The best of hosts

Fine places, food or wine help make a holiday good, but nothing contributes as much as the people. And when it came to enjoying our recent trip to Cantabria, nobody did as much to make it memorable than our hosts, Ainhoa and Aitzol. They’re the couple who run the Casona del Valle de Soba, where we stayed, and they showed an exceptional ability to make the people staying there feel far more like guests than mere clients.

The Casona del Valle de Soba
With its magnificent coat of arms over the entrance

Their names, as you may have spotted, are typically Basque, and indeed they’re both from the great Basque port city of Bilbao, not much more than an hour’s drive from the Casona. He, Aitzol, used to be a cook up in the Pyrenees, but they both decided that they preferred to be near their parents. They hunted around for a place where they could set up a small business of their own, offering accommodation and meals, and found the Casona in the province next door to their own, Cantabria.

The Casona is a seventeenth-century building of a certain grandeur. The entrance is behind an arcaded porch surmounted by the imposing coat of arms of the original family, the Martínez del Valle. I enjoyed the conversation I had with Ainhoa, about the final flight of stairs inside the house, which simply ends at a wall. Really. There’s no floor that flight could reach, even though it’s wide and grand enough to promise more than a dead end.

Grand staircase to nowhere

“I once heard that whenever a nobleman lost a battle,” Ainhoa told me, “he had to remove a floor from his house.”

“Well,” I replied after giving due consideration to this suggestion, a curious one at the very least, “I just hope his house didn’t start off a great deal higher.”

“I believe it started out as a skyscraper. He wasn’t much of a general.”

The place has a fine dining room but, in high summer, both breakfast and dinner were served in the porch. The breakfasts, included in the room price if you reserve directly with them, were extraordinarily good: freshly squeezed juice of different fruits (including plum, melon and watermelon), various types of home-made bread, and always some delicacy, ‘churritos’ (a small version of the classic Spanish churro), fritters, cake (sometimes made by one or other of Aitzol or Ainhoa’s parents). 

The porch doubled as a dining room

Dinners were optional. Our original plan was to eat at the Casona most nights but pop out to local restaurants on a couple of occasions. That plan lasted only until the first time we tried one of Aitzol’s dinners. Thereafter we dined every night except the Monday, and that was only because that’s the only evening the two of them take off from preparing and serving dinner at all. 

Which takes me onto the most staggering thing about the two of them. They barely stop working. They try to take a little time off in the afternoons, and the Monday evening, but they always seem available to provide any help guests may need. From June to September, it’s a seven-day a week job. The rest of the year, they rent the whole place out for self-catering, which presumably means a slightly lower workload. It was a relief to learn that: I can’t imagine getting through even four months of the work they do, let alone having to do it for longer.

As well as conversation and help, Aitzol and Ainhoa are remarkably well-informed and offer excellent recommendations for the things to do in and near Cantabria. Thanks to them, we went to the waterfall that is the source of the local river Asón. 

The source of the Asón

We followed that up with a visit to the vineyard that makes ‘Ribera de Asón’ white wine (and a sparkling wine, that it’s forbidden to call ‘champagne’ or even ‘cava’, even though it’s made by the same method). 

Sparkling wine - not champagne, not even Cava - in production
at Bodegas Vidular, makers of wines that take their
name from the river Asón

We also wandered around the whole glorious area, sometimes under grey skies, on a couple of occasions even with a little rain, but then that’s the beauty of the region: it’s cooler, wetter and greener than most of Spain, and there are times, as I pointed out before, where the blue skies and baking temperatures get too much for those of us who live here and the cool of Cantabria is immensely attractive. One of the things I like the most about the green area is that it’s full of cows, not in byres, but out in the countryside, grazing real grass.

The right place for dairy

Ainhoa even organised a girl to look after our dogs, who were with us, for a day so we could go to Bilbao and do the usual things like visit the Guggenheim. Her mother and grandmother are a dairy farmer team which supplies the Casona with its excellent raw milk. I was particularly amused by the  sign the mother had painted to show the business she was in. She posed against it for the photo which confirms Danielle's view that she’s the prettiest dairy farmer we, at least, have ever seen. 

Not the image I usually have of a dairy farmer
And a dab hand with a paint brush too

There are plenty of horses too, many as we saw even with foals (some of them apparently quite tired and in need of a rest).

The foals like their siesta

The Casona isn’t exactly a hotel, though the room was bigger than most hotel rooms I’ve known, and wonderfully comfortable, with all the things you’d hope for, such as an ensuite bathroom. But I suppose it would need a bar to be a hotel, and perhaps the opportunity to be served dinner or breakfast over a longer period of time, though the fixed times suited us just fine.

Toffee at the Casona waiting for a walk

It was also fun to have the dogs with us. They didn’t just amuse us, they also became the centre of attention for many of the other guests. The kids, in particular, loved them – and got loved back.

Luci and Toffee hit it off with the kids at the Casona

It was a wonderful place to spend ten days. We certainly plan to go back. And when we do, it’ll be as much to see Ainhoa and Aitzol again, since they were such a vital ingredient in making this trip so enjoyable.

Why, they even threatened to come and see us in Valencia. And if they do, we’d be delighted to see them, and attempt to entertain them as well as they looked after us. That’ll be a high bar...