Andes

• 1. Introduction

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  Andés holds 701 people across an area of just 6.46 square kilometers. It is one of eight parishes inside Navia, a municipality in the province and autonomous community of Asturias, in northern Spain. It sits on the western coast of the Principality of Asturias, tucked between the towns of Puerto de Vega and Navia. What does a place this small actually contain? A dozen villages with names like L'Aspra and Las Cortías. Beaches of black sand. The buried remains of a Roman fort. This is a parish where rivers shoot from cliffs in jets of water, and where the questions hide in the geography itself.

• 2. A Cluster Of Villages

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  El Monte, La Casanova, L'Aspra, Las Cortías, La Guardia, La Villalonga. These are some of the villages that make up the parish of Andés. The list continues with Paderne, La Cruz de Paderne, La Colorada, and La Venta. Among them sits Téifaros, a place small enough to count by hand. Téifaros consists of only a little over a dozen houses, including a few farms where cows are raised for their milk. From Téifaros, the sea is visible. The beaches of Fabal and Frejulfe are easily reached on foot from there. The countryside around it mixes crops of potatoes and corn with fields of grass and eucalyptus forests. The land sits on a hilly, very green region, and beyond the farmland the Atlantic waits at the edge of the cliffs.

• 3. A Cold And Powerful Sea

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  Eighteen degrees Celsius. That is the temperature the water usually approaches in summer near Téifaros, which tells you how cold it stays the rest of the year. The climate here is humid and cool, and the sea remains cold even at the height of the warm season. The waves can be very powerful and dangerous, breaking against a coastline that gives little ground. Black sand covers the beaches, drawn from the black rock found throughout the area. Where the Atlantic meets the land it does so in two forms only, as a beach or as a cliff, with little in between.

• 4. Rivers And Coastline

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  The Veiga d'Arenas and Frejulfe beaches mark the two edges that wedge the parish in place. There the Navia and Frejulfe rivers, respectively, empty into the sea. The parish sits on a coastal plateau, a plain broken up by several rivulets that are born near the coast. These create small valleys with gentle slopes, and at their mouths lie small beaches with calm waters. Some rivulets meet the sea by forming jets of water several meters high. This happens because the flow has limited erosive power and the waterfront declines steadily. The Rubreves, La Bragada, La Rubias, Las Cortías, La Xertal and Cereizo rivulets run from south to north, all short-haul before reaching the sea. The Travesedo Brook runs from east to west and ends at the Poza de Veiga d'Arenas. The Paderne stream exceeds two kilometers and runs east-west into the river Navia, and in its final section it takes the name Olga Faquina River.

• 5. El Castrillon

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  El Castrillon is the point of the coast that projects furthest into the sea. The coast here carries a cliff of considerable height, where the flow of the rivulets is broken up and forms small beaches. Those beaches bear names like Fabal, Cuedo, Las Rubias, La Bragada, Las Cascareiras, Las Barrosas and Pena Furada. At El Castrillon itself, the remains of a Roman fort can still be found. Centuries of cold water and powerful waves have worn at this headland, yet the stones of an old garrison endure at the place where the land reaches hardest toward the Atlantic.

• 6. The Local Football Team

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  Andés CF is the parish's main football team. In the 2014-15 season the club reached the Tercera División, a milestone for a place of barely 700 people. Since then the team has fallen back, and now plays in the Primera Regional de Asturias. The rise and the slide both belong to a community whose villages, beaches, and Roman ruins still share the same narrow strip of green coast between Puerto de Vega and Navia.