CHAPTEIi XXIX 

 HIGHLANDS OF ASTURIAS 



(1) THE TROUT IN SPAIN 



The Asturiaii Highlands — a maze of mist- wreathed mountains 

 forested with birch and pine, the home of brown bear and 

 capercaillie, and on whose towering peaks roam herds of chamois 

 by hundreds — form a region distinct from the rest of Spain. 



Rushins; rivers and mountain-torrents coursino; down each rent 

 in those rock-ramparts attracted our earliest angling ambitions. 

 Some of those efforts — with rod and oun — are recorded in Wild 

 >Spam, and we purpose attempting no more — whether with pen 

 or fly-rod. For the Spanish trout is given no sort of sporting 

 chance, and lovely streams — a very epitome of trouting-water — 

 that might make the world a pleasanter planet (and enrich their 

 owners too) are abandoned to the assassin with dynamite and 

 quicklime, or to villainous nets, cruives, and other engines of 

 wholesale destruction with which we have no concern. 



Never since the date of Wild SjKcin have we cast line on 

 Spanish waters, nor ever again will we attempt it. Spain which, 

 from her French frontier in the Pyrenees right across to that of 

 Portugal on the west, might rival any European country in this 

 respect stands well-nigh at the foot of the list. Not in the most 

 harassed streams of Norway, nor in her hardest-" ottered " lakes, 

 have the trout so damnable a fate dealt out to them as in northern 

 Spain, and for twenty j^ears we have abandoned it as an angling 

 potentiality — or, to put it mildly, there are countries infinitely 

 more attractive to the wandering fisherman. 



The case of the Spanish trout as it stands to-day is summed 

 up in the following letter, dated April 1910, from our friend 

 Capt. F. J. Mitchell :— 



I have tried a great many of the best rivers in northern Spain, and 



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