Something strange was happening this weekend in Las Bobias and Demúes, two small Asturian towns. Accustomed to the tranquility typical of a village where there are barely tens of residents, the noise of cars and the noise of tourists set off alarm bells. “They came, they went down, they stumbled… a mess,” explains Valentina, a neighbor of the place, still not believing what happened: “I don’t know who will have come… the same, every day, 2,000 cars“.

And in all that long line of clueless drivers there was a coincidence: their destination. They all headed to the Lakes of Covadonga. But a Google Maps error forced them to deviate through these towns. An 18-kilometer journey along a road that, little by little, becomes more complicated and narrow. The asphalt ends up disappearing until it becomes a cattle track.

“It’s a track for ranchers, you can walk but not with cars,” says Matías, a resident of Las Bobias. The route, the neighbors say, is not easy at all: “The roads are very difficult and if they go up they cannot go down or turn, it is a narrow track.”

The explanation for this unusual image is in traffic regulation. In times of maximum influx of tourists, like this Easter bridge, access is only allowed by public transport. Through a bus that leaves from the Sanctuary of Covadonga. A detail that the American international has not taken into account or corrected these days.

The efforts of the neighbors and the many posters distributed along the highway warning tourists have been of little use: “You warned them that this path does not lead anywhere and they did not care, they continued forward… but don’t you see the signal?” To the point that the only option left to stop the wave of tourists has been to call the Civil Guard to cut traffic. “The GPS sends them, they say …and if the GPS takes them off a cliff, they go off the cliff”

The neighbors, very angry, are still waiting for the error to be corrected. “It’s not serious,” they say. The good news is that, after the Easter weekend, access to the Lakes is allowed by car. But the council fears the worst for the summer, one of the times of maximum influx in which it is one of the biggest tourist attractions in Asturias. For this reason, they have already issued a statement and have asked the company to solve it and restore peace to a parish of barely one hundred neighbors.