CHAPTER XXIX 
HIGHLANDS OF ASTURIAS 
(1) THE TROUT IN SPAIN 
THe Asturian 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. 
Rushing rivers and mountain-torrents coursing down each rent 
in those rock-ramparts attracted our earliest angling ambitions. 
Some of those efforts—with rod and gun—are recorded in Wild 
Spain, 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 Spain 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 years 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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