Naranjo de Bulnes

Locals call it Picu Urriellu more often than Naranjo de Bulnes, and after my third attempt to see the thing, I understood why they don’t waste breath on the Spanish name when the Asturian one is right there and shorter. This is the peak that appears on every Picos de Europa postcard and half the climbing magazines in Spain — a nearly vertical tooth of gray limestone jutting more than 500 meters straight out of green pasture, no foothills easing into it, just rock going up like it changed its mind about being a mountain and decided to be a wall instead.

Getting there isn’t casual. From the Poncebos side, you hike up through the Bulnes gorge — or take the funicular if your knees are smarter than mine were that day — then keep climbing past the hamlet of Bulnes itself, which has no road access at all, just mule tracks and the funicular tunnel blasted through the mountain in the early 2000s. It’s roughly four hours of steady uphill from Poncebos to the Vega de Urriellu refuge, and I was soaked through with sweat and, on my first attempt, greeted at the top by absolutely nothing — total cloud, the peak completely swallowed. Lia laughed at me the whole way down.

The second time worked. We’d checked the forecast obsessively, left before sunrise, and came around the last bend to see the whole spire lit orange, climbers already visible as tiny dots partway up its west face. There’s a refuge right at its base, the Refugio Vega de Urriellu, where you can get a bowl of lentil stew and watch alpinists rope up for routes with names I can’t repeat because I don’t actually climb — I just like watching people brave enough to.

What gets me about the Naranjo isn’t just the scale, though that’s real — it’s how sudden it is. You spend hours walking through soft green valley and then this rock just erupts out of the ground with no transition, like the landscape forgot to warn you. I’ve hiked a lot of mountains since moving to Mexico, but nothing quite prepared me for how a single spire, not even the tallest peak in the range, could dominate a whole day of walking.

When to go: June through September for stable weather and open refuges; go for an early start, since cloud typically builds over the peak by midday even on clear mornings.