Covadonga Without the Shuttle

There is a gate on the road above Covadonga, and for the last four and a half months it has been shut to you.

Not to buses — those have been running up and down all summer, every half hour, full of people holding paper tickets and looking at their phones for the next departure. Shut to your car, your hire car, your rental van with the muddy boots in the back. From the first of June to the eighteenth of October, the only legal way up the CO-4 to the Lagos de Covadonga was on someone else's timetable.

On Monday, that ends. And it ends in the same week that the most famous walk in these mountains closed down, which means the whole shape of a Picos trip has quietly turned inside out.

The whole trip fits in one corner of Asturias. Cangas de Onis (1) is the base; the lakes (3) are 21.7 km and 36 minutes away; Poncebos (5) is 36 km and 44 minutes in the other direction. The Ruta del Cares runs between Poncebos (5) and Cain (6) and is currently cut in the middle. Llanes (7) on the coast is the rainy-day plan, an hour and a quarter from the lakes.

What closed today

This morning the direction of the Picos de Europa National Park confirmed that the Ruta del Cares — the gorge path everyone comes here for, the one cut into a cliff above a green river, the one on every poster — is cut in two places for repair of deteriorated infrastructure.

The closures are at the Puente de los Rebecos, three kilometres from Caín on the León side, and the Puente de Bolín, eight kilometres from Poncebos on the Asturian side. You cannot walk the full route between the two villages. No end date has been given; the park says the works are being accelerated.

Here is the part that matters for your week, though, and it is better news than the headline sounds: you can still walk the Cares out and back from either end. From Poncebos you have eight kilometres of gorge before the Bolín bridge stops you — which is to say, most of the dramatic Asturian stretch, the tunnels and the high-cut ledges, and then you turn around and walk it again in the other light. From Caín you get three kilometres, the deep narrow beginning, and back.

Walking a gorge both ways is not a consolation prize. The Cares in one direction is a shuttle-logistics problem: you finish twelve kilometres from your car and spend the afternoon solving it. Out and back, you just walk until you have had enough, and then you are already pointed at your own boot-laces and a cider.

One more thing on that side of the massif: the special Arenas de Cabrales to Poncebos bus plan ran until the twelfth of October this year and has now finished for the season. So the narrow road down to Poncebos is open to private cars again too. Both of the eastern Picos' access restrictions lifted within a week of each other.

What opens on Monday

The Lagos de Covadonga access plan — the one that puts you on a bus — applies on a published list of dates, not a vague "summer". For 2026 the restricted dates run from 1 June to 18 October, then 24, 25 and 31 October, then 1–2 November for the Todos los Santos long weekend, and 1–8 December.

Read that list the way a local reads it, and a very specific gift falls out:

• Monday 19 to Friday 23 October — drive yourself.
• Saturday 24, Sunday 25 — bus only.
• Monday 26 to Friday 30 October — drive yourself.
• Saturday 31 October, Sunday 1 and Monday 2 November — bus only.

For the next fortnight the lakes belong to weekday drivers. That is not a loophole; it is the plan working exactly as designed, and it is the first time since spring that you can arrive at Lago Enol at eight in the morning in your own car with your own flask.

Two cautions, both from the people who run it. First, the only authorised road for private vehicles is the CO-4 from Covadonga. Your map app may offer you a shorter-looking track; those are not open to private traffic and the fines are real. Second, even on an unrestricted date the park can close the road at any point if the car parks at the top fill up or the access road jams. Early is not just nicer here. Early is the plan.

The only road private cars may use: 12.3 kilometres from Covadonga (1) to the Buferrera car park (3), and about twenty-four minutes for it. Lake Enol (4) is at the car park; Lake Ercina (5) is roughly a kilometre further. Ignore any shortcut your map app offers — the other tracks are not open to private traffic.

The drive is the thing

From the basilica at Covadonga to the Buferrera car park beside Lago Enol is 12.3 kilometres, and it takes about twenty-four minutes. Do that arithmetic and you will understand the road before you drive it: roughly thirty kilometres an hour, all of it in second and third gear, through switchbacks stacked on a limestone shoulder with cows standing in the middle of them because the cows have right of way and know it.

Stop at the Mirador de la Reina on the way up. It is about two thirds of the way along, it looks north over a sea of green ridges to the actual sea, and on a clear morning it is the view that explains why Asturias looks like nowhere else in Spain. On a cloudy morning it is a wall of white and you should keep driving, because the weather at the top is a different country.

Coming from Oviedo, the whole run is about 94 kilometres and an hour and forty minutes: an hour on the fast road to Cangas de Onís, a quarter of an hour up to Covadonga, then that slow last climb. From the bus station at Cangas it is 21.7 kilometres and thirty-six minutes.

The forecast actually decides this

The lakes sit just over a thousand metres up, and the number that matters is the gap between the top and the valley.

The current ten-day forecast has Monday the 19th at a high of 9.4 °C at the lakes while Cangas de Onís, twenty-two kilometres away, sits at 16.3 °C. Tuesday the 20th: 9.1 °C up top, 16.4 °C below. That seven-degree drop is the single most useful thing to know about dressing for this day. People arrive in Cangas in a t-shirt and get out of the car at Buferrera into a wind.

The rest of the week, as forecast today:

• Saturday 17 — rain, hundred per cent chance everywhere, heavy down in Cangas. A day for the cheese cave and a long lunch.
• Sunday 18 — still showery, 8.3 °C at the lakes with wind gusting to 24 km/h. The last bus-only day of the long restriction, and not a day you would want it anyway.
• Monday 19 and Tuesday 20 — the window. Dry, cloud broken on Monday, overcast Tuesday, nothing falling. Lows of 3.0 °C and 2.5 °C at the lakes, which means a cold start and the possibility of ice on that road at dawn. Go up late morning rather than at first light if you are nervous on hairpins.
• Wednesday 21 — showers return, around a fifty-to-sixty per cent chance.
• Thursday 22 — dry again, a touch milder.
• Friday 23 — the warm spike: 21.8 °C at Poncebos, 21.7 °C in Cangas, 14.5 °C at the lakes. Lovely for the gorge. Windy on the coast, nearly 30 km/h at Llanes, so not the day for a clifftop picnic.

Forecasts this far out move, and Atlantic mountain weather moves faster than most. But the shape of it — wet now, dry Monday and Tuesday, wet Wednesday, dry and warming after — is a shape worth planning around, and worth re-checking the night before you drive up.

When you get to the top

Park at Buferrera. Everything begins there.

The short version of the day is a loop of a couple of hours that most people underrate: the Buferrera mines, where the old iron and manganese workings have been left open and interpreted so you walk through the industrial bones of the place before you reach the pretty part; the Pedro Pidal visitor centre; the Mirador del Príncipe de Asturias; and then both lakes. Lago Enol is the big one, closest to the car park. Lago Ercina is the shallow, reedy, reflective one about a kilometre further on, and in October, with the pasture gone gold and the cattle still up on the high grazing, it is the better of the two to sit beside.

If you want a real climb, the path from Ercina up to the Refugio Vega de Ario gains around five hundred metres over about six and a half kilometres, finishing at 1,630 metres with the Cares gorge opening below you on the far side — the gorge you cannot walk through this month, seen from above instead. Give it most of a day, take more layers than you think, and turn back without arguing with yourself if the cloud comes down. Up here it comes down fast.

Down the hill, and the rest of the week

Base yourself in Cangas de Onís. It is twenty-two kilometres and half an hour from the lakes, thirty-six kilometres and forty-four minutes from Poncebos for the Cares, and it has the cider houses — this is a region where cider is poured from a height into a wide glass, a couple of fingers at a time, and drunk straight away, and where the pouring is half the point.

Arenas de Cabrales is the other hinge. Nine minutes from the Poncebos turning, it has the Cabrales cheese cave on the AS-264 where the blue is aged in the limestone it is named for, and a sidrería or two on the main road. If Saturday's rain is as heavy as forecast, that is where Saturday should happen.

And when the mountains disappear into cloud for a whole day — which they will, this is the Atlantic coast of Spain in October — the sea is seventy-one kilometres and about an hour and a quarter from the lake car park. Llanes and Ribadesella are both close enough that you can decide at breakfast. A wet day in the Picos is a coastal day; it is not a lost day.

What I would actually do

If I were landing in Asturias this week: Saturday and Sunday on the coast and in the cider houses while the front goes through. Monday, up the CO-4 early with the heater on, a long slow morning at Ercina, down to Cangas by mid-afternoon. Tuesday, over to Poncebos and out-and-back into the Cares as far as the Bolín bridge. Wednesday, the rain day — the cheese cave, Covadonga's basilica and the Santa Cueva, which never close to cars at all. Thursday, Vega de Ario if the legs are willing. Friday, the warm one, back to the gorge or down to a beach.

That is a week built entirely around two gates: one that just came down, and one that just went up.

If you are putting a trip like this together, the useful thing is not a list of sights — it is keeping the moving parts in one place: which dates the lakes road is open, which end of the Cares you are walking from, what the forecast at 1,100 metres is doing versus the valley, and where you left the car. That is the kind of thing a travel buddy is good for, and it is the kind of trip where having it all in one place genuinely changes what you get to see.

The short version

The Cares is cut at two bridges and you cannot walk it end to end. The lakes road opens to private cars on Monday the 19th and stays open on weekdays until the 24th, then again from the 26th to the 30th. The weather window is Monday and Tuesday, then Thursday onward. Drive the CO-4 and nothing else, go up early, and pack for a seven-degree drop between the valley and the water.

Go now, while the road is open.