Author Charles Davis on the charms of walking in the mountains of Costa Blanca.
Read any good-life, back-to-basics, season-in-the-sun farm yarn about expats moving to Spain, and you can be fairly sure there will come a moment when the narrator takes to the mountains for a walk that proves to be a state-of-the-heart experience in which engagement with the landscape aspires to a quasi-spiritual empathy.
It’s a rite of passage, as vital to the format as encountering the crafty peasant with a heart of gold, losing your rag with the local building fraternity, having an amusing mishap with the domestic livestock, being duffed up by the elements, and displaying a comic ineptitude when confronted with the sort of quotidian challenges that generations of illiterate country dwellers have prevailed over with apparent insouciance.
Such clichés exist for a reason and it’s not simply because they happen to sell books. Like all clichés, they come of observable truths. Settle in Spain and you probably will bump into the wily old boy with a winning glint in his eye, be confronted by a belligerent chicken, and be battered about a bit by the big weather. For the most part, these experiences are the preserve of those who uproot themselves, but the mountains are something else.
Spain is the second most mountainous country in Europe and, though the tourist brochures may peddle images of beaches so drenched with sun that the bodies draped across them begin to resemble something being barbecued, the country’s true aficionados know that this is a bit like defining a wine by the bottle or suggesting a meal is summed up by the scalloping round the edge of the plate. The substance lies elsewhere and anyone who goes to Spain simply in order to spend their time sizzling on the beach has rather missed the point.
Good news then that the pre-eminent rite-of-passage enjoyed by expatriate good-lifers is the one experience readily available to more transient visitors. Take a trip to Spain, be it ever so brief, and you can be fairly sure that there is a great mountain experience waiting for you just round the corner, one that will take you out of yourself and bring you into a landscape that would have reduced the Romantics to paroxysms of verse-making. Nowhere is this more true than the Costa Blanca.
The beaches of Benidorm may have come to define a certain type of tourism, but just behind the coast there is a mountainscape that rivals Mallorca as a Mediterranean hiking destination, part of the Baetic Cordillera which stretches from Andalusia to the Balearics, and which provides walkers with a playground of crags, cliffs, crests, ridges, gullies, gorges, pinnacles, peaks and over a hundred waymarked itineraries, all less than three hours away from Britain on a flight that will cost about the same as a couple of bottles of single-malt.
Like most of the northern belt of the Cordillera, the mountain ranges in Alicante Province are largely composed of limestone, the solubility of which gives the sierras their characteristic ‘serrated’ aspect (sierra being Spanish for saw), guarantees a fair amount of karst underfoot, and furnishes several walks with their objective in the shape of the natural arches or windows that appear in the eroded rock, variously known as arcs, forats, and finestras.
One classic walk is the tour of the Serra de Bernia, now designated the PR7 and the first itinerary in Walk! The Costa Blanca Mountains. A wonderfully wild little mountain boasting the remains of the region’s finest example of Renaissance military architecture, the Serra de Bernia is perhaps most famous for the Cova del Forat, a fifteen metre natural tunnel burrowing through the mountain. It is an appropriate introduction for a publication designed to take you deep into this enchanting landscape of rugged grandeur, sumptuous vistas, and secret corners.
If you visit Spain with one of our guidebooks, I can’t promise cunning locals, obdurate donkeys, or an amusing incident with an olive press. Those aspects of the setting-up-home-abroad formula tend to rely upon purchasing a derelict property and turning the clock back several hundred years. But I can guarantee some great walking that will take you into the heart of the country like nothing else. Who knows, you may even end up changing life.
All photos were taken during the research for Walk! The Costa Blanca Mountains.