Extremely sleepy and gloomy day | Camino del Norte from Laredo to Noja in Cantabria, Spain – Day 11

On the Day 11 of our Camino de Santiago del Norte we hiked from the town Laredo in Cantabria to the Noja village.

This day started in the camping Laredo where we stopped in yesterday and we were very happy about it. They left us to choose the pitch and gave us a reasonable price for the backpacker so that we didn’t have to pay for the car or caravan we don’t have. And the facilities were very good. At night it was quiet except for the chickens and ravens singing that we’re a bit annoying.

We left the camping at 11 am because we felt extremely sleepy and didn’t want to get up at all. The weather was cloudy and very humid that day and we felt it all day long getting over us.

When we got out of the camping and walked along the sea front with the huge sand hills we had to hop on the ferry that took us from Laredo to Santoña. It wasn’t a very long ride probably just about 5 min. But it saved us a huge amount of distance – 15 km if we did the round through the bridge and the highways. And we certainly didn’t want that especially because it meant to go all the way with the cars. From this boat you get beautiful views of the surrounded area that is all wetlands and ponds and is considered to be a natural park.

When we got to Santoña we found a tourist office where we put a stamp of the city. We saw that there is a mountain that we can hike over but we realized that it will take us several hours to do so and we won’t get to the planned destination today so we decided to go with the Camino.

This part of the route was quite boring going straight ahead through the suburbs of the city and then we passed by the huge wall which we then realized was a jail. So it was quite stressfull to walk there. It was very weird that there was a walking pass for bikes and people.

But then we got to beach of Berria – a bit neglected area it seemed to us or maybe it was because of the gloomy and foggy weather that made everything black and white. It was very humid that day with the water drops coming down but at least it wasn’t raining.

So we passed along that beach and decided to hike up the cliff that we saw wasn’t as high and big as the previous one cause we wanted to get some views after this sad environment we were in the last couple of kms. And this was the best part of our day it was quite fast but very beautiful with the views of the ocean from above. Soon we started seeing on the horizon the beach of El Brusco and on a falling tide it was an epic view with the rocks looking out of the sand that shortly would be under water again.

We had a quick snack and looking at the maps we realized that we won’t get to La Isla town how it was planned and should stay in the town Noja. The trail of the Camino was getting away from the ocean again in this place, not so much as it was in the Basque country but still. We didn’t see it before and planned to walk along the coast as always. But it was obvious why it was going this way. It was because of the river floods and lots of wetlands in the area that we needed to go over and the bridges were only on the highways. And if we wanted to go closer to ocean we had to get away from it every time there was a river flood. That’s why the Camino was going higher. And if we knew it before we would do more kms that day following the Camino because it makes sense in this case and stayed in the city Beyroa where there was a camping actually which is a rare case.

So once again we suffered from the lack of planning the trail. So we decided to compensate it next day and do more kms then. We still needed these several easy days to recover completely from our collapse that happened earlier. So now with the exact plans for the next day we with a peace of mind did our shopping and headed to the camping.

Here is the link to Google Map to follow the Hike: