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| Title: | Between Meaven and Hell | |
| Published: | The Great Outdoors | |
| Date: | July 2002. | |
| Author: | Cameron McNeish. | |
Scented
Spanish trails that descend into the jaws of hell. Cameron McNeish explores the limestone peaks and chasms of Valencia’s Marina Alta |
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| Dusk crept over the land like a mother covering her child with a soft blanket and as the darkness deepened tiny pin pricks of light appeared in the mountain villages below. |  |
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| From our hotel veranda we could see right down the length of the Val de Laguart (try la waart) to where the great humpback of Montgo rose in isolated splendour by the shimmering coast. On one side of the valley the jagged ridge of Segaria rose from the huerta of the Girona and just below the hotel a narrow mountain road ran past the | ||
| village of Benimaurell before beginning its steady climb to the Col de Garga, over Sierra de Penon and then down into the neighbouring Jalon Valley.Bounded on its northern side by the high ridge of the Sierra Mediadia, the Val de Laguart is protected from the southern winds by the vertiginous crags of the Caballo Verde Ridge and the twin peaks of Penon Roch. | ||
| In the 17th century this ridge was the scene of the Moors last stand in Valencia and after their defeat by Christian forces their castle was demolished and every man, woman and child deported to Africa via the nearby port of Denia. The ridge gets its name from the legend of the mystical green knight who was supposed to lead the Moors to victory. Local legend is that he lies there still, waiting… | ||
| There was something therapeutic about sitting here in the scented dusk, muscles still throbbing from a long day’s hill-walking. The healing nature of the mountains was working its magic potion. Relaxed and at ease in the enveloping darkness I increasingly became aware of a natural feature that lay close at hand and although I could only dimly discern its outline I could distinctly feel its presence. | ||
| Immediately below the ridge crest on which the Hotel Alahuar is dramatically sited is a huge system of deep, limestone canyons. From those darkened depths I was aware of a brooding silence, a curious stillness that rose, overlapped the canyon rim and flooded the carob and almond groves that surrounded the grounds of the hotel. | ||
| Deep in those natural trenches lay another world, a bare, hostile world inhabited by wild boar, lynx and fox, beyond the comforts of mankind, although man did once live here, wrestling a living from the uncompromising terrain. Moorish exiles, whose countrymen had been expulsed by the forces of Catholicism, made their home in remote strongholds like this. These “Mozarabes” carried on life as normal, sequestered from the Christian traditions and values that lay outside their isolated world, a culture within a culture, a land well worth exploring. | ||
| Two days earlier my wife Gina and I had arrived in Alicante to meet my old friend Jose Miguel Garcia who, through his environmentally-aware trekking company, Terma Ferma, has introduced hundreds of Brits to the delights of the Valencian mountains. Weeks earlier, in an excited e-mail, Jose had told me of a new area he had been exploring in the northern hinterland of Spain’s Costa Blanca. | ||
| Here, beyond the low lying coastal plains of the Marina Baja, lay the limestone peaks and canyons of the Marina Alta. Jose had written of ancient Mozarabic trails that zig-zag in and out of perfumed gorges; high pastures with distant views of the Mediterranean; unspoilt mountain villages where you can enjoy lunchtime beer and tapas and best of all, the all-permeating spirit of place that derives from a crossed-cultural history, the last stronghold of the Moors where Muslim and Christian traditions are still intertwined in an eternal knot. | ||
| And finally, as a tempting throwaway, Jose mentioned the Barranco de l’Infern, the Gorge of Hell… | ||
| From the little cluster of white buildings that makes up the village of Benimaurell it’s hard to avoid the serrated edge of the Caballo Verde ridge that forms the southern ramparts of the Val de Laguart. This would be our introduction to the Marina Alta. | ||
| Splitting the Jalon and Laguart valleys, the ridge culminates in the limestone crags of El Penon Roch, which overlook the village of Murla. As we left the road by Cullado de Garga we could look south across the hills by Castell de Castells, an area I had previously visited with Jose, towards the broad swell of the Sierra de Aitana. Today it was white with fresh snow, not quite what we expected on the Costa Blanca, even at the fag end of winter… | ||
| For weeks the winter weather had been in the high 60s and seventies – now it was on the turn. Jose murmured something about a storm and within minutes the rain started. As we approached the first rocks of the ridge the rain turned to hail and soon we were walking in thick mist with only sporadic clearances to allow us to look down on the little clustered villages below. | ||
| The walk itself wasn't very strenuous but underfoot conditions were far from ideal - wet limestone can become very slippery. A couple of sections gave us some easy scrambles and we eventually managed to find a dry overhang below a great orange limestone cliff where we had lunch. As soon as we finished and climbed back on to the ridge the wind-lashed rain froze our fingers and faces and we decided the abandon plans of continuing to Murla. Instead we descended north from the col just below the crags of El Penon Roch down to the road and a walk back to Benimaurell. A hot bath, and a view out of the bathroom’s panoramic windows down the length of the valley, was good justification for an early finish. | ||
| A stay in the Alahuar Hotel is pretty much central to the walking round about here. Such is its central and elevated position you can enjoy a week's variety of walks all starting from the hotel. That's a big bonus. You don't really have to travel anywhere by car or public transport once you're here. The rooms are superbly comfortable, the big circular bath, with its views down the valley, is superb and the restaurant menu is firmly based on local mountain fare. The hotel’s atmosphere is very relaxed and informal and the staff are all extremely friendly. | ||
| A main feature of the view from the Hotel Alahuar is the great bulk of Montgo, the crown jewel of the Parc Natural del Montgo. This is an enormous limestone crag that rears up from close to the coast between the towns of Denia and Javea to a height of almost 2500ft before dropping down gently to the west in a long limestone escarpment. We climbed the hill face on, up its steep and rather forbidding looking east face, traversed much of the ridge, in reality a high level limestone pavement, and descended a steep gully to the north to where a good mule track took us back to the start. | ||
| With the Mediterranean below us, and the sprawling metropoli of Denia, Javea and Orba around us this certainly wasn't a wilderness experience but there was a real sense of elevation where, on a clear day, you can gaze from Montgo’s summit across the sea to the Ballearic islands of Mallorca and Menorca. It was a little hazy for that, but what we did see was the sheer size and spread of the inland sierras, ranging from the Bernia to the Puig Campana, across to a snow covered Aitana and then the ragged outline of the Marina Alta mountains. We could gaze right up the length of the Val de Laguart, to where our hotel sat in proud splendour above Benimaurell at the head of the valley. | ||
| One of Jose's Terra Ferma guides, Toni Barber, climbed Montgo with us. A biologist and botanist Toni works on various university projects between bouts of mountain guiding and his knowledge of the area (he first climbed Montgo when he was 14) is superb. At one point Gina said she was so amazed, every time Toni stopped he seemed to pick up some plant or other and eat it. Wild asparagus, thyme, and some vegetatious looking plant that tasted like lettuce. | ||
| The only blight on the day was the great
sprawl of the housing development below us. The houses, each with
its own swimming pool, were encroaching on the very slopes of the
hill. As we descended towards them, hundreds upon hundreds of Dallas-style
haciendas, we became aware of an eerie quietness. There was no-one
about – this was a ghost town, most of these houses are apparently
holiday homes owned by Germans and Swiss. |
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| Tony, who was born and brought up here, told us that all the places where he played as a child are now housing developments. He feels like a stranger in a land of Germans, Diutch, Swiss and English. I couldn't help offering up a quick prayer of thanks. If Scotland had a similar climate to Spain, and no midgies, we too would be overrun by vast holiday home developments. And that's not really the problem, the real horror is the size of the communities that have been created in attractive places. While the natural beauty of the coast is still there it has undoubtedly been diluted by the burgeoning developments. Not for the first time I thanked God for the humble midgie… | ||
| All thoughts of holiday homes and midgies were firmly banished from our minds as we made our way down the stepped Mozarabic trail into the confines of the chasm below the hotel, en route for the Barranco de l’Infern. These trails once linked the Moorish communities and allowed the farmers to trade in wheat, olives, carobs and wine. The widely spaced steps were designed to suit the stride of mules. On either side, the desperately steep slopes had been cut into terraces, the vertical fields of the mountains. The scents of rosemary, lavender and thyme fills the air. | ||
| In the depths of the canyon smooth water-worn rocks form a boulder hopping highway below the sheer limestone cliffs, walls of pastel shades of blue and pink, oxidised here and there by the eternal water seepage into darker shades of red and orange. The effect of the colours, contrasting with the glaring white of the rockbed, was quite stunning. At one point the riverbed runs below a natural arch, the portal to the inner recesses of the Barranco de l’Infern. Pools of deep water bar onward progress and the way forward is by utilising a couple of iron spikes driven into the limestone walls to help you climb the smooth rocks above the pools. Once through this obstacle the crux of the route boldly presents itself, a large rounded antechamber, with iron rungs driven into a sheer rocky ridge that runs up into the skylight above. A climbing rope hangs down into the cavern, the way for those with rappeling gear. | ||
| We hadn’t brought any harnesses or ropes so we crept through the subterranean passages as far as our temerity would allow us. The difficult section is apparently no more than a couple of kilometres with about half a dozen abseils but the whole route from the villages of Val de Ebo to Fleix takes about 6-8 hours, a pretty good adventurous day. | ||
| I was enthralled by the barranco and continually gazed up at the towering cliffs. The concept of time is never easy to understand in places like this, time as it relates to the slow and grinding process of the formation of a long and deep canyon like this. The eroding properties of running water are well known and I also realised that limestone is a relatively soft rock but I still couldn't conceive of the quantum period of time that was necessary for this Rio Ebo to slowly carve out such a chasm. Ten thousand years? Ten million years? Who knows? Toni reckoned more than 50 million years. What is certain, unless the weather patterns change and there is a much higher rainfall in the future, is that the power of those cascading, grinding waters are long gone. Today the riverbed is dry and parched, a bumpy highway of white boulders and scree. No longer does the Barranco de l’Infern echo to the tumultuous chaos of running water. Nevertheless the place still has the capacity to enthrall and indeed thrill those who negotiate its canyoning experience. Today it made me realise, and not for the first time, my own insignificance when compared to the more lasting reality of the natural world that surrounds me. A lifespan that is the merest flicker of time in that of creation, a grain of sand in the vast desert of the life of this planet. | ||
| Eventually, free of the tight confines of the barranco, we reached another junction of paths where another superbly constructed Mazorabic trail took us back up the red canyon wall to the village of Fleix. Wonderfully engineered, this trail zig zagged with benevolent gradients up to a large eroded scoop in the wall high above us. To our delight the trail ran right through a hole in the wall and continued up the other side through ancient terraces of almond, carob and orange trees to the village beyond. | ||
| It was a little early to return to the hotel so we opted for an easy descent to the village of Tormos, wandering unhurriedly downhill through scented orange and lemon groves. After a couple of beers in Tormos we were collected by Sauro, the wonderfully enthusiastic and cheerful hotel manager who drove us back to the Alahuar and the luxury of another scenic hot bath and a delightful dinner. The gorge of hell had, incongruously, turned out to be a day in heaven! | ||
| LES PESQUERES | ||
| Besides Toni Barber’s guiding and botanic skills he is also an acknowledged authority on les Pesqueres, the fishing platforms that are to be found on sheer cliffs along this section of the Costa Blanca coast. Apparently up until fairly recently, the seventies, poor folk of the area supplemented their simple diet with fish. Unable to afford boats, they descended the sheer cliffs of the coast by ropes and fixed ladders down to a section of cliff above deep waters. There they would construct a wooden platform, strung to the cliff by ropes and pitons. They would go to these platforms at dusk and fish during the hours of darkness, shining lights onto the water to attract the fish. Once they saw the dawn star, Venus, they would climb back up the cliffs and return home with their catch, either to sell, or to add to whatever they could grow themselves. | ||
| Toni's uncle was one such fisherman and Toni has researched the subject thoroughly and has written a book about it. It was a fascinating day, driving to various capes on the coast to view some of the old platforms. There was a cruel irony in the fact that up until comparatively recently the only people who came down to these cliffs were such poor fishermen. Now the whole coast is a holiday playground and the villas that rim the tops of the cliffs are the most expensive. | ||
| INFORMATION POINT | ||
| Walks Information:
Jose Miguel’s company Terra Ferma organises walking hoidays
in the Sierra de Aitana and Marina Alta through Exodus holidays. Jose
also arranges bespoke walking tours and holidays. Terra Ferma Web: www.terreferma.net E -mail: info@terraferma.net Tel: 00 34 965 89 03 93 |
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| Maps: Instituto Geografico Nacional’s 1:200,000 (Alicante Province) Topografico Nacional de Espana 1:25,000 (Orba, Relleu and Altea) |
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| Guidebooks: Costa Blanca Mountain Walks, Vol 2:East, by Bob Stansfield, (Cicerone); Walking in Spain, (Lonely Planet) | ||
| Accommodation:
Benimaurell is a working village with most of its inhabitants engaged
in agriculture. There is a shop, a post office, two restaurants and
a bar. The Hotel Alahuar PTDA, El Tossalet, S/N 03791 Bennimaurell, Alicante, Costa Blanca, Espana is highly recommended. Tel: 00 34 96 558 33 97. E-mail: alahuar@paralelo40.org |
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Language:
Spanish and Catalan |
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| Travel: fly to Alicante’s El Altet airport. You can hire a car from the airport, or book one in advance from Premier Car Hire (01279 641040) The Hotel Alahuar,and Terra Ferma can arrange airport transfers to the Val de Laguart | ||
| Time to go: best time of the year to visit Las Marina Alta is between October and June. The summer months can be unbearably hot and dry for walking while the winter months offer a wonderful respite from the usual wet/cold conditions of the UK hill areas. January and February can be incredibly mild with the added bonus of the almond blossom season. This year in February the weather rose into the mid-seventies, although short-lived storms can be expected in the mountains at almost any time. | ||
