Calahorra to Barnedas Reales & Aguedas

I was woken up at 6am by barking dogs. I tried to go back to sleep for an hour but at 6:30am I gave up and put the kettle on. Much to Ellie’s disgust.
By 8am we were pretty much ready to go and rolled down to the water station to tip off and fill up.
We had a big day planned for today but no exact route. I had screenshot someone else’s route last night but when I was trying to plot the route this morning I realised his map was rubbish so I ended up plotting a course on google using waypoints but to get us to the start of the route I could use TomTom.
We set off just after 9am and the traffic leaving Calahorra was pretty manic to start with. The national speed limit in Spain for a single carriageway is 90kph that’s just above 50mph and seems fast enough to me so I set the cruise control not wanting the hassle or fines from police. But the Spanish couldn’t care less. They will overtake you wherever and whenever they want, including blind bends and hills. The only exception to this is the single white line which they 99% seem to adhere to.
It was only a 25 mile drive to our starting point of the journey and 45mins later we were at the tourist information centre for the Barnedas Reales national park in Navarre.
Navarra (or Navarre) began its story as the medieval Basque Kingdom of Pamplona in around 700AD & over seven centuries was absorbed into larger entities forming the Kingdom of Navarra. Reales – literally translated means Royal – with these lands once being the legacy of the Kings of Navarre.
The tale of this wild area, however, goes much further back than the Kings that reigned here. This semi-desert or ‘badlands’ were formed around ten million years ago when the basin opened to the Mediterranean Sea & drained, leaving what is now the Ebro Basin. The soils of the Bardenas Reales comprised of clay, chalk & sandstone, have been eroded by water & wind forming quite the twist of nature.
An Unesco World Biosphere Reserve, the park itself is split into three main areas.
• Bardena Blanca (White Bardena) right in the centre, feels the most desert-like. It takes its name from the presence of salt on the surface of its soil. Here is where you’ll discover vast plains & deep gorges which have been formed by rivers flowing over the centuries.
• Plano (plane) once an inland sea enclosed by the Catalan Coastal Range, when the Bardenas Reales formed, it left this part of the land relatively flat. The alternating soft & hard materials caused by erosion have created swirling layers, with hills dotted throughout the horizon.
• Bardena Negra (Black Bardena) is located at the South Eastern tip of the Bardenas Reales bordering Aragón. The soil here is darker (hence the name) & is covered in vegetation. You’ll find plateaus of different altitudes here with Mediterranean forests on one side & grainfields on the other.
We started our journey at the panoramic viewpoint. From here you get a real sense of the scale of the place and a board points out all the various landmarks.
From there we went to the must see destination of the entire park. The extraordinary looking Castil de Tierra is a sight to behold. Nicknamed Cabezas (which translated means head) these isolated hills are dotted throughout the park with a one exuding a character all of its own.
From there we were in the hands of google following from waypoint to waypoint until I jumped out with my phone to get some pictures and accidentally deleted the route. Unfortunately I couldn’t get it back because there was no signal but I thought I knew where we were going so I didn’t worry. This is when our trip went off the rails entirely.
I came to a road where I should have turned right but there was an articulated lorry and workers blocking that road. There were no diversion signs so I just assumed that if I kept going it would bring me around to the end of that road which I thought it did 15 minutes later. I then knew I had to turn left at a crossroads at a hunting lodge and it would be a straight run back to the tourist information centre.
At a crossroads we came to a building with a huge statue of a man and a goat. This didn’t look like a hunting lodge and after trying to get google to work we turned left. I also programmed TomTom to head for the information centre but these gravel tracks weren’t even in TomTom. Off we drove, down a gravel track and it got bumpier and bumpier. Then turned to rocks which Wanda handled very well and then turned to dirt. Ellie was cursing me saying I should have just gone the road way, but neither of us knew at the time that this was going to be this bad. For 15 miles we drove across desert, stone, rock and mud and we were completely in the middle of nowhere until finally 1 mile from our park up we popped out of the gravel track and onto a concrete road. We had just a few hundred meters to go and the road signs said something about this concrete road for access only but we pressed on anyway heading down a very steep hill where the road got so tight against the cliffs that Wanda had to breath in, and when we came to the bottom we were at the airè.
I hadn’t read many good reviews about this airè, lots of people had said it’s smelly because the waste disposal area is to close and really noisy. I thought we’d risk it as it’s out of season and even when we got here it was busy. But respectfully quiet for daytime. Let’s hope the night stays the same.
The airè is overlooked by huge sandstone cliffs and up until the 1960’s people lived in cave houses in them and the cliff face is dotted with hundreds and hundreds of doorways and windows.
After a cup of tea Ellie and I went exploring and to our amazement you can get into 4 of the cave houses and they have been preserved for tourists and it’s free. There was also an app we could download with a 3D tour and videos from the people that lived there but unfortunately it was all in Spanish. The boards inside the houses to explain about the living conditions were in several languages including English so we did learn about life in a cave house and it was fascinating. There was no running water, the women went to fetch water and carried it back in there heads or hips and the farm animals used to live in the houses with them. Some of the houses still had trough’s carved into the walls.
It was now getting late and it was trying desperately to rain as it’s been doing all day so we headed back to Wanda for some dinner and to settle in for the night.Meer informatie