Plank Road: Sierra Subbetica

To the north of our cottage lies the Sierra Subbetica, another limestone range. The Subbetica is a protected nature park which is devoid of foreign travellers, who tend to bypass this area. It is rather difficult to get information on the walks in the Subbetica, we are trying to use a old booklet that is in both Spanish and English, but something has been lost in the translation. The start of the walk was impossible to find, I don’t think it actually exists, so we saw a trail on the other side of the canyon from a mirador on the highway and headed over there to start the walk.

The Bailon river at the bottom of the canyon appears dry most of the year. However, the water is subterranean and is flowing under the surface. The cracks and crevices are widening and then collapsing, resulting in the deepening of the canyon.

There used to be an olive oil train that ran through the Subbetica joining all of the little villages. The Spanish have transformed the old railway bed into a via verde or greenway which can be biked or walked. There are other more interesting looking walks that we may try to figure out, rather than taking the via verde, but it would be great on a bicycle.

The small villages in Andalucia are referred to as pueblos blancos, or white villages, they are numerous, compact and the buildings are all white. The village at the top of the Subbetica park is called Zuheros, and that is where we went today. It is a very pretty little village with an old ruined Moorish castle at the top of the hill. The village is backed by the jagged and rugged limestone cliffs.

Since our Spanish is pretty bad, we couldn’t really get across what we were trying to find and I think the trail head that the booklet refers to, does not exist, so we walked over to the trail we saw from the mirador and started to walk.

It was an uphill climb along the canyon through some very nice rock, the griffon vultures were screaming overhead, but they are virtually impossible to photograph. We passed a few Spanish people on the trail and then everyone vanished, it was siesta time and only the loony foreigners, meaning us, were out roaming around during siesta.

Since we still thought we could do a loop and find the trail, we overshot the turnoff by about an hour of steady climbing. When we got to a clearing up top, there were sign posts, but none indicated a route back to Zuheros, so we needed to go back the way we came. Back near the Bailon river we saw a trail going up the canyon so we took it, since curiosity is our downfall, we had to determine if the trail head in the booklet was for real or not. We ended up on the road near the mirador and walked down the road back into town, there was no trail head on this side of the canyon.

As it was still siesta, there were not many about in the village so we drove through the tiny streets and then headed for home. Our quad muscles are in revolt right now, so we may have to have an easy day tomorrow with no climbing.

View of the canyon and walking trail from the mirador