Your first night of the trip is spent at Hotel Villa de Cabrales, nestled in the centre of Arenas de Cabrales at the base of the Picos de Europa. The River Cares runs through here, famous for its trout and salmon which you'll find on the menu throughout summer. The hotel is a renovated country home with wooden beams, stone walls, antique furniture, a cosy bar and an open fireplace. You'll stay in twin-share rooms.

Before heading into the mountains on day 3 to more basic quarters at the refuges, you'll stay at Hostal Nevandi in Espinama. This rustic guesthouse in a historic building has a pool to soak in after your first day of trekking. The guesthouse is well regarded for its homemade traditional Cantabrian food which you'll enjoy on the terrace taking in the views of the Picos.

You'll spend 3 nights at different refuges within the Picos de Europa National Park, namely Refugio Collado Jermoso, Refugio De Urriellu and Refugio Cabrones. You'll stay in mixed dorm-style bunk rooms. Since Covid, the refuges have stopped providing bedding and pillows, so you'll need to bring a lightweight sleeping bag and travel pillow. The refuges will serve your evening meal and breakfast, and you'll also be able to buy your lunch for each day from the refuges before setting off. There are shared toilet facilities and showers available to use.

Your final night of the trip is at Hotel Paraiso, next door to a chocolatería and a few minutes stroll from the seafront and the centre of Llanes on the Bay of Biscay. You'll stay in twin-share rooms with air conditioning.

For solo travellers looking for their own space, an optional private room can be booked for an extra charge, see Optional Extras for the price. This covers the nights in Arenas de Cabrales, Espinama and Llanes. The nights in the mountain refuges are mixed dorm only, so no single rooms are available on those nights. Please request this at the time of booking.

Day 1

Arrival

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Day 2

The trek begins

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Day 3

Deeper into the Picos

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Day 4

Hut to hut through the peaks

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Day 5

Hike and scramble over to Cabrones Refuge

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Day 6

The final stretch to Poncebos

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Day 7

Adios Asturias

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We've crunched the numbers to work out the total carbon footprint of this trip, and plant enough trees to suck 2x as much back out the atmosphere.

What's the number?
It works out on average at 150kg of CO2 emissions per person, including all local transport, accommodation, food, activities, guides, staff and office operations.

The only thing it doesn’t include right now is flights and travel to the destination. We do make an overall estimate across all our customers separately, but as we don’t book flights, have customers from all corners of the world, and no way of reliably knowing their travel plans, we simply can’t include an individual number in the figure on display here. We’ve got a goal for 2022 to fix that, so that when you book, there is a way to measure and mitigate the carbon emitted by your flight too.

But what does the number mean?
Yep, hard to picture eh? To give you an idea:

• Driving 1000miles/1609km would be approx. 281kg of CO2 in an average car (or 140.5kg per person if there was 2 of you in it).
• A return economy class flight London - New York would be approx. 1,619kg (1.66 tonnes) per person.
• 10 trees in a temperate forest are estimated to remove approx. 250kg of CO2 from the air in a period of 5-10 years.

What are we doing about it?
Our trips are relatively low-carbon by design, and we're working with all our hosts to develop long term carbon reduction plans. For every person booked with us since 2016 we’re planting enough trees to suck at least 2x more carbon out the atmosphere than is emitted by their trips. All native trees, as part of amazing projects that are re-foresting degraded land, tackling the biodiversity crisis and supporting local communities at the same time. We go further than that too, also funding re-wilding projects worldwide to help protect important keystone species from extinction. See the reforestation and re-wilding schemes we support. See our carbon action plan.

Want to know more?
Amazingly, no international travel company has ever publicly published their carbon measurements before, as far as we know. We believe that must change, quickly. So we’re openly sharing the method we used in the hope that other companies will be able to more easily follow suit and build on what we've done so far. You'll find it all here.