"Terra Ferma Walking trips in the warm sierras of the Mediterranean "

Title:	Sun and Sierras of the South.
Published:	The Great Outdoor Magazine
Date:	January 2000
Author:	Cameron McNeish.

I suspect many of us suffer from Seasonal Affliction Disorder, the bodys way of retreating into itself when the days become short and sunshine is limited to television's holiday programmes. The onset of November's dour days inevitably brings out a darkening of my mood and a corresponding humor that is only lightened by exposure to blue skies and sunshine. Inevitably, it being the weekend we put our clocks back, the radio news had been giving out gale warnings and the possibility of local flooding.

It was already cold, wet and windy as I made the short sprint from the airport car park to the departure terminal. Winter blues again, but in King- Canute-like attempt at holding the dark season at bay for at least a week I was heading for the Sierras of soutern Spain where I had been promised the sun would shine and my spirits would be lifted. I wasn't dissapointed.

Just over three hours later I sat outside a harbour bar in Alicante in Valencia, eating fresh panfried whitebait with garlic and drinking San Miguel beer. The evening temperature was 22 degrees and locals and visitors alike were wandering around in shorts and t-shirts. My host Jose Miguel Garcia, was laying out plans for the weekend ahead and suggested I should by some sunscreen! Next morning just twelve hours after my arrival to Spain, Jose and I set off on what was to be the first sun-kissed, wind-free day of the seven I was to enjoy in Spain, climbing the secong highest mountain in the area which gave us views out across the blue Mediterranean and inland over the carved limestone landscape of the little known Sierra Aitana.

Puig Campana ,1406m, is a magnificent double topped mountain which seems to rise sheer from the back door of a growing Benidorm conurbation. Its western top looks as though a square hole has been kicked out of the summit ridge and Jose told me that an ancient giant by the name of Roldan created the gap because he had been told his wife would die when the sun went down behind the Puig Campana summit.By creating a great notch in the mountain he could enable her to live just a bit longer. Just as Roldan tried to tame the natural cycles of the day, so thousands of rock climbers have been coming here in recent years to try and squeeze a few more weeks out of their summer, or add some precious sun-kissed weeks to the notoriously unestable weather of British spring.

		We climbed Puig Campana from Jose's climbers refuge, a delightful hut set deep amid soaring crags and shining rock faces near the village of Sella. An ancient footpath meandered up the valley from the refuge, tracing its way through olive groves and fields of almond trees. Scents of thyme and rosemary filled the air as we passed long abandoned fincas, old farm houses, and the sun shone from a blue Mediterranean sky. It was the last day of Octber, and it was hot.

		Gradually we left the olive terraces behind and climbed into another world, to a rough scree-girt col between Campana and its northern neighbour, the crag-bound Monte Ponoch. A steep scramble gave way to the summit slopes with rewarding, and contrasting, views on either side.
Below us lay the mini-Manhattan outline of Benidorm and its burgeoning neighbours of the Costa Blanca, their tentacles spreading even closer the foothills of the mountains. Jose told me of plans for a new multi-million pound theme park, of the problems of water shortage caused by providing showers and bathing facilities to millions of tourists and his fears that the powerful hotel corporations would soon turn and lift their eyes to the hills-already there are modern hotel blocks in the Valle de Guadalest.

But it was to the north and west that our gaze lingered, over a beautiful and ragged landscape corrugated by long valleys that rise from the coast and run inland, parallel to each other, separated by mountain massifs with rocky ridges and fronted by crags of inmense proportions. Inmediatelly below our feet the beautiful valley of the Barranco de L'Arc flows uphill from the old village of Sella. Great leaning upthrusts of shining white limestone, like shark fins, vie with each other for prominence, rising sheer from the greens and yellow and reds from the autumn hued maquis. Between the Barranco and Puig Campana a horse-shoe shaped ridge rises in small sharp-topped wedges, gradually gowing into vertiginous spires, towers and buttresses. This is the curved ridge of Monte Castellets and Jose told me that an expedition along the entire ridge would take about three days, with much severe rock climbing and rapelling involved. I mentally postponed that trip for another time...

The south-west ridge of the Puig Campana itself boasts a number of long and serious rock climbing routes and with literally hundreds of virgin crags in the valleys it's no wonder this area has become a mecca for rock jocks. Paradoxically, few walkers have heard of the Sierra Aitana, this trange of mountains and isolated valleys that form the hinterland of Benidorm and this part of the Costa Blanca. Every years tens of thousands of sun worshippers gaze up at these high mountains from their beach resorts before turning their attention back to the sea, sand and sangria, and long may they do so. It's only thirty minutes or so by car from Benidorm to the unspoilt village of Sella; Benimantell, Confrides or Castell de Castells, thirty minutes in which you live one world behind and enter an older, gentler world where simple values are cherised and the pace of life is intrinsically more relaxed.

The island of Mallorca has long been a popular winter destination for the sun seeking British walkers, but now the people of this small area of mainland Spain are keen to lure winter visitors to their sun-kissed mountains. Curiously, these highlands of the Costa Blanca have strong parallels with many of the upland areas of the UK. Both regions suffer from unemployment, traditional industries like small-scale farming area being run down and both are relying more on green tourism. And while the big hotel consortiums lift their eyes to the hills from the costa Blanca coastal fringe and calculate what scope the mountains have for their swelling number of tourists, my friend Jose Miguel Garcia and his partner Jeroni Garcimartin have succesfully competed for an award for promoting the rural economy of the Sierra de Aitana area. The competition run by the Ceder Aitana, the region's rural development agency, spurned the large scale development proposals of the large holidays corporations in favour of this small two-man operation called Terra Ferma.

Jeroni and Jose began their walking and climbing holiday company because they wanted, in some small way, to offer a green solution to the area's economic problems. They also wanted to work in the mountains, a not unreasonable desire since the hills and valleys of the Sierra Aitana are among the most unspoiled and ruggedly beautiful landscapes of Spain. Rising to almost five thousand feet from the olive and almond terraces, the limestone mountains of Aitana offer a variety of expeditions ranging from the technical multi day scrambling routes over the incredible pinnacles of the Monte Castellets ridge, a technically easier but still demanding scramble over the Cuillin-like Bernia ridge which looks down over Calpe and the Meditterranen Sea, or a straightforward hill bash up Puig Campana, at 1406m the highest mountain in the area that is free of access. The highest mountain, Aitana itself,1559 m, has a military installation on the summit and is closed to visitors.

Ancient Mozarabic trails, dating from the early centuries of the Islamic occupation of Southern Spain, criss-cross the area and like the ols stalker's paths of the Scotish Highlands stand testament to the skills of those who built them. Using such trails, Terra Ferma had developed a number of multi-day walking tours visiting remote mountain summits, sensational ridges, hill top castles and tranquil high-mountain meadows with nightly accommodation in small hotels in the mountain villages. Vehicles carry your luggage from hotel to hotel and all you have to carry is your lunch, some water and in the unlikely event of rain, waterproofs.

And when they are not guiding walkers and climbers around the mountains, Jose and Jeroni busy themselves with archeological detective work- re-discovering the ancient trails that have been lost in time, and re-building and maintaining them for the travellers of our new leisure generation. These mozarabic trails zig-zag into the most unlikely places, down into deep barrancos, up through narrow gaps in the crags, ranging along below enormous crags and across endless miles of maquis covered plateau -places that would be unattainable if these cobbled stone highways had not been created by the master craftsmen of yesteryear.

After a couple of days walking with Jose and Jeroni, I eventually met up with a handful of other journalists and touroperators who had simmilarly been invited to sample the delights of the Aitana area. In a week's walking we wondered at prehistoric cave paintings, visited natural rock arches, teetered along narrow ridges, searched for the areas neveras, deep snowpits which were once used to make ice from snow- the original fridges, sang operatic arias where our voices bounced back at us from vast overhanging limestone cliffs, and enjoyed the hospitality of generous mountain folk. Every day the sun shone for a blue sky and the only fireworks we saw on Guy Fawkes night was the odd shooting star in cloudless black skies.

There is an alluring atraction in swapping thermals and ice axes for shorts, tee-shirts and lightweight boots at this time of the year, even if only to give us the strength to face the rest of the winter. The Sierra Aitana certainly worked its magic on me and its healing powers might well last me until about February or March. Then I might have to head south again for more of the same.