging to and fro their eyries, high amid the cornices of rock; but the pastures at the foot of the steeps are everywhere level and placid, and from Unquera up to Abándames can scarcely be called an ascent.