Monday 3rd April 2023

After a long lie in following our exertions yesterday we enjoyed breakfast on the balcony in the sun. It took a while to get going this morning. The only motivation was the thought of a different flavour of ice cream, so off to Potes we went.

We got side tracked because the market was on and it was very busy. We like wandering around markets, we didn’t buy anything but were given a handful of hazelnuts from a stall holder, delicious.

Our wanderings inevitability led to food. We spied a table in the sun, and the waiter was too hard resist, so we went in for the Dish of the Day, a 3 course local meal with wine, delicious. As you can imagine this was not a short affair and being rather full after we found the first bench to sit in the sun to aid digestion.

Only then did we remember ice cream, a different flavour of course and only to keep us going while we visited The Monastery of Santo Toribio de Liebana. Opposite to the Tardis (for Dr Who fans) big on the outside and small on the inside. Being good British people we sat patiently through a 20 minute talk in Spanish by a monk about the True Cross 🤷🤷🤷 Christian refugees fleeing from Muslim occupied Spain in the 8th century brought with them the Lignum Crucis, purportedly the single biggest chunk of Christ’s Cross.

Our last panorama of the day was from the Ermita de Santa Catalina and it was only 600m uphill from the Monastery woohoo!