My friend Lorenzo Starnini, a great Italian naturalist and ornithological illustrator, always says, when I praise him for the inexhaustible artistic heritage of his country, that he envies the
variety of almost virgin ecosystems
of ours.
Born in a hyper-urbanized country (like much of rich Europe), for him Spain is the Italy of European naturalists.
Our
vast unhumanized expanses
, he remarks, are as valuable and important to the world as Italian cathedrals and museums.
You are surprised that they get so little attention around here.
I have often remembered our talks in the small town of Soria where I have spent most of this strange year, during the long walks through the mountains of the Iberian system that have replaced more ambitious trips.
Straddling Soria, Burgos and La Rioja there are pine forests, holly trees, beech forests, waterfalls, glacial lagoons and remote villages
that make you forget that you are really in the heart of an industrialized country of 47 million inhabitants.
This autumn does not lend itself to distant destinations either, but the
mountains of La Demanda, Urbión and Cebollera
They are still right here, a few hours from Madrid, Barcelona, Zaragoza or Bilbao, offering the respite of a noble and serene landscape and contact with everything that the virus has not touched and can be enjoyed as before (by some at least, already that
Castilla y León
and
La Rioja
maintain their perimeter closures until November 23 and 29, respectively).
And it turns out to be a lot: all that in which humans play little part.
enlarge photo cova fernández
You can enter these mountains through the Soria
Valley of Razón
, a river that already promises from its name, sheltered by the foothills of the Cebollera and Carcaña mountains and on the border with the Cameros in Rioja.
If one arrives from the moorland north of Soria and has visited the sparse and almost metaphysical ruins of
Numancia
, the abrupt impression of change in the tone of the landscape is even greater.
The rough edges are suddenly tempered: we go up a limpid watercourse between
poplar
groves
and willow
trees
, large meadows
where
herds of blond and almost mythological Limousine and Pyrenean cows
graze
, pastures of
ash trees
and
centenary
oaks
and pollarded for centuries to resemble giant menorahs of seven arms.
On the slopes, the
Scots pine groves
are interspersed with
melojares
and the first patches of beech that one encounters in these mountains.
The pre-Romanesque hermitage of San Esteban, in Viguera (La Rioja).
DANIEL ACEVEDO (PILAR REVILLA)
Popular architecture reinforces the impression of having entered a
secret or fabled alpine principality
.
You can no longer see the adobe, the brick masonry and the squat volumes of other Soria villages, but rather large houses free of corners and ashlar frames, marked gabled roofs and white walls: they remind you of eastern Asturian villages or Basque farmhouses. .
They are his milk sisters:
the famous Soria butter was produced here
, in Valdeavellano de Tera, Sotillo or Aldehuela, thanks to its dairy farming.
It brought a prosperity that shines in its coats of arms, in its good-looking churches and hermitages and in the towns of Indians and holidaymakers from the interwar period, which also recall those of the north (my favorite is
Villa Florita
, in Sotillo del Rincón, of a curious
art
Egyptian-Soriano
deco
).
enlarge photo Details of the interior of the hermitage of San Esteban.
JC MUÑOZ (ALAMY)
Each town in the valley can see the others in the distance, and the ancient roads that link them are clean and ready to be traveled, taking care to leave the closures for the cattle that one comes across as they were.
The balance between traditional activity and welcoming new visitors is exemplary around here.
The washhouses, fountains, mills and chapels of the valley are restored and in use to continue offering water and shelter to walkers.
You can walk a lot in the flat through the great plain of common pastures, and then there are the two classic walks of sandwich and water bottle.
One is
the comeback of the course of the Reason
to the place of Chorrón
, a fluvial pool of book on the shore of pastures that are now strewn with lunch breakers, the last flowers of the year before the first snowfall.
They are grazed by cows that are already descending to winter in the valley, and their sturdy stone huts resemble those of the Picos de Europa.
You can also ascend from
Molinos de Razón
to the hidden
Cebollera lagoon
, the first of many others of glacial origin that exist in these mountains.
The cattle track leaves behind
pastures, pine groves, oak groves where the red fruits of rowan and holly appear
.
Further on,
a path between rockrose and heaths
leads to the lagoon at the foot of slopes that may already have traces of snow.
The silence of the sheet of water under the bare slopes and scree is impressive, and going down back to civilization it almost seems that one is returning from the Scottish highlands.
There it will continue, undaunted, lonely, reflecting the sky and curled by the wind, until it freezes with the great winter snowfalls.
El acebal de Garagüeta, in Soria.
B. SCHMID (ALAMY)
The Acebal of Garagüeta
The road goes up the head of the valley to go to
Vinuesa
, but you have to retrace it to find, almost in front of its mouth, another of those secret jewels of the natural heritage that my Italian friend envies and that we ourselves know so little about.
The
Acebal de Garagüeta
is the
largest holly forest in Europe,
perched on the slopes of the
Montes Claros mountain range
and a stone's throw from the town of
Arévalo de la Sierra
and its visitor reception center (650 97 93 58; patrimonionatural.org );
the first time I visited it, years ago, I had to look for it and find it by pure luck and by asking the neighbors.
There are other holly trees in the area, such as Oncala, but Garagüeta is the most spectacular.
And right now it's at its best, when the trees and shrubs are in full fruiting and female holly trees are covered in bright clusters of red drupes, before the snow makes the climb harder.
It is a fantastic and almost surreal landscape, halfway between Lewis Carroll and Tim Burton
: where the forest is clearing, the horses and cows of the nearby villages have grazed the sloping meadows into carpets of
manicured
grass
blade by blade, as if every night an army of gardener goblins armed with nail clippers trimmed it.
They have also browsed the
spiked, glossy leaves of fir trees
as consummate masters of topiary art: the exempted trees look like aces of spades and hearts, rockets, piggy banks, or red and green armillary spheres.
They form sestiles or vegetable tunnels where cattle roost in the shade in summer and labyrinths of winding paths where Alice's rabbit or an army of cards could appear playing croquet with flamingos and hedgehogs.
Further on,
the forest closes in and its sharp leaves make it impenetrable
, except when a river of stones of glacial origin crosses it.
At this time everything is red
: the holly fruits, the rose hips and the albares thorn, the leaves of the country maples, the mustard trees and maguillos that stand out from the thicket.
Be careful with the red: apart from being toxic, the fruits and branches of the holly are very protected and you cannot take even a branch of pre-Christmas decoration.
If the Queen of Hearts herself orders heads to roll, it will be well deserved.
enlarge photo The waterfalls of Puente Ra (La Rioja).
D. ACEVEDO (PILAR REVILLA)
The acebal and the Razón valley guard on both sides the road that goes into the Sierra de Cebollera and enters La Rioja through the
Tierra de Cameros
: another wild region with a lot of personality recognized as
a biosphere reserve by UNESCO
.
From
Villoslada de Cameros,
with its imposing mountain houses, the path that borders the
Iregua river starts
and ascends to the beech forests and waterfalls of
Puente Ra
.
It was enough that the immense herds of merino de la Mesta stopped grazing these mountains for their truly superb beech forests to recover,
at the height of those of Irati in Navarra or Ponga in Asturias
.
In autumn and winter,
the Saltín waterfall
and other
terraced ones
, with water as abundant as it is icy, are of wild beauty.
You have to make an effort (figurative and literal) to put them aside and ascend to the meadows and sheepfolds where the imposing factory of the porticoed hermitage and
the house of the santero de la Virgen de Lomos de Orios is located
, an ancient spiritual center of the Cameros already the one that pilgrims not one but two annual pilgrimages.
It is said that she is a very miraculous virgin who has thrown a cable to the shepherds through these solitudes for centuries: on the entrance lintel to the hermitage, a Picassian lizard carved from cow horns remembers the miracle for which, with her intercession , saved one of them from the attack of a gigantic and hungry lizard.
It has, as a good hermitage, its hermit:
Roberto Pajares,
El Pájaro
, who is not as fierce a lion as he is sometimes painted (he is a painter himself) and he showed me the shepherds' hut that he rebuilt stone by stone in one of the sheepfolds ;
the silhouette carved in the stone by one of the artists whom he invited to work in the place, and the collection of popular baroque votive offerings that the temple preserves (such as that of the possessed young local who ended up vomiting, after many prayers, a fat toad gnawing at his guts).
Villoslada is a good base to get to know the Tierra de Cameros well, with other superb beech groves such as
Monte Real
, near
Ajamil;
ancient hermitages such as
the cave of Santo Domingo de Silos
, near Laguna de Cameros, or the very interesting pre-Romanesque hermitage of
San Esteban de Viguera
, with frescoes from the Middle Ages and sheltered by an immense cave that allows to save the tiles to its plastered volumes and curiously modern.
The Riojan town of Villoslada de Cameros.
D. BELENGUER (AGE)
The most beautiful town
From Villoslada you go up the Mayor river to leave behind
Montenegro de Cameros
, the only Soria enclave in the region, and enter the narrow and beautiful valley of the Urbión river through its port.
Viniegra de Abajo,
which in 2016 was chosen as the most beautiful town in Spain in a popular contest, here acts as the unofficial capital
of the Siete Villas region
.
The title is good if it draws attention to this remarkable, prosperous and well-cared for town: its large Indian mansions would not detract on Parisian boulevards of the
belle epoque
, along with the schools and laundries paid for by the neighbors who emigrated at the beginning of the century, on everything to Argentina.
In
La Venta de Goyo
(ventadegoyo.es), apart from eating excellent game and seasonal mushrooms, there are old photos of department stores and Buenos Aires palaces founded by sons of these lands.
It is curious and revealing to see the great metropolis of Buenos Aires connected with these places through the umbilical cord of the emigrated countrymen.
The Monastery of Valvanera, in Anguiano (La Rioja).
M. RAMÍREZ (ALAMY)
According to legend,
the Urbión lagoon
was also connected to the sea, the
wildest, most remote and mysterious of all those that occupy the base of many of the glacial cirques of these mountain ranges:
an intact high mountain ecosystem in the heart of Mediterranean Europe
, classified as
a Ramsar area of special interest to birds
, that my ornithologist friend would like.
The path that goes up to it starts near Viniegra, skirting a stream, between meadows, sheepfolds, cabin ruins and
the well-kept hermitage of San Millán
.
It requires effort and long hours of walking.
But once there, under the naked peaks of Urbión, it is not difficult to believe in the legends that speak of its unfathomable depth, of the appearance on its surface of the remains of shipwrecked ships in distant seas or of abyssal monsters that left the bones of the cattle peeled. dead that the most daring shepherds submerged tied by a rope.
From Viniegra you can continue exploring the beautiful Siete Villas and reach the lonely
monastery of Valvanera
(monasteriodevalvanera.es) to spend the night in its pleasant inn and enjoy the views of the valley covered with beech trees in the middle of autumn.
At nightfall, one feels like a traveler from before through these solitudes: the place is left alone, the monks sing their vespers, the campaigns ring and the mist rises from the stream at the feet as soon as the wind stops blowing.
enlarge photo View of the Neila Glacier Lagoons Natural Park (Burgos).
J. Arabaolaza getty images
You can also take the intricate road that leads to Burgos and the
small town of Neila
, already in the Sierra de la Demanda.
It is the best base for visiting the
Neila Glacier Lagoons Natural Park
.
There are seven: Black (not to be confused with Vinuesa, which is better known and visited), Larga, Corta, Brava, de los Patos, de las Pardillas and de la Cascada.
A good route is the one that goes down to
the Cascada lagoon
, the most spectacular: it freezes in winter, and it is easy to see
roe deer, wild boar and deer
.
It also hides the
Los Potros cave
, where the militias of the fearsome
Cura Merino
took refuge
during the War of Independence.
Napoleon himself hated him so much that he even exclaimed: "I prefer the head of that priest to take four Spanish cities!"
Even more remote is the
Las Calderas ravine
, where the Palazuelo River, the snow and the wind have formed very beautiful but icy pools in the rock for bathing even in the height of summer.
The path that goes up to the high mountain pastures of Las Nilsas is delightful, among imposing specimens of ancient yew trees, another relict tree.
Leave the
Chorlón waterfall aside
and go up to the high sheepfolds, surrounded by peaks that reach 2,000 meters.
Again one takes a deep breath and believes in the Alps or the Pyrenees, very far and very close to that maddening noise that never reaches many decibels around here.
Javier Montes
is the author of 'Luz del Fuego' (Anagram).
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