Walking Spain

The walk today was absolutely brilliant. You walk up the bed of a stream/river, up the Barranco de Boquella and well it’s incredibly beautiful because there are steep red rusty coloured walls to this gorge. In the walls of the gorge, you occasionally see caves and I have to stress how absolutely beautiful this valley/gorge is. I saw four “jabalis” four wild boars, two parents and two baby jabalis. The coats of these animals are black, brown, and they are fairly hairy unlike a domestic pig. They grunt like pigs. The dog decided to chase them, not a cool idea.

I should say something about walking up a stream/riverbed. The advantages are that it’s easy to follow the path because it’s just a matter of walking up the riverbed because the riverbed is the path. Another advantage, although on this walk I was going uphill, because I was going upstream or walking upstream it didn’t feel steep because as I was walking along the bed it was a very slow gentle climb and that was nice. But there are obviously disadvantages. Riverbeds are of course full of stones they can be very small (pebbles) even like sand, but there are also rounded stones, middle sized cones and very large stones and after a while it can get a bit uncomfortable walking all the time on this type of riverbed.  Walking all the time on boulders in the bed of the stream (let’s say more than 60% of the walk, the other sections of the path are in a good condition) by the time I got back from the walk I was feeling pretty tired of walking on this kind of surface. I suspect it is not great for your knees and back. That’s the impression I got, it maybe just my impression.

Anyway, the Barranco de Boquella is a different kind of world and the world was beautiful of course. It’s an enormous ravine. Because it was a stream/river and although it was dry, there seems to be reasons for this as it’s been raining here for the whole of the last week. So, it’s not got water and there has been a drought in Spain (despite recent rain) but at the bottom of the valley, at the beginning of the walk, there are two big industrial style wells with very large pipelines as if they were carrying oil rather than water.

The “pozos” (wells) have sweet names: Santa Bárbara and Virgen de Gracia. Their religious names appear to justify the overexploitation of a natural resource as if mankind has some kind of divine blessing for destroying ecosystems. There was also an open channel of fast flowing water, probably for irrigation purposes. So, the river/stream is dry because at some point the water has had its route diverted to fill these industrial strength wells (or water deposits).

Of course, there is water in some parts of the stream (it’s quite nice because they are like mini ponds and might be a good swimming opportunity in warmer weather) and there are moments when you have to get out because there’s actually serious amounts of water. This happened to me at one point and I thought I could go through that area but actually you can’t, you have to get out and scramble onto the mountainside if not you’ll land up getting wet. The dog loved it.

You walk up the ravine/gorge till you get to Casa Boix. It’s really a ruin which is a pity because it’s absolutely beautiful and I can see why someone would want to build a house there. The whole walk was fantastic. I can’t recommend it more.

You can check out the trail here:

https://www.wikiloc.com/hiking-trails/barranco-de-boquella-to-casa-boix-125796963