We had the opportunity to have lunch there today — a delicious couscous (OK, not Paleo, but today was my cheat day!) — after which they gave us a tour of the center, which basically amounts to a huge old, restored Andalucian home with the following facilities:

• An arts and crafts workshop
• A carpentry workshop
• A pottery shop
• An industrial kitchen, where artesanal olive oil, honey and jams are made
• An artesanal museum
• A large living area
• A large, rural accommodations area where guests can come for a relaxing weekend in the countryside

The center operates an attached store, called Arte de Mis Manos (“My Handmade Art”), where they sell basically all of the products produced in the center, including woodworks, pottery, food products, teas, you name it! The store is open for three hours each morning during the week, and can be opened on request for visitors arriving during the weekend.

It’s a great center, working for a great cause, and producing some of the best quality products in the regions. What they need now is marketing! :-) So if you’re reading this, and live in the area, be sure to plan a visit soon. It’s worth your while! Here’s a couple links to the location, followed by a video and some photos:

• Arte de Mis Manos | Google Map | Center Website

Here’s a video of Pascual (who lives with his wife and children at the center), giving us a demonstration of his pottery skills. The stuff he makes is amazing!

And here are some photos we took during the visit.

We left Marbella this morning around 10am, heading up the Carretera de Ronda where we stopped (as usual) at the Venta Navisillo for a late-morning breakfast. It was an absolutely beautiful morning — cool, crisp, sunny and blue. Perfect for a bike ride.

Parking the car in Cartajima, the wife and kids left for a day of hiking and gathering fallen chestnuts, while I took off on the mountain bike to scout out a route I’d been looking at for a while.

My route returned to the Carretera de Ronda, direction San Pedro, for about 10km to the Puerto Madroño, where I turned right onto the rural scenic route to Pujerra. The road is narrow, quiet, barely transited by cars and spectacularly beautiful this time of year.

Passing a couple of chestnut-gathering families, I rolled into Pujerra after another 14km. Riding through the town I passed a restaurant with some amazing BBQ smells, and made a note to head back this way later for dinner.

Leaving Pujerra, on the left is a newly paved road towards Juzcar. It was this road I’d been meaning to check out, as I wasn’t previously aware it even existed.

A friend had told me it contains some steep climbs and he wasn’t kidding. It was a serious climb into Juzcar (though, I have to say, the reverse direction back to Pujerra looked worse!)

Juzcar came into some recent fame, as it painted itself (the entire town) in Smurf blue, to become an official Smurfs III town. And holy cow what that did for its tourism. What was previously a dead town had at least 100 cars parked alongside its meager entrance today, including a small team of police directing things.

I immediately headed out, back towards Cartajima, to meet up again with my wife and kids, who’d collected four giant bags of chestnuts.

We headed back to Pujerra for lunch at the BBQ restaurant. The service was, well, pretty awful (mind, you it was late for them to be serving us lunch) but the food was great! I had a solomillo iberico, and it was cooked perfectly and served with a delicious Argentinian Chimichuri sauce. Delicious!

The route can be viewed, and GPS track downloaded, at the following page on Garmin Connect:

This Saturday we visited another intriguing and spectacular area of Andalucia — the city of El Chorro, and its historic “Camino del Rey.” El Chorro, about an hour northeast of Marbella, is a small city that sits at the base of the “Desfiladero de los Gaitanes,” one of the world’s most impressive canyons, with a depth of over 700 meters (2,300 ft). Back in 1901, the King of Spain, wishing to visit the El Chorro electrical installation had a pathway — known as the “Camino del Rey” — constructed along the side of the canyon walls.

The trail wasn’t maintained, and eventually began collapsing in places. Finally, it was permanently closed in the year 2000, after three people died due to collapsing sections and accidents. Several meters of the trailhead were removed to prevent access, but still today, though, people regularly climb a vertical ledge of the wall to access, and traverse the trail.

As you can see from the photos below, the area is simply amazing to visit. The scale of the canyon seems monumental, especially when experienced up close. After having lunch at an fantastic venta, we sat and watched climbers scaling the wall, accessing the trail, and climbing the bridge. Later, we hiked to the point at which people begin to scale the wall; at that point truly appreciating the risk these people take.

We then walked through the cool train tunnel, to access views of the camino from inside the canyon.

And, to really appreciate the danger of this trail, have a look at the following video of someone walking along the camino. You won’t believe your eyes.

We left Marbella around 10 AM, stopping for breakfast at the Venta Navasilla on the mountain road to Ronda. Passing Ronda towards Sevilla, we took the turn-off to Benoajan. Just before Montejaque, we turned left towards Cortes de la Frontera. In Cortes, we took the round-about to the left in the center of town, and descended down to the sister-town of Estación de Cortes. After crossing the railroad tracks, we turned left, and about 1 km later turned right (just after crossing the bridge).

You would never know that this turn leads to the start of one of the most beautiful hikes around, leading to a Spanish national monument — the famous Cañon de las Buitreras. (We’ve tried to find the canyon several times from the other side, Gaucin, but never managed.) Anyway, after about 2 km the road turns into a dirt road, and winds up and down the valley. After a total of about 6 or 7 km, the road forks at the top of the hill.

Our path goes off to the right, and we considered continuing on with the jeep, but then decided to park. Was a good decision, as the quality of the road deteriorates, and becomes very exposed. Hiking approximately 3 km down this road, we arrived at a ruined albergue (or ruined refuge). Another family there told us about the trail leading down from the fig tree patch, down the side of the mountain and into the canyon, eventually arriving at an old water-duct that serves as a bridge, known as the Puente de los Alemanes, built in 1918.

(If you’re standing at the albergue, to the right are some fig trees. To find the small trail, walk to the far corner of the fig patch (the corner closest to the canyon), and look for the tiny single-track trail.)

Walking down the barely marked trail, we eventually came to some rocks with bored out steps leading down to the bridge. The canyon at this point is about 5 meters across, and 100 meters deep and high. Although we didn’t let the kids descend down the rocks to the bridge, we (parents) did, and it was impressive. The views down over the side were stunning, and creepy. Across the bridge was a tunnel in the side of the canyon, leading eventually to the continuation of the trail on the other side (which leads to Gaucin.)

We returned up the hill to the albergue to have lunch, and then on back up the dirt road to the Jeep, to end the fantastic day.

Below is the GPS track of the hike, a selection of photos, and a link to the full photo set at Flick.

GPS Track File (ZIP archive)

The full Flickr photo set is here.

We parked the car just down the turnoff in Benaojan, at the base of the path that leads up the rocky zig-zag (not to be confused with the similar, and perhaps better-known rocky zig-zag in Montejaque). After suiting up in our gear and packs, we started up the steep zig-zag in the warm morning sun.

After cresting the top, we descended the long narrow path, that runs along the rocky mountainside above the famous Cueva del Gato. At the bottom of the mountain, we continued along the flat dirt road alongside the train track, arriving after a total of about 5 km to the crossing; on the left, the dirt road up towards Montejaque, and to the right, Ronda. We stopped here in the shade next to the river, for lunch and a quick nap.

The dirt track up towards the Ermita de Montejaque is very familiar; we do this portion of the trail every year during both the 101 km de Ronda and Homenaje events. It’s a gentle climb until the very end, where it concludes in a very steep 600 meter climb to the Ermita.

Leaving the Ermita, we took the popular rocky zig-zag down towards Montejaque, and then followed the road back down to the starting point in Benaojan.

The day was marked with scenes of springtime — lots of interesting flowers, insects, and newborn animals.

Attached below is the GPS track file (for others wanting to do this hike), and a series of pictures. You can also view the full set of pictures on the Flickr set.

Benaojan-to-Montejaque-Loop-GPX-Track.zip

Hotels in Ronda

We traveled to Ronda on Saturday afternoon, with plans of overnighting in town, to avoid an early morning drive from Marbella on the race day. Since we booked late, the only hotel we could fine with vacancy was the Hotel Colón. As the hotel sits precisely on the starting line, next to the Alameda, we thought we’d lucked out!

But then we checked in.

First bad omen was when the receptionist said that we had to be out of the hotel by noon the following day (Sunday). This is the first time we’ve ever been to an event like this, and where the local hotel didn’t allow us to return to the room late the following day to take a shower. (It’s not like they had guests arriving on Sunday night.)

So we spent the afternoon exploring Ronda, and ended the evening with a pizza. Returning to the Hotel Colón at about 9:30 PM, we hit the sack early.

Three hours later we realized we’d made a terrible mistake. Not only does the hotel’s location coincide with the race start, it also coincides with the busiest evening-time spot in all of Ronda. Loud cars, loud people, buzzing motorcycles, shouting, bottle breaking, police sirens, you name it. An orchestra of noise.

At midnight, I’d decided to simply go home. Anybody familiar with Spanish nightlife knows that kind of chaos goes on all night long, and I wasn’t about to sit there all night, and then ride 70 km the following day, having done no training at all (more about that later).

We left the hotel shortly after midnight, unsure whether we were simply going home, or to another hotel. Fortunately, we happened to ask the public parking lot attendant if he knew of a hotel outside of Ronda, and he pointed us to the Hotel Don Benito.

Wow. What a difference! Just 4km outside Ronda sits the four star Hotel Don Benito. Beautiful. Friendly staff. And quiet! We were able to have a gloriously peaceful night.

Considering the one-star Hotel Colon was 50 Euros per night, excluding breakfast, and the four-star Hotel Don Benito was 60 Euros per night, including an awesome breakfast, I’m pretty sure I know where we’ll be staying in the future.

Race Day

After a breakfast of fruits, toasted rolls with olive oil, cereals and coffee, we headed off to the Alameda for the start of the event, where we were greeted by 1,000 cyclists and 700 runners.

Not having touched a bicycle in over six months, I was more than slightly concerned about my chances of finishing the thing, and so I moved to the very back of the group. At 9:30 sharp, the gun was fired and we were off.

The race made an initial, insanely muddy loop around Ronda, and then it was off to Montejaque, where we climbed up to the famous Ermita. I’ve done this climb many times, and it’s hard. I was able to stay on the bike for most of it, but had to walk at the very top, where both the inclination and trail erosion from the recent rains made it impossible to stay on the bike.

Back to Ronda, we hit the 30 km point, where I’d planned to do a self-assessment and possibly quit. However, I felt surprisingly good, and decided to continue. The route then left Ronda for a north westerly loop of about 40 km. I started feeling better and better, and ended the race passing many people and feeling strong. I can only attribute that to the Powerbar gels which I’d decided to take religiously each 45 minutes.

My finishing time was 5h:30m, over an hour better than last year’s time. (But still, that’s relative. Spaniards love cycling; over 80% of the people in my category still beat me!)

I arrived just in time to setup the camera to capture Pino finishing the run, in fourth place overall, and second place in her category. AMAZING!

After the race, we downed our recovery drinks, had a warm sandwich and beer offered by the organization, and sat looking at the gorgeous Ronda countryside waiting for the awards ceremony. At 5:30 PM, Pino was awarded her 2nd place trophy — and there was no mention of my finishing in the bottom twenty percent. (Unfair!)

In addition to Pino’s performance, others from Marbella did well too. Our friends Aurora and Juan finished first and second in their categories, respectively (in the 23 km run option).

All in all, an absolutely fantastic day in Ronda. Looking forward to next year.

Photos

Map of the 70km bike route.

Altitude profile of the bike route.

Start of the race.

Pino running through the local towns.

Climbing up to the Montejaque Ermita.

Pino’s finishing second!.

Team Marbella did great!

It was a muddy, muddy day.

The trails begins its way up through the woods, and then takes a sharp left, winding up in altitude through some zig-zag switchbacks, before breaking out of the forest into the higher (and rocky) region of the mountain. We turned around just short of the peak, and took in the views of Sierra Prieta and the lakes around Ardales.

After finishing one of our favorite hikes in the region, we of course returned to have lunch at our favorite Venta Verita, near Tolox. Rosada and calamares a la plancha. Yum-yum!

I’ve attached a few photos below.

Be sure to check out the full set of photos on Flickr.

For quite some time, we’ve been wanting to visit the river source (“nacimiento,” in Spanish), having heard that it’s a particularly beautiful place. Unfortunately, however, neither the routes we’ve found in books, nor the ones we found on the web have accurately described how to find the place. On our first attempt, two weeks ago, we simply couldn’t find it.

This past weekend, we tried again, and this time we did find it. In this blog article, we’ll describe how to get there, and point you to the trip page we created at EveryTrail.com, where you can download the GPS track file, to ensure your own ability to find it.

Getting to the starting point.

We began by driving to Yunquera, about an hour’s drive into the Sierra de las Nieves region north of Marbella, Spain. There’s a round-about as you’re leaving Yunquera (with a green gas station on the left). Take the second exit in this round-about, heading down a narrow road, staying to your right. After less than a kilometer, you’ll pass a recreation area on your left. Just after this recreation area, is a small road that leads off to the left, through a row of trees on both sides. (At the beginning of this road, is a Junta de Andalucia sign announcing a number of trails in the area.)

After about three or four kilometers, there a road off to the right, just as the road you’re own curves relatively sharply to the left. The road to the right is marked with what looks like an aqueduct passing overhead. Turn right on this road, and park your car about 20 meters later, at the junction of the next road which also branches off to the right.

This next road off to the right is where you’ll be walking. You can’t drive it, thankfully, as the neighbors have put up a chain across the road to prevent all but those willing to walk from visiting the Nacimiento del Rio Grande.

Path to the Nacimiento del Rio Grande.

After about 700 meters walking down this road, there is a sharp curve to the left. This curve is marked by a “plazoleta”, or “small plaza”; basically a little area where cars would have, in the past, perhaps parked. On the right side of the road, in this curve, a trail begins to descend just between two rocks. It is this trail that leads down to the river. If you miss this curve, and continue down the road, you’ll come to a point (about 200 meters later) where you’ll see a house on the right (with a heavily plant-covered outside garage), and (looking down the hill) a water reservoir on the left. If you get here, you’ve gone too far. (Turn around and walk about five minutes back up the road.)

From the path leading down to the river, it’s about a 200 meter walk. You’ll eventually come to a set of stairs on your left, that lead steeply down to a small dam that built on the river. At this point, you can do one of two things:

1. You can walk across the dam, climb up onto a small water aqueduct and follow it to the river source cave on the right. In August, there wasn’t a lot of water, but we reckoned this area must be spectacular in the winter. It’s the perfect place for a picnic.

1. Instead of crossing the dam, climb up onto it, and straight off it (on the other side, but without crossing), and follow the path down to a pool of crystal clear water, backed up by the dam, and suitable for swimming.

Attached below are some additional resources for you:

1. You can view our trip photos at Flickr, in this photo set.

2. You can download the GPS track file which begins at the point we parked the car from the trip page at EveryTrail.com.

Every May, thousands of people from around the world gather in Ronda, Spain, to subject themselves to the grueling endurance event known as the 101km of Ronda, hosted and organized by the Spanish professional military, La Legión. A bit lesser known, this group also organize a warm-up even in March, known as the Homenaje de los 101km de Ronda. While I’ve done the 101km three times now, this was the first year that I participated in the Homenaje.

This past Sunday, we got up early–especially early, given the switch to Daylight Savings Time–dropped the kids off at the grandparents, and headed off to Ronda. I’d planned to do the 70km mountain bike ride, while my wife planned to do the 43km running option. We got to Ronda about an hour later, parked and headed to the start area.

And we’re off!

At 9:30 am, I and 1499 other MTB’ers took off from the Alameda, in what would turn out to be one of the hardest rides I’ve ever done. A half hour later, Pino set off on what would, for her, be one of her most successful races.

The route left from Ronda, made its way down to Benaoján, up to Montejaque, up to the Ermita de Montejaque, down to the valley, up to Arriate, back up to Ronda, down the famous “Cuesta del Cachondeo”, then back up to the Ermita de Montejaque (on the other side), and then back to Ronda through the same route via Benaoján on which we started the day.

The route planners packed in just about as much climbing within the 70km, as they do within the 101km. Have a peek at the route profile:

While the course would have been hard on a good day, things got terribly complicated by the weather, which is particularly unstable this time of year around Ronda. While most of the day was cold and thickly overcast, it’d occasionally clear up, becoming beautiful, but sweltering hot.

And just by the time you’d get the jacket off, the sun would duck behind a cloud, bringing back the bone chilling cold. Eventually, it began to rain, finally turning into hail.

The wet weather led to some awfully muddy conditions, and since the course was practically all climbing or descending, there were a lot of crashes. (I crashed three times, but at least the soft muddy landing helped!) And with the constant change of cold-hot-cold temperatures, the mud sort of baked into rock-hard clumps on the bike.

The finish.

All in all, a hard, unpleasant ride, much of which was spent walking up and down muddy inclines. I finished the 70km course in seven hours; 15 minutes more than it took me to do the entire 101km course last year!

On the positive side, Pino had a great running race, finishing 30 minutes faster than her time in the Homenaje last year, and ending up fourth overall, and second in her category! Go Pino!

The raced ended just in time, as the weather turned for the worse, covering the area just outside the city in a snowstorm:

The possessed car wash.

The day wouldn’t have been complete, without a hair-raising experience at, of all places, a car wash.

Just outside Ronda, we stopped to wash my mountain bike at a “high-pressure” do-it-yourself car wash. Very tired from the race, feeling mellow from a beer, my mind was in another place when I inserted the Euro, and pressed the “Wash” button. What I heard next sounded like something between a grenade launcher and the space shuttle taking off.

The little faded pictogram on the wall showing a man holding the water pistol as “Step 1″ needs to have some supplemental text like, oh,

“WARNING: This machine is driven by a NUCLEAR pump. YOU WILL DIE! if you’re not holding on to that pistol with ALL THE MIGHT YOU CAN MUSTER when you insert that coin!”

Before I knew what was going on, the rocketfuel-propelled car wash pistol was violently shooting up and down, left and right, thrashing anything in its path. I instinctively and instantly dove in front of the Jeep, covering my head, and hoping I wouldn’t get killed. Meanwhile, I could only imagine what was getting smashed to pieces overhead.

Finally, I reached up on one pass of the enraged pistol, and managed to grab the hose. The darn thing nearly ripped my arm off, but I somehow management to wrestle it to the grown (and getting soaked in the process).

In the end, I avoided getting hit, but the Jeep suffered some major dents. :-( I sure learned my lesson.

For those interested, I’ve got more photos up on a dedicated Flickr set.

With advanced reservation, you can catch the bus to Alto Chorrillo from either Capileira, or, as we did, several kilometers up at the Hoya del Portillo. From Alto Chorrillo, you can hike to the Refugio de Poqueira, down to the city of Trévelez, up to the famous peak Mulhacén, or over to the beautiful Siete Lagunas (seven lakes).

As is typical in Spanish national parks, the trails are not well marked. Although we asked several people for directions, we were led ambiguously towards the Mulhacén, instead of the Siete Lagunas, which we realized after speaking with some folks heading down. Rather than turning around, and hiking all the way back down to the Alto Chorrillo to start over, we decided to hike straight up and over the mountain ridge, to join up with the trail which leads around the other side of the mountain to the Siete Lagunas.

Contrary to what many told us, the subsequent trail that leads down to the Siete Lagunas is actually marked, by the largish pile of stones shown in the following photo. (Note that on my EveryTrail.com page for this trip, I’ve included the two Siete Lagunas turn-off waypoints in the downloadable GPS track file.)

Traversing the mountain on the Trévelez side of the Mulhacén, at about 3,000 meters of altitude, we began closing in on the hidden Seven Lakes. It’s a stunning view from here, looking down the valley towards Trévelez. (Turns out, we were actually lucky to even be here! There was so much fog at the Alto Chorrillo, that the bus driver strongly recommended we spend the night at the Refugio Poqueira, instead of risking not finding the lakes and getting lost. We had a GPS though, felt adventurous, and decided to head to the lakes. It was the right decision, since we ended up climbing out of the fog at about 2,800 meters into gorgeous and stable weather.)

At about 7:30 PM, we crested the final ridge, looked down the steep slope into the gully below the Mulhacén, we saw our destination, Laguna Hondera, the lowest (and largest) of the seven lakes.

Although we sort of expected it, we were caught a little off-guard at how cold and windy it was. It seemed that the natural gully channeled cold winds directly off the Mulhacén down the valley towards Trévelez. We bundled up, quickly pitched the tent, and headed off to bed.

The next morning, we woke up about 7:00 am to an absolutely gorgeous sunrise over the valley.

We had a leisurely breakfast while watching the early-morning wild mountain goats and deer having a drink by the lake, and the other campers (two groups) waking and stretching by their tents. After packing everything up, we climbed out of the gully, and retraced our path back up the mountain, and back down to the Alto Chorrillo, where we caught the 12:15 am bus back down to the Hoya de Portillo.

What I really noticed about this trip, was the affect altitude makes. We only walked about 7km on Saturday, and 6km on Sunday, but I felt exhausted when we got back to the car. Of course, carrying much more equipment than usual had something to do with it, but even more so (I believe) the lack of oxygen at that altitude!

And, of course, it wouldn’t have been a proper trip to the Alpujarras, of course, without a stop off at Casa Julio, in Pampeneira for a good old Plato Alpujareño (this time with migas, instead of potatoes.)

Resources:

• Flickr photo set.

• Full trip details, including downloadable GPS track and waypoints. at EveryTrail.com: