Camí De Ronda – Cadaqués, Spain – 4/11/19 - 4 Miles
Hiking in Spain on my birthday – what a gift! Jim and I spent a few days visiting Costa
Brava in Spain with our daughter, Megan, and her partner, Jordi. Our home base
was an Airbnb apartment in L’Escala that allowed us to daytrip up and down the
magnificent Mediterranean coast. I love hiking on my birthday to
remind me of how fortunate I am in health and time and spirit – and this year
was extra-special.
Exactly where in the world are we? Cadaqués is a
coastal town in the province of Girona, Catalonia, Spain. It’s about 100
miles up the coast from Barcelona and about 12 miles from the French border.
Found a souvenir rock
Meg and Jordi explored the food situation while Jim and I
tackled a little bit of the Camí de Ronda around the peninsula. Trail names and
route-finding is a bit messy, and “Camí de Ronda” is a generic name as part of
the GR92 coastal path which runs pretty much the length of Spain. We downloaded
a snippet and did our best to follow it – with mixed results. [Some blogs about hiking in this part of the
world are here and here and here – good luck!]
Walking around the crescent of the town
center. Gee, I wonder what the trail
signs will look like?
Is this right?
Found it! The first of NOT ENOUGH signs
Making progress, but the lack of signage was now a problem
The trail skirts along the bottom edge
A bit of a scramble down a thickly wooded slope with
multiple user paths brought us to this cove
Back on the path (a path)
Past the homes with nice manicured garden terraces, the trail passes empty, overgrown hillsides with stacked-stone terrace
walls that contained olive trees and grapevines in years past
Port Lligat is in sight where we are meeting up with Megan
and Jordi
And here is where we lost the path (photo below). The stone steps go directly
to the water, where presumably boats would be tied up. The iron gate into the
walled garden did not budge. Clearly it
wasn’t possible to walk around the outside of the wall. What else could we do?
Scramble up the neglected hillside, hauling ourselves over
the terrace walls (easy for Jim, difficult for me) and through the dense
vegetation. At first we were encouraged
by a path obviously made by others, but it petered out and we made our own
path.
Meanwhile, Megan and Jordi saw our tiny figures fighting
through rough terrain and wondered, “What the hell are they doing? Why aren’t they on the
path?”
After a half-mile up the hill, around the bend to a road, and
downhill on pavement, we reached level ground and the shoreline at last.
So our hiking adventure was done. Whether the iron gate was
locked or we didn’t try hard enough to move it, that detail is left for the
ages. Walking back through the village in search of
a nice café for a celebratory birthday lunch was just as interesting.
Lunch at Lua
All together we spent 10 spectacular days in Spain, from the
coast to the mountains to the hustle and bustle and museums of Barcelona (I got
pickpocketed on the subway). We ate, we drank, we ate – those Spaniards eat eat
eat! Our trip of a lifetime for 2019!
