Autumn is one of the best seasons to visit Asturias. The forests fill with red and golden leaves and the countryside is a world of colour. It is easy to find accommodation and enjoy the cuisine while the climate is still pleasant. November is also the month in which to collect chestnuts and celebrate the typical amagüestu fiesta to drive away the witches and bad feelings about the approaching winter.

Nobody knows where the fairies live but the xanas stretch their limbs in the lakes of Enol or Ercina, comb their hair in the Cares ravine and bathe in the Cantabrian surf.
Because the xanas are the fairies of the north, they live in the flowing waters, in the lakes and springs. They are beautiful and they smooth their long hair with magic combs.
When a handsome young man drowns, the old women of the area suspect he has chosen to live for ever with a xana.
The xanas have distant relatives in the Norwegian fjords and the forests of England. They are part of the heritage of these rainy lands where the damp air makes it impossible for us to sense the true limits of our bodies or the difference between the real and the imagined. These are the dominions of mist and omens.
In the half-light and lost in the haze it is not difficult to feel the monsters we have inside us, such as the Culebre, the Asturian Dragon that survived because St George was born a long time before they built the Huerna motorway. Even before the train carried the twentieth century and progress to ancient Asturias, as was dreamt by the enlightened thinker Jovellanos.
The priest of my home town never met the Gijón sage who dreamt the truth, but he said he had seen paradise when the morning mist that covers the valleys lifted towards the mountains, stained by a hidden sun.
There unfolds a landscape that has always been there but was beyond our imagination. Perhaps heaven is also there but the beauty of the woods hides it from our view.
All we know is that between the Eo and the Deva there is a small green realm squeezed up against the sea. It seems a fairytale land because it has a prince, a coat of arms and many legends.
Along with the stone houses there are wooden granaries whose doors display the magic Celtic signs that everyone looks at and no-one now knows how to read. The magic of the druids has disappeared but there remains the enchantment of the beech, birch, cork and especially the magic of the oak. Because Asturias is the enchantment of its woods.
In Somiedo there is the domain of the bear and in Muniellos the Enchanted Wood that in Autumn is covered in colours worthy of a king’s ransom.
With the aroma of chestnuts, the Asturians celebrate the amagüestu, the fiesta of cider and chestnuts and good people, as they say about the folk from around here.
For this fiesta the people will leave the towns and climb into the woods to collect chestnuts. They will abandon Oviedo, leaving behind the Magistral, which from the gothic needle of the cathedral looks down on this heroic stone city.
Beautiful Oviedo that looks so good for its age and has pretty pedestrian avenues, paintings by Urculo and Botero’s sculptures, and designer fountains that try in vain to compete with the pre-Roman monuments that dominate the city from the height of the Naranco mountain. These unique monuments have recently been added to UNESCO’s World Heritage list.
They will also leave the bustling Gijón, the most populated city in Asturias. Here there are beaches as well – the beach of San Lorenzo and new beaches such as the Poniente that has just been spruced up. Some residents will find it hard to leave the seaside esplanade, others the breakwater and the cosy fishermen’s quarters of Cimadevilla or the hill of Santa Catalina from which the great sculptor Chillida praised the horizon for ever.
They will even leave Aviles, Cantabria’s best kept secret with its suggestive San Agustín district, and climb to the woods on the hillsides as though every day were Martes de Campo: that fiesta day when the young lads and lasses escape to the countryside accompanied by the sound of bagpipes. They sit aside the streams and waterfalls to eat the bread and drink the wine given to them by their godmothers. Because the verdant foliage preserves the heart of the rain along with ancient gods and forgotten ancestors.
Everyone will climb from the valleys into the mountains, right up to the Picos de Europa, so called because they were the first sight that greeted Asturians returning to their homeland from the Americas.
For the Asturians, in common with other Celtic peoples, are like the salmon – they are born in Asturias and travel thousands of kilometres to the frozen seas beyond Canada but come back to die in the river in which they were born (unless a fisherman makes him or her into the campanu, the first capture of the season worth his weight in gold).
Over centuries the Asturians went like the salmon to make their lives in the Americas but they dreamed of coming back to die at home. So very many did so and all around the paths and roads of Asturias we can see the colonial style mansions with their ironwork and palm tree.
The single palm is the symbol of the traveller who went to South America and made his fortune, who triumphed and came back with money. The others who came back poor (like the salmon that never became the campanu) are the subject of Clarín’s marvellous story Pan y Boroña. For if palm trees come from success, failure nurtures the sad flower of literature.
The mountains of Asturias form a seascape of craggy peaks swimming in waves of mist, such as the Mirador del Fitu, from where we see Asturias from the sky as God may have seen it. It is a seascape of mountains that stretches to its death or birth in another sea of boats and seafarers.
Because Asturias is maritime and mineral. "They say the mine of Camocha goes beneath the sea, so the sailors hear the explosion of the fire-damp," sings the Santiaguin chorus. Yes, this is the land of songs and choirs, and many voices sing more and better than one.
These voices sing not only on high but also below ground, as Asturias descends into the caves of Candamu with their stalactites and stalagmites or to the coal mines that destroyed the lost village of Palacio Valdés for ever.
Beneath the earth of Asturias there are no gnomes or elves at work but good men who sang all these songs and whose world we can glimpse in the Mining Museum of San Martín del Rey Aurelio.
After travelling to the centre of the earth we can visit the green belt of the coastal maritime villages, of Llanes with its walls that withstood the Vikings, to the town of Luarca, passing though the invisible curtain beyond which the red roofs become slabs of grey slate and the mountains are lower and more welcoming.
Luarca has the most beautiful cemetery in Spain… at least for me and for Severo Ochoa, the Asturian Nobel Prize winner who chose to be buried here, forever looking at the sea.
Behind us we have left the multicoloured town of Cudillero and the picturesque village of Tazones where they say the Charles V disembarked and killed his first Spanish thirst with a swig of cider.
For cider is the green blood of Asturias, comparable to the mead of the Germanic gods. If the visitor wants to see where it is made, he should go to Villaviciosa or Nava. To drink this cider is to communicate with that green heart.
Then we can savour the sweetness of the mist with a special cream of velvet crab in Tapia de Casariego or Ribadsella.
Asturias does not fit into these pages but overflows like sparkling cider or the wisdom of Padre Feijoo. The traveller is best to set off to discover for himself the secret of this land of the far north.   

Eat, drink and love

Women and apples must be Asturian, as they say beyond the Pajares. But this year not only the apple and its natural daughter cider are Asturian but also chocolate, as Tino Helguera from Gijón has been chosen as the best chocolate maker in the country. His creations represented Spanish chocolate at the European Bocuse de Oro held in Lyon earlier this year.
Indeed the latest news about Asturias is not only sweet but also tasty and salty because Alejandro G. Urrutia has won the Bocuse de Oro for best chef. He also represented Spain in Lyon.
Yet on top of eating well in Asturias, the drinks are also delicious. Asturias is the land of cider but there are also wines such as Cangas del Narcea that should be better known. Mind you, this is Nalón not the Ribera del Duero and for the moment the Asturian David Barro has won a creditable third place in the Spanish Wine Tasters’ Championships.
Nobody denies the Asturians’ fine sense of taste. Perhaps that is why the Spanish Gastronomy Academy has awarded one of its National Gastronomy Prizes to José Manuel Vilabella for his culinary essay La Cocina Extravagante.
We do not know if this will be enough to show that Asturias is not resigned to being the land of gluttons but is also a top-choice territory for eating, drinking and all the sweet feelings that cuisine can bring when it becomes an art.