DryStoneGarden

This one isn’t sculpture or land art, but it has some of the same effects. It’s the Ruta de Cares in Picos de Europa National Park, a fantastic trail in the mountains just a little inland from the north coast of Spain. It’s an exceptionally flat trail through an exceptionally un-flat landscape, which might not sound amazing but just look at the photos and imagine yourself there. It’s spectacular.

I was a little slow to figure it out while I was hiking, but the trail was built to serve as the access trail for maintaining an aqueduct. It follows along beside the aqueduct, and because the aqueduct is at such a shallow grade, the trail is also flat, like a desert trail except it runs through a limestone gorge. And then, because it goes through the mountains (sometimes literally), a ton of effort went into making it flat, into matching the shallow grade of the aqueduct, much more work than anyone would ever use on a recreation trail. It has tunnels blasted through the rock, bridges, rock walls, arches, I’ve never seen so much effort put into a trail.

The aqueduct was built from 1915 to 1921, the trail from 1945 to 1950. I loved it, but a part of me was thinking, huh, 1910’s, 1940’s… I bet people died building this. And yep, there was a sign saying 11 people died during construction. It’s kind of a running theme with these old structures: I love the end result but not the means to building them.

It’s a beautiful mountain range, but it’s the trail that takes it to the next level.

I’m sure they don’t let people kayak or inter-tube it, but wow that would be a lotta fun.

Just one of the best trails I’ve ever hiked, a must for anyone who goes to that part of Spain.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 27th, 2022 at 8:07 am and is filed under trails. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.