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: a century of digging and mapping

The Tarragona-based Catalan Institute of Classical Archeology, in collaboration with the Tarragona city council, has published an inventary of all 843 (!) archeological interventions that have taken place in Tarragona from the end of the 19th century to 2004. Extremely detailed maps and descriptions of all archeological dig-ups. The large Roman monuments of the bi-millenial city have largely been uncovered and studied but they are only part of the fascinating puzzle that is Roman Tarraco. Capital of the huge province of Hispania Citerior and one of the most important provincial capitals in the Western half of the Roman Empire, the city boasted not just a circus, theatre, amphiteatre, forums and temples but was also home to perhaps 40,000 inhabitants living in the residential area of the city, much of which is still being puzzled together by archeologists and historians. Go to the website of the city history museum and download the maps: www.museutgn.com/planimetria.asp. Detailed descriptions of the finds and of all the haps and mishaps of the excavations can be found on: www.museutgn.com/Planimetria/ID_184200918121.pdf.