A midlife swim through Iberia

After receiving a ‘Death Calendar’ Mike Bright and his partner Em decided to embrace life and head on a swimming adventure

I’d never thought of myself as a traveller. Most of my adventures unfolded close to home, in Britain’s rivers and coves – places I knew like old friends. Then life shifted.

A close friend gave me a “Death Calendar”: a spreadsheet of weeks until the hopeful age of 80. Ticking off my lived weeks gave me a jolt. Over half the boxes were gone.

I had recently met Em, my partner, who lived with courage and a sense of adventure. We asked: why not now? Why not seize a year, rather than risk waiting for a ‘later’ that may never arrive? So we packed up the van, caught the ferry, and landed in northern Spain. With no itinerary beyond swimming, we followed blue lines on the map into mountains, valleys, and pools. Our ‘midlife gap year’ became about immersion – literal and spiritual – in wild water.

Baptism by cold

Our first swims came in the Picos de Europa. Limestone cliffs towered over valleys, eagles wheeled overhead, and a river ran glacial-blue through a gorge. We stripped on the rocks and plunged. The cold clamped around us, breathless and fierce, before releasing a rush of endorphins that had us laughing uncontrollably.

That rhythm became familiar: plunge, gasp, retreat, dive again. Each time we returned to the water, something melted – not just tension in our bodies, but fear itself.

We camped that night with the doors of the van open. The moon lit the jagged ridges and wolves howled in the distance. Already, swimming felt less like a hobby and more
like a baptism into a new way of living.

From Spain’s north coast we drifted south, pulled inland by rivers and waterfalls. Portugal felt warmer, both in climate and in spirit. Swimming became the rhythm of our days: saltwater mornings, fresh river afternoons, long warm evenings. But one place fixed in memory more than any other.

Covas: becoming otters

Near the village of Covas, we cycled through fruit-laden valleys and found a pool hidden among cliffs.

We became otters, sliding from rock to rock, diving into submerged caves. Hours slipped away unnoticed. Fish darted around our legs, dragonflies skimmed the surface. We weren’t swimming to exercise or even to cool off. We were playing, dissolving into the joy of being in water. That, I realised, is something adulthood often steals – and something wild swimming gives back.

Swimming for coffee

Further inland lay the Peneda-Gerês National Park, where a vast lake had been formed by damming the river. Most visitors rented pedalos, but we decided on something different: we would swim across for coffee.

We slipped in, unease flickering for a moment before rhythm took over. Stroke after stroke, sun on our backs, silence below. We landed on a sandy bay and, goggles still on our heads, wandered into a café. Two espressos later, we swam back. It was absurd, joyful, and liberating.

Sacred waters

Later in Gerês, we followed twisting forest roads to the Cascata de São Miguel. Lizards skittered across the path. Pools appeared one after another, hollowed in sandstone. We slid into each one, letting cascades pound our shoulders like natural massage. Finally, we reached the main fall. The evening sun painted the rocks red, the pool glowed deep blue. We paused.

Em lifted her arms, as though in invocation, and dived. I followed. In that moment, midlife worries about age and time dissolved. All that remained was water holding us up.

A midlife baptism

We left sun-browned, water-shaped, and changed. The Picos gorge. The otter pool at Covas. Coffee swims on Gerês lake. Sacred cascades. Each etched itself not just as a memory, but as a step in a larger journey.

When people ask why I travelled, why I swam, I don’t talk about kilometres or maps. I talk about the feeling of water closing over my head, of fear giving way to freedom, of time stretching in the blue subsurface silence.

That’s why we swim. Not just for fitness. Not just for adventure. But for life itself.