PULSE-RACING PEAKS
Reach dizzy heights on a bewitching hike through the Pyrenees
SITTING on the stone terrace of Can Borrell inn, we watch a dragon’s back of granite peaks fade from tangerine to copper. Feeling deliciously whacked after a 12-mile hike over a high mountain pass, we clink our glasses of chilled local rosé.
The one blot on my horizon is an inability to get out of my mind the annoying rhymes of that old curmudgeon Hilaire Belloc, who travelled through this region in 1909. ‘The fleas that tease in the High Pyrenees’ had been particularly irksome to him, as were ‘ the tedding and the spreading, Of the straw for a bedding’.
If only I had not re-read that Pyrenean poem Tarantella, which begins: ‘Do you remember an inn, Miranda?’
My wife Hennie and I are on a week-long self-guided hike over the Pyrenees from Spain to France, crossing the Catalancultured Cerdanya region, which is shared by both countries.
Happily, in place of straw and teasing fleas, we can look forward to a string of inns and small family-run hotels, booked for us by the travel agency Inntravel.
Our journey starts in Barcelona from where the Puigcerdà railway snakes northwards through forested ravines.
We goggle at glistening peaks and wedding-veil waterfalls as we make our way up to the high Cerdanya plateau.
First night is at Riu de Cerdanya, from where a zig-zag trail leads up to a dizzying pass.
Despite it being the height of summer, piebald patches of snow sit on the highest flanks.
Every now and again the cry of a hawk shocks the silence. One sails so close overhead, we hear the whoosh of wings and glimpse its clenched talons.
We drop through boulder-strewn heathland scented with wild herbs to Talló, a hamlet of sturdy grey farmhouses roofed with fish-scale slate tiles.
Our bags had arrived by road at Cal Rei inn where we prop our feet against our wooden balcony and gaze at the view. An evening of undiluted serenity beckoned or so we thought, until we met Señora Marta, the black-clad woman with eyes like pumpkin seeds who is our hostess at tiny Grau de l’Os restaurant.
Pointy-hatted straw witch figures adorn her tables and broomsticks hang from the ceiling. Fixing us with those unsettling eyes, Señora Marta smiles mysteriously while pouring us home-made nettle soup and a powerful potion of wild herbs she claims to have foraged from the forest.
If this sounds like a gimmick, it does not feel that way when she tells us: ‘There is something of the sorceress in many of us Cerdanya women.’ Our route to Meranges stitches together ancient packpony paths and transhumance routes — trails for driving cattle to summer pastures.
We traverse meadows and woodland, fording streams from time to time.
In one place we are close enough to Andorra to make out distant ski- lift pylons resting in the summer grass. Winter sports in the Pyrenees might not be a patch on the Alps, we decide, but for summer walking, we’d choose these mountains every time.
Next day — our longest, with about seven hours’ walking — takes us across a rugged plain before we skip across a stream which is the unmarked border with France, and drop into a steep valley to the rail-head of La Tor de Querol. ‘ We are all Catalans in esprit, whether our papiers are Spanish or French,’ declares Quim Farias, co-owner of Chateau Brangoly above Querol, another converted farmhouse, in the French Cerdagne. Quim (pronounced ‘ Kim’) explains that this has been the case since the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659, when patriotically Catalan Cerdanya was partitioned between France and Spain. On our final day’s walk we leave France to cross back into the bizarre anomaly of Llívia, a little enclave of Spain completely surrounded by France.
The reason is this: under the terms of the 1659 treaty, 33 villages were ceded to France. But officially, Llívia was classified as a town, not a village.
Spanish negotiators clung to this technicality. So, more than 350 years later, the Spanish flag flies alongside the red and gold of Catalunya and tapas tempts on bar counters.
Sitting outside in the medieval main square we dine on calamares stewed Catalan-style with tomato and olive oil, then sleep like logs in the old grain store, which is now the Hotel Bernat de So.
Yes, we remember an inn, Miranda. And the Cerdanya has cast a spell on us.