Soportújar: a nice mountain walk

We missed the turn for the GR 7 shortly out of Soportújar this morning, but we knew that the track we ended up on would bring us to an acequia that we could then use to connect to the GR 7, so we shrugged our shoulders and decided to take a chance on it. Common topics of conversation as we started up:
“How steep do you think this track is?”
“Do you think a car could actually get up this?”
“I really need to stop and take my jacket and fleece off!”
“I wonder if there’s any way to show how steep this is in a photo?”
“Look! There’s Órgiva and the Puente de los Siete Ojos. I think that big rectangular building might be the Benisalte Mill.”
“There’s the Mediterranean, but it’s too hazy to see Africa. “
“I think the Acequia de la Vega is just around this curve.”

Sure enough, it was, and we went from climbing up ever so steeply to ambling along on the level, right in the dry acequia. One 90 degree turn later and views of snowy Cerillo Redondo opened up in front of us. Surprisingly, we weren’t the only ones enjoying the trail today. We counted 11 other walkers, by far the most we’ve seen on any day so far.

A little farther up, we saw the reason the acequia was dry: a big slide had filled the channel with rubble and a huge rock. It will take machinery to shift that boulder. It probably came down in the February storms. We’re guessing this may happen fairly frequently here because at one point there were four rock walls above the acequia that were clearly built to hold back slides, and farther on toward the Rio Chico, which feeds the acequia, the channel was enclosed in a large tube (so it’s impervious to rockfalls).

Eventually, we got to a point where the drop off was too steep for comfort, and we could no longer walk in the acequia because it was enclosed. The trip back down was just as interesting with ruins of old cortijos on each side. We continued all the way back to the village on the GR 7 which also had a steep gradient, but not anywhere near as steep as the track we walked up.

When we got back to our apartment, I decided to look at the app called climbfinder that I had recently downloaded (thanks, Sabine!). I remembered that it showed a route out of Órgiva passing through Soportújar that was rated the 5th steepest climb in the Sierra Nevada (track ratings, not senderos) and the 8th steepest in Andalucia. I had said to Ned two days ago, “That’s a route we better not take!” You can imagine our surprise on finding that it was indeed the track we took this morning, Era de La Majada. We only walked a small part of the entire route, but it turned out to be the steepest part, an 18% grade out of Soportújar! We were really pleased to have done it.Læs mere