Our diversion to a supermarket yesterday afternoon took us to the town of Berja, where we pondered over our destination for the night. When it turned out that the coast was a little further than we had thought, I looked at the map again and realised that we were very close to another area highlighted to us by the lady in the Tourist Office in Almeria as being good for walking.
The night was spent in one of the car parks in the big recreation area, just a minute or so down the road from the start of a handful of walking routes. There were various possibilities for combining bits of different routes, but we opted to just follow PR-A 336 in its entirety, which the information sign told us was 8.6km long.
Well, what a fine walk that turned out to be! A narrow path took us via the remains of 7 sets of lead mine workings and an enormous slag heap, all the time giving us superb scenery and views (including the snowy high tops of the Sierra Nevada, to the north).
We retuned back to the recreation area having covered 10km (hmmm, are all of the official distances under-stated?) with just over 500m of ascent and having had such a good walk that I’m now very glad that an earlier error in grocery planning led us to take a diversion to Berja!
We’re going up there, somewhere
Nice path!
Fine views from the high point of the walk
Crossing the enormous slag heap. You wouldn’t have wanted to fall half way across, due to the steepness, but it was actually very stable to walk across.
Another shot of the slag heap – it must have been a few hundred feet tall and made of the sort of crushed-rock gravel for which people pay good money when they want to lay a driveway
One of the mine entrances. All of the others were just holes in the rock (some vertical, some levels), whereas this one had a constructed entrance.
The night was spent in one of the car parks in the big recreation area, just a minute or so down the road from the start of a handful of walking routes. There were various possibilities for combining bits of different routes, but we opted to just follow PR-A 336 in its entirety, which the information sign told us was 8.6km long.
Well, what a fine walk that turned out to be! A narrow path took us via the remains of 7 sets of lead mine workings and an enormous slag heap, all the time giving us superb scenery and views (including the snowy high tops of the Sierra Nevada, to the north).
We retuned back to the recreation area having covered 10km (hmmm, are all of the official distances under-stated?) with just over 500m of ascent and having had such a good walk that I’m now very glad that an earlier error in grocery planning led us to take a diversion to Berja!
We’re going up there, somewhere
Nice path!
Fine views from the high point of the walk
Crossing the enormous slag heap. You wouldn’t have wanted to fall half way across, due to the steepness, but it was actually very stable to walk across.
Another shot of the slag heap – it must have been a few hundred feet tall and made of the sort of crushed-rock gravel for which people pay good money when they want to lay a driveway
One of the mine entrances. All of the others were just holes in the rock (some vertical, some levels), whereas this one had a constructed entrance.
Not that I am envious of course??????????? But it certainly looks fantasmagorical!
ReplyDeleteSorry for any envy caused ... but this was a particularly good one.
ReplyDelete