Logroño and La Rioja Province

LOGROÑO, lying on the Río Ebro, is a prosperous city of around 150,000 – a pleasant place of elegant streets, open squares and riverside parkland. The wine trade is not as immediately apparent here as in, say, Haro, and there are few cultural attractions that demand attention – the principal museum, the Museo de la Rioja, has been under restoration for many years. But the big draw is the city’s lively old quarter, the so-called Casco Antiguo, with an unparalleled selection of excellent tapas bars, for which it’s worth making a considerable detour. The two main annual events – each fuelled by copious wine-drinking – are the Fiestas San Bernabé (June), a week’s worth of enjoyably rowdy local festivities, from street fairs and pelota tournaments to folk concerts and costumed processions, and the even more exuberant Fiesta de San Mateo (September), which coincides with the annual vendimia (grape harvest).

Around 18km from Nájera (a little further from Santo Domingo), the stone village of San Millán de la Cogolla serves as gateway to the magnificent twin mountain monasteries known as Yuso and Suso. You can see these easily as a half-day diversion from the main Rioja route, while a third monastery, Valvanera, lies further south, off the LR-113, the trans-mountain road that provides a dramatic journey south and west between Nájera and Salas de los Infantes (90km; 2hr drive). This twists ever higher up the glorious, lush valley of the Rio Najerilla, hugging the sides of the huge hydroelectric Mansilla dam, before careering across the bare uplands of the Sierra de la Demanda to cross into Castilla y León. The route makes a great roundabout approach to Burgos, and you’ll emerge close to the equally magnificent monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos.

The immense lower Monasterio de Yuso dominates the valley, built in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to house the relics of the crowd-pulling sixth-century saint, San Millán. It’s at the centre of some fairly big tourist business, with one wing of the monastery housing a four-star hotel, a couple of big restaurants and enough parking to accommodate the entire Spanish nation, should it choose to all come at once.

The much older Monasterio de Suso lies a few hundred metres up in the hills, hidden from public view. You’re taken up by shuttle bus to see the beautiful, haunting building, the original site of Millán’s burial before he was sanctified in 1030 and later transferred down the hill into surroundings more in keeping with a patron saint.

There’s another wonderfully sited monastery, the Monasterio de Valvanera, 35km further south of San Millán de la Cogolla (and a 5km detour off the LR113 mountain road). If anything, the location is even more dramatic than Yuso and Suso – sited 1000m above a steep-sided valley, with the tidy terraces of the Benedictine monks’ vegetable gardens below. It’s worth stopping briefly for the views – there’s a bar and restaurant and some simple accommodation here – and to experience a monastic retreat with none of the crowds of more renowned counterparts.

Forty kilometres from Logroño, Calahorra is the main town of La Rioja Baja, the southeastern part of the province. After the wine towns of the Rioja Alta it’s a disappointment, and there’s no pressing need to stop, though its parador brings some out this way. However, Calahorra does offer an attractive back-country route to Soria, via Arnedo, 12km southwest of town, where the scenery suddenly changes from cultivated flatland to vivid red rock, punctured by hundreds of caves, both natural and man-made, used in the past as houses and hermitages. From here – past attractive riverside Arnedillo, until reaching the tiny valley-bottom village of Yanguas, 30km southwest – the LR115 makes a twisting journey through the narrow Río Cidacos gorge, before climbing up over the bare tops for the sweeping run into Soria, another 50km to the south. It takes a couple of hours all told from Calahorra to Soria, though it’s much the best idea to break in the middle at Enciso for a spot of dinosaur-hunting. A hundred and twenty million years ago (in the early Cretaceous period), the southeastern part of La Rioja was a steamy marshland where dinosaurs roamed, leaving their footprints in mud that later fossilized, and you can spend an enjoyable day in the area tracking the tracks.