Title: Hasta the Vista. Published: The independent On Sunday. Date: June 2000. Author: Canet Street Porter.   Just few miles inland from Benidorm lie spectacular mountains, unspoilt villages and empty footpaths. I've decided to walk in the Sierra Aitana, a relatively undiscovered part o f Spain which ids only now being developed for visitors, and in a more eco-friendly way than the coastal concrete jungle. My definition of a perfect walking holiday isn't jus a well marked trail. I want a good picnic, a home cooked dinner with local dishes, and small friendly hotels. Would I find it in the province of Alicante? My flight was full of Brits heading for the opposite kind of holiday- sea , sand, sangria and probably sunburn. The omens weren't good. The drive from the airport was through a coastal strip of dusty fields,passing the clusster of tower blocks that is Benidorm- as ort of mediterranean Hong Kong. We climbed up into the mountains passing Altea with more expensive villas and terraced fields. I stopped in the village and bought an Hola ! to improve my Spanish. Then we took the road to Castell de Castells and at the end of an extraordinary beautiful valley, with long mountain ridgwes of limestone pock-marked with huge caves and sheer cliffs marked with indentations caused by wind and rain. The village sat up one side of the valley, extremely isolated. It was 3 pm. Siesta time, and all the shutters were drawn. Our guest house, Casa Pilar, was a restored old corner house with a large, airy sitting room on the top floor looking out overthe village. Our bedroom had a 1920s wooden double bed-very cosy! Down in the basement(once a stable) we ate lunch; delicious serrano ham, olives,with local cheeses and white wine and a dessert of blocks of almond paste that looked like fudge and melted in your mouth. After our siesta we took a short drive, then walk to an amazing double rock arch high above the valley. The path took us through wild camomile, and fennel in flower, cornflowers, daisies, thyme, rosemary,sistus, palms and sage. Next we drove to the other side of Castells to see 7000 year-old cave paintings at Pla de Petracos, only discovered in 1980. Large red images of figures highon a cliff face, fenced off, very clear though through binoculars. Back in the village, a lot of conversations were echoing around its tired streets- how unlike an English village. I sa t in the lounge in the top floor of the guest house, watching the clouds go gold and birds flying to their night resting spots. Sadly no life bullfighting on TV, but a nisy cat fight on the square below. Cathedrals on TV. Then Pilar, who had been impressed because she saw my picture in Hola !, aske du s to accompany her and her husband for a stroll after supper. A huge dinner of chickpea and noodle soup, then grilled vegetables with roughly chopped chiken baked in lots of olive oil. By 11 pm I was exhausted and slept well. Breakfast was a banana with home made dark, thick cut marmalade in it-delicious- and camomile tea. Luckily it was overcast (good for walking). We drove through groves of oranges, medlars and olives, finally taking a dirt road up to about 2000 ft. Then it was time to heave on our rucksacks and set off along an indistinct path up a steep rocky cliff. We were heading for the ruins of the Casstillo del Serrella, built by the moors, to defend their territory. On th every tip of a rock outcrop with a sheer drop on three sides. The views from the 14th century castle were superb. The Mediterranean lay far awayto th eeast, Benidorm thankfully scarcelly visible under a heat haze. We gingerly climbed back down to the dirt road and said farewell to our guide Jose Miguel, who was to meet us at the other end of our walk with the car.Our plans was to ascend to the scarpment of the sierra Serrella and walk due west. After one false start, which led to a sheer cliff we cut accroos rocky slopes to rejoin thereal footpath up a ridge, then zig-zaged down to a gully.From here,it was a sweltering 40-minute ascent t o a pass with sheer cliffs on either side. Over lunch we decided to follow my compass and strike out across rough ground up the hill. From hten on we had an hour and a half of the finest escarpment-walking along the Serrella range you could imagine, with breathtaking views on all sides. At the Pico de Serrella(4327 ft) we gingerly descended a steep slope, avoiding loose rocks and thorn bushes.This was a low moment.Jose had told me to aim for a hill rock below-but how? It seemed interminable and my knees were lke jelly. Overhead. Swifts scythed through the air, making swooshing sounds, emitting mocking screeches. Having dropped from the high ridge, we climbed a secondatry one, onlythis path featured a prickly Spanish version of holly, and soon my legs were painfully scratched. We then skirted the base of a steep rocky scarpment to our right, walking carefully across scree- eventuually reaching a gravel road after four-and-a- quarter hours. We plooded up its zigzag route over the top, then contoures along thrugh shady pine trees, before zigzagging once more down to the dirt road. A couple of phone calls to Jose Miguel on the mobile phone he had lent us(he couldn't believe we've done it so quickly) and we met him in the car further down the road. A short drive took us to pension El Trestellador high above the village of Benimantell, with a fantastic viewof the valley down to the sea and the rocky crags of the Sierra de Aitana to the south.After 6pm the owners were still having lunch laughing uproariously. Covered in dust and parched, I downed two beers, one after the other. The pension was modern with clean, tiled rooms and no lounge-really a arestaurant with rooms which people come up from the coast to visit. It was in an idyllic position, and Charo, our hostess, brougt us plates of local cured hama and cheese. I had a bath and inspected my scratched legs, searched for bullfighting on TV(no luck), but settled for the Open tennis championship. Dinner started with bread and cabbage soup with ahm stock an dbeans. This would have been a meal in itself, but it was followed by a salad of pickeld beetroot,peepers, egg, aspargus, and lettuce an d a large earthenware casserole of slow-cooked lamb with roast potatoes and aubergines. It was delicious if somewhat oily, and I crawled up to bed feeling extremely bloated. I tried to stay awake to digest this monster feast, but to no avail.The nigt was extremely tormented. I woke up sneezing and parched every hour as my summer cold really blossomed. Breakfast and a huge plate of fruit so very perfect it looked like a Dutch still life-bunches of medlars with the branches and leaves still attached, dark-red cherries, lumpy, large,ripe perfumed pears and apricots with the palest flesh. Jose Miguel had described the previous day's walk as moderate, but I would dissagree- sections of it are not on paths at all and involve walking down a steep slippery slopes. Most normal walkers would want to do it with a guide and there is no water en route and a possibility of getting lost if you can't read the maps. This morning we were to climb the Sierra de Aitana and started with a drive up an extremely impressive new road build with UE money (ironic when you realise tha local schools ha ve to close because the villages cannot afford teachers) up the mountain to a parking area at Fuente Partagas, with picnic tables under trees and astream running down through the site.We were to climb Aitana, the highest mountain in the province at 1558 m, a long ridge desecrated at one end by a cluster of transmitters and radasr domes- but witha wall of impressive sheer cliffs facing us- te Partagas. Jose Miguel guided us up the tracka little way and then left us to a climb along a well-defined path to a pass behind a crag. It was sweltering and my cold was a nuissance, but the environment was so pleasant it was a joy to walk through- clouds of sage with purple-blue flowers, lavender( not yet out, but still smelling strongly) popies and camomile and pink flowers thyme. From here we took a little path, climbing gradually untill we emerged onto a forest road. After a few hundred yards another track took us south east until it fizzled out on a plateau below towering cliffs. Now we followed apath directly to them, scrambling up diagonally- I had to pull myself through a narrow gap in between two rocks known locally as "two vixen pass" or in an English guide book " fat's man burden". We emerged onto the summit which seemed as if a giant had put his foot down and squased the earth. The rocks we had crawled through formed a façade behind which the ground sloped away at 40 degrees with high fissures in the limestone. It was very hard to walk on the protruding little sandstone spines, but we found a footpath and started to traverse the ridge. We followed the edge of the sheer cliffs in s a switc walk heading east with excellent views of the valley below. We dropeed down to a forest track and followed it back down the mountain to our starting point. Our final's day walk was a relatively easy walk from Benimantell to the old-hill top village of Sella. We started by contouring around theeastern end of Aitana range, following a path once used by the village postman. Again there it was an almost secret route through the cliffs, up a gully,and we emerged into a completely different landscape of grassy fields. Then the path on this plateau joined a dirt road which dropped south down a sheltered valley which was the home of a Budhist retreat. Another sweltering haul up a beautifully restored path brought us to the top of the cliff and the dirt road to Sella, a completely quiet unspoilt village with about 300 residents, arranged in tiers up the hillside. At the end of our four days in Alicante I was exhausted but mentally refreshed. On a clean pebbly beach, near the posh Montiboli hotel outside Villajoyosa, I tried to tan my legs so the scratches wouldn't seem so bad. My holiday reading lay unopened- On the last night I'd finally located live bull fighting on TV. Hoorah!