Stage Comillas to Llanes (By Bicycle)

At around 50.9 kilometres, this stage links in a single day's ride the two walking stages that separate Comillas from Llanes and crosses the border between Cantabria and Asturias. The profile rolls constantly: there is no climb worth naming, but no genuinely flat section either, because the route negotiates a succession of short valleys running down to the sea.

Leaving Comillas, the Modernist ensemble falls behind and the road takes on the Oyambre nature park, a protected expanse of dunes, marshes and meadows that accompanies the cyclist through the first kilometres. The road skirts Oyambre beach and comes out at San Vicente de la Barquera, the obligatory stop of the morning.

San Vicente is arranged on a tongue of land between two estuaries, with its thirteenth-century castle and the church of Santa María de los Ángeles presiding over the old quarter. The Maza bridge, with its thirty-two arches, crosses the estuary and offers the town's best-known view, the Picos de Europa rising in the background on clear days.

Beyond the estuary the itinerary pulls away from the sea a little, through La Revilla, Serdio and Pesués, among meadows and eucalyptus woods, until it reaches Unquera on the banks of the Deva. The river marks the border: across the bridge lies Asturias and the climb to Colombres, whose indiano houses — built by emigrants who returned wealthy from the Americas — culminate in the Quinta Guadalupe, today the Indiano Archive.

The final third follows the eastern Asturian coast through Pendueles and Vidiago, the coastal shelf opening out between cliffs and pasture. Llanes closes the day: a seafaring town of medieval origin, it preserves a stretch of its wall, the basilica of Santa María del Conceyu and a small, working fishing harbour. Out on the breakwater, the Cubes of Memory painted by Agustín Ibarrola turn the concrete blocks into a work of art at the water's edge.