PYRENEES REVISITED  - Week 5 News

      View this week's photos      

Bottom of News Page

Return to Index page

Week 5 - Spanish CataloniaWeek 5 News - the Garrotxa and Vall de Nuria regions of Spanish Catalonia:

We left France over the 1500m Col d'Ares and began the steady sweeping descent through high alpine pastures down to the Catalonian mountain village of Camprodon. Since this was the birthplace of the Spanish composer Isaac Albéniz (1860~1909) we felt we should stop to investigate. The rather woe-begone village has 'rediscovered' its illustrious son as a much needed tourist feature, but you could see why Albéniz left to seek the bright lights of London, Paris and Nice. We felt however we should do our bit to support Camprodon, by including this week a piece from Albéniz' piano and guitar suite Iberia.

                                                                                                              Click on map for details  
 

The route over high sierra mountains to Olot was unclear but turned out to be a fast modern road leading down into the agricultural Fluvia valley. Our reason for coming over to Baixa Garrotxa (pronounced in Catalan Garrotcha) was to visit the Park Natural de la Zona Volcanica. Although now heavily wooded, the area is dotted with 31 volcanic cones, and close to the medieval town of Santa Pau, we camped at the expensive but appropriately named Lava Camping . From here, we spent a fascinating day walking the 10 km circuit of volcanic peaks and the beech woods which now cover the ash and lava fields of the volcanoes. The volcanoes now lie dormant awaiting the right provocation; they last erupted a mere 12,000 years ago, spewing out a 40m deep lava flow which later crystallized into a basalt columnar crag on which the village of Castellfollit de la Roca is now built. The other volcanic product which covers the whole area was gritty ash and cinders, such as rained on Pompeii in 79 AD from the Vesuvius eruption. Picking up a handful of this material showed what a perfect building aggregate it made, and until  creation of the Natural Park by the Catalan Parliament in 1985 put an end to the exploitation, the volcanic ash cones were despoiled by quarrying for road building. Our walk took us around the ash cone of Volca del Croscat where the conserved former quarries have exposed the interior structure of the 100m high volcanic cone - this amazing sight revealed before us was a conserved lesson in volcanology (Photo 1). On from here, we passed through the beautiful beech woods of Fageda d'en Jorda; the Catalonian sun was so hot that we were grateful for the shade of the beech trees. (Andrew and Dave: like Tityrus in Virgil's Eclogue, we enjoyed our sandwich lunch 'petulae recubans sub tegmine fagi'). The path led up onto the rim of the volcano of Santa Margarida and down into the dormant caldera, an eerie experience. While camped at Lava, we had several clear sightings of Hoopoes, a bird we had only seen before in Greece, with its long curving beak, crested head, tan body and distinctive black-white striped fan-tail and wings.

Although out of the higher mountain area, we wanted to visit the medieval Catalan town of Bessalu, and being a weekend, we were glad to find the beautifully laid-out and peaceful Masia Can Coromines campsite, kept by a French- English couple. Bessalu was no disappointment: the 11th century fortified bridge (painstakingly restored after being dynamited during the Spanish Civil War) is a magnificent entry into the winding narrow streets, dark-arcaded shops and sunny squares of the medieval hilltop town (Photo 2). Today's sleepy atmosphere belies its illustrious past as the dynastic seat of the Counts of Bessalu who once ruled over this small and briefly independent principality. After our stay at Can Coromines, we camped near the village of Montagut for a mountain walk up into the wooded limestone country of the Alta Garroxta. Buzzards circle overhead, and the area is criss-crossed with stone-paved tracks and elegantly arched stone bridges used previously by muleteers.

Our route now took us westwards over the 1000m high Col de Coubert; the surprisingly good road gained height steadily giving panoramic views over wooded hills to the high mountains of the border area, then dropped down through a beautiful long valley to Ripoll, a modern soulless town, all appartment blocks and glossy car showrooms. We were glad to pass straight through, up the Freser valley back into the higher mountains to camp just outside of Ribes de Freser at what surely must be the campsite of the trip (so far that is!) - Vall de Ribes. We have camped in some spectacularly memorable settings, but Vall de Ribes must rank among the best, particularly at this time of year when it was so peaceful. The site was terraced up the hillside, looking out across a side valley (Photo 3); in the evening, the lights of farms on the opposite hillside twinkled in the long dusk and the lowing of grazing cattle with their clanging bells echoed across the valley  - it was blissful.

Our reason for coming up to the Ribes valley was both to experience the inspirational mountainous area of the Puigmal range, just south of the Franco-Spanish border, but also to ride on the Cremallera. What's that, I hear you ask? To give you a clue, Cremallera is the Catalan word for zip - no you're not going to get it. The Cremallera is a rack and pinion mountain railway, which runs for 12 kms up grades of 15% to the mountain and ski resort at the head of the Nuria gorges. Now to forestall any facetious comments about this degenerating into a train-spotting web site, you need to have had the sort of intimate experience of the Nuria gorges as we did: the Cremallera provided convenient transportation for reaching the high point of the 1000m descent down the gorge using a section of the GR11 Pyrenean long distance path. The alpine flora which accompanied the magnificently challenging scenery made this a classic of mountain walks. At this time of year, the fellside was ablaze with deep pink alpenroses, blue and purple gentians and yellow broom. The superbly engineered GR11 path followed the contours faithfully, losing height in controlled gradual sweeps, down into the increasingly narrow gorge, alongside the Nuria torrent, and giving impressive views of the cog railway crawling up this unbelievable gradient (Photo 4). This was mountain walking at its very best.

      Click on map for details

Back at camp that evening, we collected emails, and leant that our now 2 month old granddaughter, Isobel was to have her first camping trip the coming weekend. For us, we were really sorry to be leaving the peace of our valley-side camp here at Vall de Ribes, but it was time to be heading back northwards over the Collada de Toses to continue into the Ariège area of the French Pyrenees.
First however, since we were passing, we had to experience Andorra, just to see if it really was as horrific as we had been warned. More in next week's edition of our Pyrenean travelling web.

                                        Sheila and Paul                                                                                                              Published: Monday 13 June 2005

Hillman Imp 1973

VW Camper 2005
  View this week's photos
  Top of News Page
  Return to Index Page

Hillman Imp 1973

VW Camper 2005

 Music this week:  Isaac Albéniz 
   Danza Espagnola from Iberia
 
  Current News Page   Site Plan   Who we are   Publications