Taramundi

The first thing you notice is the water. It races through every garden, drives every workshop, and dictates bedtime—when the mills stop, the village goes still. Taramundi sits on the western lip of Asturias, barely twenty minutes from Galicia, yet the OS map makes it look like cartographer’s doodling: a tangle of lanes that dead-end at a stream, restart on the far bank, then corkscrew uphill. There is no town square to speak of, only a scatter of stone houses threaded together by the sound of hammers hitting steel and sluices hitting stone.

The Blade and the River

Knives made here pre-date stainless steel and fibreglass handles. The local cuchilleros still forge from reclaimed car springs, folding the metal until it sings. Wander into Casa Xosé, halfway up the hill in A Veiga, and you’ll find Sergio grinding a blade while the radio mutters football results. He’ll let you watch, answer questions, and sell you a modest peeling knife for €18—half the price of the souvenir shops on the coast, and it will last longer than most marriages. Ask politely; if he’s tempering, you wait. The rhythm is pre-industrial: the forge shuts when the river drops, and the river drops when it hasn’t rained on the Cantabrian hills for a week.

To understand why water matters, walk the 800-metre lane to Os Teixois. The ethnographic site is sign-posted from the AS-21 but the brown icon gives no clue that you’re about to step onto a working 17th-century power grid. Four waterwheels drive a fulling hammer, a grinding mill, a saw and a tiny hydro-generator that once lit the owner’s house in 1952. Staff fire everything up at 11:00 and 16:00 sharp; outside those slots you’ll see motionless machinery and a bored attendant. Time it right and the clatter is deafening, the floorboards tremble, and children forget their phones exist. Entry is €5, €3 for under-14s, and the ticket is valid all day—handy if you hike up the valley and return for the afternoon show.

Walking Between Hamlets

Forget “circular route” and think “join-the-dots”. The PR-AS-205 links half a dozen hamlets—Os Teixois, Mestas, Barxas—along old pack-horse paths. Total distance is 10 km but you can bail out at any bridge; the local bus will pick you up on the hour if you flag it down. The path climbs 250 m, then drops into oak woods where chestnut rails hold back earthy banks. Stone hórreos on stilts dot gardens like miniature churches; most still store last year’s potatoes, padlocked against pine martens. After rain the schist turns silver and lethally slick—decent tread is non-negotiable, and the hand-rail at the riverside gorge is more psychological than structural. You’ll meet one farmer, perhaps two; everyone else is upslope cutting hay or indoors finishing a knife order for Bilbao.

Beds, Beans and the 22:00 Curfew

Accommodation splits between 18th-century manor houses and new timber cabins that smell of cedar and wood-burner smoke. La Rectoral, perched above the Eo valley, has four rooms with beams you can’t reach and duvets thick enough for a Scottish February. Rates hover round €120 B&B; dinner is an extra €25 if you warn them before 18:00. They’ll serve fabada—Asturian bean and pork stew—followed by cachopo, two veal steaks the size of an A4 folder crammed with Serrano ham and cheese. One portion feeds two hungry walkers; attempt it solo and you’ll understand why Spanish lunches come with siestas. By 22:00 the lane is pitch black. The village has no pub, no late-shop, no streetlights; noise is limited to owls and the river that never sleeps. Most guests regard the blackout as therapy.

When to Come, When to Stay Away

May and late-September are the sweet spots. Meadows glow lime-green, the forge is open, and buses still run three times daily from Ribadeo. July brings French motorhomes and Spanish language schools; queues at Os Teixois stretch to 45 minutes and parking on the AS-21 is a wing-mirror lottery. January and February are for hermits: museums shut, rain arrives sideways, and the only open café closes at 15:00. Mobile reception vanishes in every season the moment you drop into a valley—download offline maps before you leave Oviedo. Cash is equally elusive; the nearest ATM is 12 km away in A Pontenova and several artisans keep a dog-eared sign: “No tarjetas, lo siento.”

The Upsides of Being Stubborn

Getting here requires intent. The fastest route from the UK is a Ryanair hop to Santiago, then a 90-minute hire-car dash along the A-8 and up the AS-21. Roads narrow to a single lane with passing bays; meet a timber lorry and someone reverses 200 m. The payoff is that Taramundi has sidestepped the whitewash-and-gift-wrap treatment suffered by better-connected villages. You will see abandoned barns with trees growing through the roof, and a 1990s breeze-block garage grafted onto a 1700s house. It is imperfect, alive, and honest about rural decline. Buy a knife, walk five kilometres, sit on a wall and listen to a forge hammer keeping time with the river. Then drive out while the mist rolls up the valley and the water keeps working long after you’ve gone.