Hiking for beginners

To those fond of hiking, trekking, roaming through the countryside or just curious about discovering new walking routes in and around Tarragona: where to start?

The following editorials have published a whole series of Catalan- or Spanish-language guides useful for exploring the region either walking, biking or driving: Cossetania (Azimut collection); Piolet; Prames. Their websites allow you to order guides online. If you have access to a local library in Catalonia, then you will easily find any of these guides on the shelves. Personally, I find Rafael López-Monné´s series of walks and excursions (entitled ´A peu per les comarques de Tarragona´) - published by Arola Editors and now in 5 handy booklets - the best introduction to hiking and discovering fascinating new places in the amazingly diverse countryside and mountains of the Tarragona province.

Finding English-language guides (or French, German or Dutch-language guides) is slightly more difficult. If Spanish or Catalan is not (yet) your cup of tea, a useful introduction are the rural tourism pages in the family tourism guide (with lists of lots of relevant websites) and the car itinerary booklet published by the Provincial Tourist Office. You can download these booklets (and also order them for free online) on this website. On another page of the Provincial Tourist Office you can order for free online or download a range of other English-language (as well as French and German) booklets that may be useful as well as a map of the province. The hiking brochure they publish now seems to be out of stock - try the website just to see if you can get hold of it.

For professional hikers, thé websites to go are the one of the FEEC - the Catalan federation of ramblers´ and mountaineering associations - and the English-language site of the Catalan Hiking Association.

On these two websites you´ll find lots of information about all the long footpaths (´senders de gran recorregut´ - or in short, GR) - the red-and-white-marked foothpaths of over 50km - and about all the short foothpaths (´senders de petit recorregut´ - or in short, PR) - the yellow-and-white-marked foothpaths of between 10 and 50km. Information about the foothpaths and of course also about mountain refuges, campings, hostals, local ramblers´ associations and a great deal more. On the last website you can buy online route guides in English, which come with maps, for all of the GR paths (you can buy a guide to the entire path or to 10 to 20 km sections of the path) and guides and maps for all of the PR paths. Of the other publishers of maps, the ones worth mentioning are Piolet (with a series of very detailed maps of, e.g., Montsant, Els Ports, the Prades mountains, the Poblet woodlands and Siurana) and the Institut Cartogràfic de Catalunya which publishes topographical maps of all the comarcas on a scale of 1:50.000.

This just to get you started!

Tarraco´s blessed mountains

The Tarragona province has a number of exceptional mountain ranges such as the massifs of Montsant and els Ports which are natural parks. The Poblet woodland, part of the mountains of Prades, is also a protected area with the status of natural area of national interest.

The Montsant natural park (see top picture) lies in the north of the Priorat comarca and is the natural park closest to those holidaying on the Costa Dorada. The ´Holy Mountain´ (which is what Montsant means literally) has historically been a place of spirituality and transcendence, of hidden-away Romanesque chapels and hermitages and of course also home to the oldest Carthusian monastery - Scala Dei or ´God´s Stairway´ - south of the Pyrenees. Even the Muslims (who occupied this land for centuries) called it the ´blessed mountain´. The whole world knows about the Priorat and Montsant wines, some also know about the beauty of the vine-covered slate hills, but far fewer know about the stunningly imposing blocks of conglomerate rock, chasms, caves, gorges and grottoes of the 9,200 hectares of the Montsant natural park. Like els Ports, the Montsant mountain is difficult to access: no vehicles can get here.

The els Ports natural park is probably one of Spain´s wildest - and least-known - mountains, with its deep rugged ravines and its herds of wild mountain goats (which have barely survived anywhere else). Eagles, vultures and falcons are some of the other animal species seen in els Ports. This is a park of over 35,000 hectares, extending into Aragon and Valencia.

The Poblet woodland, on the northern slopes of the Prades mountains, is about a quarter of the size of the Montsant park. These woods (see picture below) were historically part of the property portfolio of the famous Poblet monastery, Spain´s most important Cistercian monastery. This is a dense, leafy wood at great altitude, a refuge of trees and species unusual for these latitudes so close to the Mediterranean, with lots of wildlife, including the wild boar and the peregrine falcon, and a growing network of hiking and biking trails.

It is said that on a clear day, at the summit of the 1,202 metre-high La Baltasana, one can see the els Ports mountains in the south and the Pyrenees in the north.

To allow us to discover these areas we should give credit to the first generation of hikers who have mapped often long-forgotten footpaths, cart tracks and trails of cattle herders, wood choppers and charcoal makers.