Posts Tagged ‘candás’

It was the best of weather, it was the worst of weather.

Okay, not quite best and worst but there was a bit of a contrast between last weekend and this weekend here in el paraiso natural.

Last weekend Pompeyo and Carmen took us to the beach at Barro, which is a beautiful rocky cove with a wide sandy beach. We stayed at one side for two reasons; it was quiet, and it was next to the chiringuito (the beach bar). As we plodded down the steps to the sand we reserved a couple of the at-that-time-raw chickens and proceeded to do beachy things while the chickens roasted. Liz, as you can see from the photo, had delusions of mermaidery but we coaxed her off her rock with the smell of roasted meat.

This weekend, well, it was very… um… British. We went with Maria Jesús to Gijón to have a look at El Laboral, the biggest building in Spain, according to Wikipedia (which is never wrong). It was… underwhelming… big but big like a fat kid rather than a basketball player, a fat kid who bullies because he’s really insecure (at least that’s what the mid 20th century let’s-make-it-big-for-Franco style of architecture suggested to me).

After that we went to Candás, for the sardine festival (the one we went to last year, where we sat on the grass in the hot sun and got very drunk). This year people were displaying a Dunkirk spirit, huddling under the sports centre roof to eat their grilled fish and baroña (corn bread).

We were in a cafe (what’s new) the other day and Liz saw in the paper that this weekend was the sardine festival at Cándas. So of course we had to go. Cándas is a small seaside town that used to be a fishing village and now is a tourist town with a smattering of hotels and a good few bars. Every year (for the last 40 or so) they’ve had a festival to celebrate sardines.

We wandered up to the fiesta and had a good look round, there were five stalls, each run by a different local restaurant or bar. According to the paper they would each be grilling 5000 sardines each day of the festival. We could smell it from some way off. We picked our stall based on two things… one we knew the restaurant and two there were the shortest queues. So we went for the dozen sardines and a bottle of cider, for the tradition is to accompany the sardines with cider. A very friendly chap behind the bar gave us some pointers on more advanced cider drinking, apparently you have to pour it down your throat, rather than gulp it down, you have to be smooth (mas suave he said). After that he sold us on the corn bread rather than the white bread, and he was right, the slightly sweet corn bread went really well with the sardines. Liz asked for cutlery only to be told to use her hands and to be given a small demo on how to eat grilled sardines with your fingers. Oh my they were delicious, absolutely fantastic, and as we dug in, a couple of the folks behind the bar, including the grill chief, came over to see how we found them (muy ricas, we said). Friendly guy behind the bar kept pouring the culetes of cider, he was trying to get us smashed I’m sure. In the middle of all this a few dozen vespa riders came past in formation and we ended up chatting with a few of them, they got free sardines for being part if the parade but they were from Madrid so they didn’t know sidra, and we all ended up drinking a fair amount as we polished off the fish (and I cannot stress enough… they were absolutely gorgeous, there was much finger licking (a mix of lemon, cider and sardines mmmm). Then the friendly chap forced us to pour our own… Liz’s expression is a mixture of frustration and cider fuelled giggles.

The upshot was, we were both a little tipsy and full of oily fish as we got on the bus back to Oviedo.