Where to stay

La Cepada Small modern hotel with large rooms built into a hillside overlooking Cangas de Onís. Doubles from £82. Avenida Contranquil, s/n. Cangas de Onís, 00 34 985 84 94 45, http://hotellacepada.com

La Ablaneda With only ten rooms, this is more guesthouse than hotel, but it’s convenient, immaculate and close to the national park. Doubles from £51. Covadonga, Cangas de Onís, 00 34 985 940 245, http://ablaneda.com

Travel Information

Cabrales, along with Onís and Peñamellera Alta, is in Picos de Europa, and part of the Principality of Asturias, whose climate is cooler than other parts of Spain. August is the warmest month, with average highs of 23°C. Currency is the euro. Spain is one hour ahead of GMT.

GETTING THERE
Easyjet (http://easyjet.com) flies direct to Asturias Oviedo airport from London Stansted. Cabrales is just over an hour-and-a-half drive.
Ryanair (http://ryanair.com) flies to Santander from London Stansted. Santander is less than a one-and-a-half-hour drive from Cabrales.

RESOURCES
Info Asturias (http://infoasturias.com) provides plenty of local information.

FURTHER READING
The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World’s Greatest Piece of Cheese by Michael Paterniti (Dial Press, £17) is a non-fiction New York Times Bestseller that will further fuel your quest for queso. Tales of a mystical cheese drew its author to a small Castilian village and its web of blood feuds, wine and long-held secrets.

Where to eat

Casa Marcial Nacho Manzano’s menú tradicional must offer one of the best Michelin two-star dining deals anywhere. It includes his mother’s recipe for arroz con leche (rice pudding), ham croquetas, a mini bean stew fabada and young cockerel with rice. £41. La Salgar, s/n, Parres, Arriondas, 00 34 985 84 09 91, http://casamarcial.com

Restaurante Los Arcos Old-fashioned restaurant with excellent cider, cheese and some serious traditional dishes. About £34 (including cider). 3 Plaza del Ayuntamiento, Cangas de Onís, 00 34 985 849 277

Food Glossary

Food and Travel Review

Cabrales caves are creepy. The floors are damp and slippery. Age-old spiders’ webs trail from the roofs. Scariest of all is the fierce aroma of a thousand cheeses slowly morphing from white to blue. Cheesemakers come here to wipe them, turn them, wash them, brush them and sniff them — latterday Gollums fondling their Precious.

A lost corner of northern Spain, Cabrales isn’t Middle-earth. Set back from the Atlantic Ocean and stretching deep into the Picos de Europa mountain range, it’s a warren of switchback roads, tracks, rivulets and streams scored through limestone gorges. Carreña’s pale cows straddle the double white lines, daring drivers to pass. The local headline complaining ‘The presence of wolves in Cabrales is stifling tourist development’ says it all.

More than twice the size of Barcelona, with a population of less than 2,500, Cabrales is one of the 78 districts that make up the Principality of Asturias. It has a local dialect, a favourite tipple (cider), one famous eponymous cheese and another produced nearby that’s a worthy rival. It’s tempting to describe it as a hybrid landscape of alpine uplands, backed by mountains rising to over 2,600m, that unravels into rolling plains as it drifts down towards the coast. In summer, it’s bucolic, a rambler’s paradise; in winter, ferocious, a countryside where survival can be tough.

Ana Rosa Bada makes her Cabrales cheese in Poo, a village whose name we won’t dwell on. Originally, the milk was curdled with rennet from a kid’s stomach. Not any more. It can be a blend of cow’s, ewe’s or goat’s milk – whatever reaches her dairy.

‘We use only raw milk and we don’t add any Penicillium roqueforti to make it blue,’ she says. ‘We don’t have to because the cheese is open-textured and the caves do the rest.’ How long she leaves it there varies from two to four months. By then the cheeses will be freckled with dark blue from rind to core. Their texture isn’t wet. More crumbly than creamy, it doesn’t ooze. The taste, always strong, can fluctuate between pungent and ear-curling. No two are identical; the flavour immediately electrifies the tongue with a variety of sensations – blackberries, currants, grass, hay, bittersweet chocolate, leather, woodsmoke, and yes, meat.

Poo is a jumble of stone houses with wood-framed bay windows or balconies next to square-shaped hórreos, grain stores built on stilts. Opposite Ana Rosa’s dairy, Casa Aida is both café and village shop. Order a plate of embutidos from the barman and he’ll dish up freshly sliced cold cuts on the counter above packets of detergent. A plate of serrano ham, lomo (cured loin), salami, chorizo and cecina is yours for £5. The sausage is venison, the chorizo wild boar and the cecina – well, it’s just air-dried meat. Perhaps it is chamois or a Spanish ibex, both hunted.

Ana Rosa’s parents (her family has been farming for six generations) used to take livestock into the mountains in summer, milk them and make cheese. ‘The hut they lived in is a ruin now,’ she says. ‘We still own it but we can’t turn it into a holiday home.’ Only the shepherds who are willing to live there with their animals are permitted to stay.

Cándido Asprón is one who has chosen to spend his summers there. He has 11 brothers and sisters but he’s the only one to have chosen a life of isolation. Brought up to farm, he emigrated to Venezuela to work as a builder. Homesick, he returned to a stone hut at Belbín, an hour’s hike across country from Covadonga Lakes, where the tarmac road – and four-wheel transport – ends. On a clear day, snow-capped mountain tops and pastures glistening with wild flowers seem a rural idyll. When it clouds over and the mist thickens, it’s almost menacing. The only sound is the clack and ding of tuneless bells around the necks of invisible cattle.

Cándido milks his goats and six cows to turn into Gamonéu, the other local cheese that, officially, comes from nearby Onís. In size and shape it could pass for Cabrales. Holm oak logs outside his dairy give a clue as to the difference. This is lightly smoked. Eaten young it’s earthy, but the flavour of clean milk lingers. Older, it turns harder and sharper. The texture is firmer than that of Cabrales.

In a stone sty, a little larger than his own living quarters, Cándido keeps two pigs. They thrive on the whey that’s a by-product of his dairy. A large tub filled with chorizo packed in lard underlines their fate. Cándido doesn’t care much for vegetables. No strings of fabes, Asturias’s famous white kidney beans, grow in his garden.

There is, though, another worker in the area. Jesús Noriega’s Aula de la Miel in the nearby village of Alles, in Peñamellera Alta, is part beekeeping academy, part museum, part honey-tasting centre – for sampling the product of his 600 beehives. His wife, Carolina, fries tortos de maíz, ethereal corn fritters, to dunk into heather, chestnut and lime or chocolate honeys. They even go well with a honey and Cabrales pâté. One year, Jesús moved the hives to the coast at the end of summer and a third were wiped out. Left to over-winter in the mountains, they survived. Bees, he explains, have their own central heating system: ‘Inside the hives it’s 40°C, hot enough to melt the snow outside. The workers vibrate their flight muscles to generate heat.’ He sees it as a lesson in how fragile yet resilient the natural environment is.

Gamonéu made on farms in the Onís valleys is good but not quite like that produced by Cándido. He smiles as a friend brings him a newspaper and a fresh baguette. The life of a mountain shepherd does have its rewards – and not just the exceptional cheese produced here in the hills and caves by those dedicated to their craft.