We were five minutes into Asturias when I realised that this might not turn out to be your average Spanish holiday. No coaches outside the slidey glass airport doors, no bi-lingual reps on the pavement, no insouciant taxi-drivers offering invitations like cigarillo-bandits, “You wanna ride?”.

Instead, the man in the car-hire office hardly spoke English at all so we were forced to conduct our opening business through a colourful combination of well-intentioned but meaningless “Ola!”-style Spanio-phonics, and an imaginative variety of “Ow you say” manglish.

It was a laugh, but we got our car in polite double-quick time and headed off for the depths of a green countryside poised between mountains and sea, wondering what kind of airport, less than two hours from London, employed staff who couldn’t speak our tongue, for heaven’s sake.

Asturias is Spain for Spaniards, that’s the point. It is an exquisite holiday region where, for reasons hard to fathom, Juanita and Juan take their vacations in numbers, but Janet and John rarely do. Look for a Brit in vain. In cafes, restaurants, beaches and mountain walks, this is the land where Angles fear to tread, and it’s a crying shame – not for their sake, but for ours. It’s lovely here.

We had landed at the small regional airport known as Oviedo and also Asturias, placed some 20 kilometres from the city itself. It’s a beautifully cosy little airport, but we could equally well have zoomed in to Santander, or Bilbao, an hour or two to the west, which both take flights from Britain and are enormously handy for this craggy north coast region. Three airports. Few Brits. The mystery deepens.

Perhaps it’s the fact that the Asturians, inhabiting a high, changeable, rocky, faintly mysterious area that stretches from Cornwallian beaches to the high tops of the walkable Picos de Europa are pretty much like us Brits: polite, a little shy, a bit self-interested, but ready for a laugh or at least a friendly smile.

Perhaps we don’t like to encounter such mirror-images abroad. Or there again, possibly the weather does it for us. It can scorch above 30 degrees here, and then in September the skies can turn on a euro to send cool mountain showers shivering down your back – only to clear again within the hour, to be replaced by more gorgeous sun.

More likely, though, we simply haven’t discovered the place, or made the effort to explore a region that requires some driving to fully appreciate.

We were staying amid the green-meadow foothills of the Sueve Natural Park, a few kilometres above the no-nonsense village of Sevares. From our bright apartment – the Casas Rurales, created from beautifully-converted farm buildings on an estate that rears horses – we could see the shatteringly appealing images of the Picos de Europa emerging each morning as fading mist revealed peak after peak, valley after valley.

In silence, we would read in bed as this vista steadily formed itself up beyond the window; then we would breakfast, and get in the car, and drive down the tiny, twisty lane to the main road where we faced the same question every single morning: up or down?

Think of Asturias as a gigantic green bowl – rain-kissed rather than rain-ravaged, its heights filled not simply with gaunt limestone crags, but with Alpine meadows, wildflowers, gorges, pastures and woodland. All this is accessible using roads that are unusually good; sometimes winding, but wide and decently-surfaced and largely traffic-free. The up part of the question, of course, was whether to head for the heights and explore these big vistas and empty spaces.

The down part was the matter of those beaches. So many of them. Think of sandy Cornwall coves, but blow them up a bit and space out the people, and fling in a bit of easy-parking and far, far warmer Atlantic seas.

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