We took off on a bendy but fantastic road through the olive hills to Priego de Cordoba, a large town that was packed with shoppers this morning. I guess because of its larger size, there are no normal public car parks like there are in other towns we have visited. The car parks are underground parkades, so we parked a long way away from the town centre at the side of the road.
Unfortunately, we were going by a hike that had GPS points pinned that we found online, but the start and finish points made absolutely no sense. After wasting time, we started to follow the description in the hiking booklet and after several km, it made no sense to us either. So we walked the few km back into town and went to the tourist information point.
The people in there were wonderful, very friendly, and thankfully, a young guy who has obviously been on the hike and who could speak very good English, gave us explicit directions of how to get to the starting point. Turns out, we had been on the correct route but did not go far enough as it looked totally wrong to us. Good thing we checked at the tourist office because the booklet gave a wrong route later on. The tourist people gave us a small bottle of olive oil, a town sticker and maps.
We headed back toward the trail head and had to endure a road walk of 6 km through the olive hills once we left the town. It was a bit surprising to see how steep the olive hills are. We passed by many cortijos or farmhouses, they farm olives and there are quite a variety of animals, including dogs, chickens, turkeys, goats etc. We finally got to the end of the road and had lunch under an ancient and huge olive tree.
We passed the last cortijo and started gaining a lot of elevation through the olive hills. Then we had to head up the mountain, although time was starting to run short, we decided the road walk was not rewarding so had to go up. They don’t tend to build switchback trails, the trail just heads straight up the mountain and was really steep.
We got really close to the summit but thought we had better bail out as we were high enough for views and we had surpassed our deadline of 4:30. Good thing we bailed out as going down was rather dicey with loose scree underfoot, our hiking poles were very useful.
Then we had our never ending road walk which seemed to take forever as the hike was a bit too long considering our misadventures earlier in the day. We stopped in at the wonderful fountain for a couple of minutes but had to keep going as it was getting dark and we didn’t reach the car until 7:30, we walked for approximately 8 hours and something like 22 km.
We wished we had more time to visit the town of Priego de Cordoba as they have a really nice historical centre and it is a good walking town as well.
The fountain is called Fuente del Rey, it is a baroque fountain of three connecting pools lined with 139 gargoyles (many seem to be missing) spitting water into the pools, in the centre is Neptune and Aphrodite on a horse-drawn carriage. There are concrete benches all along the fountain, it would be lovely place to spend some time.
As usual, click on the pictures to enlarge....
Some type of grouse?
Walk down the road through olive hills
Getting closer to the mountains
Views from La Tinosa
Pretty valley to the south, this approach to La Tinsoa is reputedly easier
This does not look steep, but it is
Fuenta del Rey
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