This was published in the Times in the early 90s

Spain has a history and a landscape which are big, bad and blood-drenched. But these are only a few of the reasons why I told the kids we should pile into the VW camper and potter around the north and centre of the country. I left out most of the stuff about great Romanesque monasteries and the way you could hear a pin drop in a bullring. I didn't even dwell overlong on the vultures and the mist-enshrouded mountain passes and the high, bleak sierras. These are not good selling points with your modern pre-pubescent.

So we hit the road from the ferry port at Santander to the Costa Brava - which I took to be terra cognita, at least by being vulgar - and found rule one staring us in the milometer. Crossing a quarter of Spain is a longer business than a transect of the same proportion of our own landmass. It should have been obvious, but I didn't get where I am today by being able to read maps.

It looked like being a twelve hour trip, and a matter of opening the two sun-roofs and the windows, drawing some of the curtains on the sunny side, and turning up the Simply Red tape. It was lovely: 75 miles per hour on an empty shimmering road in that sharp-edged light - like in the movies - and God seeming to stand at every aperture of the van with a hair-dryer. By early afternoon, in real desert now, one could tell the young that they need not go to Arizona: that it really was like this. We'd pull in from time to time, for fuel, and Coke from a coin-operated chiller. We learned then and there to turn down the metabolism as far as it will go: the way to survive and thrive on these hot days. We could not face the vagaries of speaking Spanish into a Spanish call box to the holiday camp to say we would be horrendously late.

We need not have worried. All the girls at reception spoke English. Besides, "late" is not a word which anyone has translated into Spanish. Nor is "crowded". The camp was as luxurious as the brochure said, and the swimming pool as thrillingly multinational and hilarious - even as late in the evening as we thought it was. And yet the paradox remained: Spain is huge, and its people have a history of cosmically disliking each other, so why do they live so hugger-mugger, even when they're camping?

I thought Mrs North was going to rebel when she saw how close-packed the tents were: she looked at our allotted space (this was one of those sites where you rent the tent and kit ready in situ) with the air of a woman who had repeatedly said that abroad always was more trouble than it was worth. Where is the grass, she moaned? The kids, of course, were laying rubber in the direction of the pool and never stopped loving the entire event.

The neighbours were as charming as they were near. And the merit of the proximity of our Spanish fellow-campers was that one could observe them without scruple. I like to see a woman rise sleepily from her hammock as the light softens and prepare a little early supper of many species of fish more ugly than I dare imagine, let alone gut. The husband would cruise by from time to time in a vaguely supervisory role. Aperitifs were taken. Supper would, it was clear, be ready promptly. Say about 11.30, dear?

In the washing facilities (beautiful), it alarmed me how much shaving foam and spray-on deodorant these southern EC members were getting through. These people - including the locals - are rich and clean. They are, in fact, in danger of becoming Euro-normals.

We took ourselves to a couple of pretty beaches, but the Mediterranean could not beat the pool in the kids' eyes. We ate Sunday lunch at Aiguablava - a lovely cove - and liked it quite a lot, until the umbrella blew into the encampment of some oiled and bronzed weekender who smouldered her disdain as though about to give us a starring part in a Goya execution scene. More flesh than sand in this place, said Mrs North. We did take a look at the tourist scene: but I thought Gerona very dull and decided that I was not in the mood for whatever were Spain's urban joys.

The kids left the campsite with the addresses of enough penpals to keep Basildon Bond in business for a couple of millennia. I thought it didn't really matter how wrong things went from then on in: we'd already had a great time. Now for real Spain, red in tooth and claw. Or passionate, as the brochures have it.

We were in our own tents now, and on our own. Seeking inland water-side sites, we headed for anything with blue on the map with the tent symbol beside it. They tended to be reservoirs, but huge and fringed with pine-woodlands (within which the campsites lurked, only some as spacious as they should have been). And there were little towns with butchers which were just the shaded front rooms of terraced houses, with beaded curtains to keep the flies out. The best was near Soria, and we would wander in the town of Vinuesa which was distinguished by having three storks on its church: we had never seen that many before.

One afternoon, the children swam half a mile at least to an island, and we towed a broken down speedboat behind our plastic rowing boat. The owners were a very glamorous couple, owners of a pharmacy (he seemed - in the manner of the place - to be wearing the most expensive of his stock on his chin, and was followed by a rich scent even when he had been swimming). I began to think the Spanish were seriously charming, liberal and modern, so immersed myself in a nineteenth century Spanish feminist gothic novel (in translation) to regain my bearings.

We'd seen Poblet (in the monastic area inland of Tarragona), but I said that Santo Domingo De Silos was the cloister I most longed to return to and which took me first to Spain. If you want to feel the twelfth century in stones which really do seem to live with their sculptors' hands still flutteringly in attendance, then this monastery in its high, desolate scrubland is perfect. The kids liked the cloister well enough, but simply adored the eccentric stream-side walk someone has made in frightful cliffs which gave Christians sanctuary centuries ago.

Another of those fabulous Spanish drives northward now, across wild, high plains of red earth and ripening wheat wherever there was soil enough amongst the rock outcrops, and then really vertiginous mountains. We were headed to the Picos de Europa, a sort of Lake District except that it has been pumped up so as to be steeper, rougher, ruggeder. Campsite after campsite turned us down on the grounds that an extra tent would have turned the place into a sardine tin and the shop had plenty of those in stock already. Then one, at Avin, whose sign and site said "no space", said yes and charmingly efficient young men shoe-horned us in amongst people who smiled instead of scowling and seemed not to mind that even without us there'd have been more room in a changing cubicle with two fat women in it already.

A boy at the campsite nearly drove me mad by imitating the absurdly high-pitched tweeting of a hawk he was trying to befriend across the lovely little valley. He did it for an hour at sundown and sunup (here in the far north the Spanish are almost like Englishmen in their passion for early starts and stout boots.)

We found steep mountain streams with hazed mosses and ferns in every rainbowed nook and cranny around little waterfalls, and the kids swam in pools so deep and cold I would take another glass of cheap red wine just to warm myself up from the watching of them. The hairpin bends were so tremendous I was glad the van was newer than any vehicle I've every owned. We went north to the coast and swam in coves like Cornwall's, and ate lunches of astounding variety of quality.

We headed for the ferry and home so relaxed it would have taken a repossession order to shake us.

This information was true in the early 90s:

The North family travelled to Santander courtesy of the much-admired Brittany ferry service from Plymouth (0752 221321). They were put up in the Keycamp enclave in the five star Cypsela campsite at Pals, Catalonia: contact Keycamp, 92-96 Lind Road, Sutton SM1 4PL. Camping Picos de Europa, Avin, Onis, 33556 Asturias (010 34 8584 4070) was very friendly and has a reputation for reliably taking bookings. Spantrek run walking and four wheel drive safaris in the Picos; their wildlife specialist, Teresa Farino, co-wrote the classic "Wild Spain" with the late Frederic Grunfeld.