WALKING BEHIND NERJA

THE NATIONAL PARK BEHIND NERJA

I have (at the time of writing this in the early days of April 2015) been on only relatively short excursions into the vast National Park (strictly speaking Parque Natural), which includes the Sierras of Tejeda and Almijara.

 I have written about walking from Frigiliana in past posts. One thing I noted was that Frigiliana sits on the border of the Park – so that the unprotected countryside to the south and west is scattered with modern settlements, built here and there with not detectable planning influence; and Frigiliana itself displays its own “Costa” swathe of dense apartment bulidings on the edge of the Higueron gorge, where the Park starts. To the north and east, however, there is no new building and the prospect is mountainous, green and wild.

The demarcation between Costa and Park is also very pronounced inland from Maro, an eastern satellite village of Nerja nestling, if that is the right word, between the coastal cliffs and the motorway.

From Maro, via a grim tunnel under the motorway, you rapidly leave a few small farm buildings behind and ascend into the Park up a barranco – a dry river bed. This is a stony, vegetation-shrouded ascent, which gets steeper and steeper as the Sierra foothills are reached. On a ridge some 600 meters up, next to a rural ruin, you look back towards the coast over green and rocky slopes and cliffs. The dense white buildings of Nerja are in view, along  with the smaller urban patch of Maro.

The urbanisation (or, literally, the “urbanizaciones” , the villa suburbs) are halted and hemmed in by the Park. From the your perspective on the ridge, you can imagine a giant knife slicing off the riband of coastal development, leaving nothing but wild green hills falling away to the sea. This is, no doubt, much how the landscape appeared until recent years.

Turning away from the Costa and daydreams of geo-engineering, the view is one of mountains. A series of ranges march northward with increasing heights. Between are steep valleys, some glacial and dry, others containing rivers.

From the particular ridge above Maro just described, there is a lumpy path down to one of glacial valleys, where the wildness is somewhat abated by a wide track, inviting to cars, which leads up to a well-appointed picnic area. Downhill, it is an easy stroll of a few kilometers to the Caves of Nerja and the bus stop. This is probably the direction you’ll turn if you have just come the way I have described, completing a circuit of just under four hours.

Uphill, a short distance past the picnic area, the car-friendly track ends at a ridge, from which the view is a spectacular mix of green valleys and ridges in the foreground and grim-ish bare peaks further back.

The immediate valley is the deep cut of the Rio Chillar, which eventually finds it way to the sea at Nerja, not always accompanied by any water at that end. Beyond are a couple of steep ridges and then, at this point out of sight, the not quite so deep but seemingly more sheer and rocky gorge of the Rio Higueron, above which stands Frigiliana.

The walk across to Frigiliana ( or vice versa) follows the long distance Gran Senda de Malaga ( which be rendered as the “Great Malaga Trail”)- basically, for this section, an old mule track. It has recently been thoroughly way-marked with new red and white wooden signs and the occasional painted mark. So it is perfectly possible to walk it unguided, if suitably equipped for the weather conditions and the often steep and stony path (walkers do get lost in the hills, sometimes with tragic results; there is a risk in some places of taking a path which proves not to be a path or of just getting disorientated among the numerous ridges and ravines). If starting or ending at the Caves, the Frigiliana walk will take most people at least six hours, allowing for rest and meal stops.

But if you are only an occasional walker of rough hill country tracks, you might feel more relaxed about your first traverse if you join a guided group. A calming guide with a steadying hand is especially helpful when crossing the Rio Chillar. Where the path comes down and, on the other side, goes up, the river, although not wide, is rocky and drops over several short, sharp levels. Crossing with dry feet is a precarious affair of hopping from boulder to boulder, with immersion certain to befall any walker who loses his or her footing (give the guide your phone before hopping off).

For myself, I think that on future walks I’ll wade and eat lunch while drying off on the other side.

Between the Rios Chillar and Higueron, the path goes over a couple of ridges and around the heads of valleys below various of the lower summits of the Almijara. The slopes are covered in scratchy scrubland plants, which provide no shade but would, at the expense of laceration, prevent much of a fall if you were to slip off the path (a possibility, in places, for the clumsy walker).

Either end of the walk between Frigiliana and the Caves is fairly easy. Towards the Caves, there is the vehicle track mentioned, or you can descend into the parallel barranco for much of the way for a pleasant walk along its narrow and impressive canyon. On the approach to Frigiliana, the wonderful gorge of the Higueron is always uplifting. Most of the time its bed is basically a wide and dry stony track. But after heavy rain you are reminded that it is, indeed, a Rio. A broad shallow stream takes over, necessitating that you end your walk with a lot of hopping from side to side (but not of the immersion-threatening kind).

April 2015