Monte Ranero

This post will have an unsual amount of pictures so I'll try to make the speech shorter :). Last Saturday, I went with my friend Felipe to do a nice route to the beautiful hill of Raneros, located in the border between Cantabria and the Basche Country. Here is a link to a Google Earth path file containing the route to Monte Raneros so you can see where it is by yourself. This time, I didn't need to take my GPS out because the route was easy enough.


We took a FEVE train early in the morning, departing from Santander at 8:00 and arriving at Carranza station (Ambasaguas, Basche Country) at 9:37. It was a cold morning but still good for this time of the year (December 15th).


After having a cup of chocolated milk and buying a "bocadillo" (like a sandwich but with French bread) in a bar, we started following the general road BI-630 straight to the cave of Pozalagua.


In the picture there is a nice example of the typical huts in this region. For me, it usually goes unnoticed. But I thought it might be good to show one of them to people from all over the world because they are quite nice!


We didn't visit the cave though, because it was kind of a touristical attraction and we felt that we were not there for that. In a few minutes from the cave, using a slightly visible path, we reached the top of the hill (we scared some vultures as well).


The views from there were amazing and we took some nice pictures in the border of a precipice.


The ground there was a bit tricky because the grass was dense and hid the holes bellow.


Then, we went down again and enjoyed a very nice walk on the crest and through a beautiful forest. I took some pictures there to compose a panoramic photo with software. Here are the results, they look nice to me.


Felipe had a very good camera and we took some pictures of ourselves hehe.


There were some hunters there and for a moment, I felt a bit unsafe. Next time I will take an easy to view jacket with me just in case.


We also saw a black sheep fighting with another one.

By the time we arrived at Gibaja (Cantabria) it was only 16:30 and the next (and last) train to Santander was at 20:50 (there are only 3 trains each day to Santander from Gibaja). We entered to a bar called Whisky and we stayed there until it was time to go. We had the opportunity to chat with some nice people there about a lot of things. The owner of the bar, Nisio, who used to drive a Taxi in his youth, was the one who gave us the first welcome. He showed us some other nice routes around, like that one to see the source of the Ason river. He also said we had missed the most interesting parts of the route, the cave and a zoo called "el carpin" (I disagreed
with him, but didn't tell anything) and that we should have done the route the other way around (maybe he was right about that but I planned to do it this way so we could start a bit later, therefore not so cold, and see the range of mountains from the train).

We also chatted with a couple coming from Bilbao (the guy was called Mikel, I don't remember the woman's name) about politics, how to save the world, racism, the differences among people in Spain depending on their region, etc. Although we were still in Cantabria, most of the people there were Basche (even the bar was furnished with Bilbao's football club posters). We also talked to another nice guy, called José "Miel" (Miel means honey in Spanish, he works growing bees) and a woman with so many descendants that she won't have room for them in Christmas dinner.

Before taking the train back to Santander we had a great Spanish omelet with tune and a sandwich in another bar near the station. José Miel, who said there were only four bars in Gibaja (being Whisky the most popular for the youth thanks to the music that his nice barman plays -- he is used to go outside, especially to Ibiza, to get to know the last trends in house music, etc :D), recommended us that bar because it had some beautiful girls there haha, "two from Bilbao and a beautiful southamerican", he said. When we get there we only found the latin girl, Colombian, and yes, she was gorgeous! haha. See you soon!