Cantabria

Rodrigo Antón Tomé  

Yes, of course I still remember that day. Yes, sure, even after all this time. The funny thing about that trip is that we would have never pictured the North like that before, would we? It actually seemed to be all prepared so we could discover this place, from which we had always been so close to, but never thought it to exist as you saw it, in the best way I could ever think of.
Everything seemed to be perfectly arranged… I remember the cloudy sky tainted in dark rainy blue making a perfect colour combination with the emerald landscape. And, certainly, I remember how the feeling of fresh, almost cold air mixed with the gentle humidity came into us with a touch of absolute lack of liabilities. The weather was just perfect. And it became much better when we had to drive by secondary roads after we got that puncture. Those roads took us to the most beautiful rural environments I can remember. They were full of amazing intense green lands, and everything was so quiet that I remember how you felt as if it was there only for your personal delight. And the mist that concealed it all completed an image we had always imagined as the place the most peaceful and worth being in, a place which we assumed to be out of the tedious Spain. How could we even imagine that it had been right before us all the time!
  In fact, as I can remember, all the beautiful nature we sighted and felt, we started seeing it only after we passed through that long tunnel that was a little after Aguilar.  But everything was very different before and after that tunnel, actually. I remember it as a clear frontier between the arid, yellow and light brown boring roads of Castilla from the magnificent sight of the highland rural Cantabria. I will never forget what you saw right in the moment we got out of the tunnel, don’t worry about it; that image it’s something I’ve never stopped looking back on since then. And I can still see it. We were high in a mountain; far up from the village that silently rested at the bottom of the immense valley we had before your insignificant eyes. Isn’t peculiar the fact that this was the first thing we saw of Cantabria? Why? Well, I remember that old man who told you that “Cantabria” actually means something about a village and mountains or something like that. I think he said “people from the village in the mountains”, but I can’t clearly remember it, I’m sorry. Anyway, it is quite appropriate, isn’t it?