Frías to Elciego
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Frías to Elciego in the Rioja wine area
Motorhome Journey from Frías to Elciego
There is a clear blue sky when we get up here on the CampingCar-Park site at Frías in Northern Spain; the sun rising behind the trees so not yet too hot. We breakfast and sit outside in the delicious cool of the morning, reading and listening to the birds. The bird-App (Merlin) tells us there is an impressive list of birds twittering in the trees, the usual tits, robins and woodland birds but also pied flycatchers, nuthatch, black redstart and a bee-eater, new for us this trip. Later, before the day gets too hot, we walk up to the castle and pay our €2 each entrance fee (a bit different to English Heritage outrageous rates of many pounds each!).
We spend a relaxing morning exploring the castle. We decide we do not need interpretive notes as the castle is built as all other castles: moat, drawbridge (now a fixed bridge), outer wall, inner curtain wall, courtyard with well and four corner towers one of which is the Keep; this we can see from our campsite. We join the many other pairs of feet climbing the stairs and indeed, we are rewarded by 360° view of the whole area and plateau including a view of our campsite and where we are parked.
Later we descend through the town and look for somewhere to get lunch. Perhaps because it is Monday nowhere is serving lunch, we are amazed as many others are looking for lunch too, sadly we don’t find anything. Back at Hymer we have a late lunch and consider our options: to stay another night or move on. Our mind seems to be made up for us when two motorhomes arrive with two groups of noisy young people. They sit on the table and do a lot of loud talking… everyone else is sat quietly outside their van, reading or looking at their phones. Interestingly several of them have dogs and don’t keep them on leads or be too fussed when they come and pee around our vehicle!
Our next stop was to be Elciego in La Rioja wine region, so we decide to go now rather than tomorrow morning. We service Hymer, emptying and filling tanks and leave about 3.30pm the group of young people increasing the volume as the afternoon (and beer) progresses. We leave Frias on BU-504 through Onarañes crossing the Sierra de Cantabria, stopping at the summit of around 305m/1,000ft. Turning onto N-1 we drive past Miranda de Ebro and Haro and onto N-232 at Briones all the way to Elciego. We have been to Elciego many times (almost every year since 2018), so make our way to the Aire near the Valdelana winery. About 9 mohos (2 UK including us, Belgian, German, French, Italian and 3 Spanish) are already here, so we join them parking on our ‘usual spot’ on the bend (of the single central row of mohos) which gives us the extra triangle of pitch.
We arrive about 5.30pm and everything looks deserted! The day is cooler, about 24°C and feels very pleasant to us pale-skinned north Europeans. We walk into the town expecting to be able to get a glass of wine and a meal, perhaps at the La Florida restaurant if it is open. It is not, and neither is anywhere else (except the bar of La Caprichosa). In desperation we did go into La Caprichosa, there was one person sat at a table and they looked like staff. The other staff walked past us heading into the kitchen and ignored us. Having now read the reviews on Google maps similar occurrences have happened to others. Disappointed we walk back to Hymer to look at what we have in the fridge for tea. Starters of baguette and hummus, followed by ham and cheese omelette, very tasty but not what we were expecting. We have an early night, 13 other mohos are now parked here on the Aire.
