w3w ///consented.bedbugs.bliss

Yesterday, we made our way to Planoles from Puigcerdà – which would have been a very boring 8 hour slog along roads and forest tracks, so we followed the very helpful advice from Carla (at the hotel), and took the bus round instead… In part this is also as we have some big ‘Brian’ days in the next set so we need to conserve our energy, particularly for Wednesday.

So today we walked up into the Nuria Gorge and onto Nuria itself. The gorge and the ‘tourist’ path up is all very impressive – but not sure all tourists would enjoy some of the exposed walkways, it took just about 3 hours to climb – and at times felt like walking into Middle Earth !

The clever part of this is our hotel is back here in Queralbs which is at the start of the gorge. Due to a masterpiece of planning (!?), we were able to leave our rucsacs at the hotel and then climb without – still a long way up and still hard – but sooooo much easier !

There is a funicular train that runs up the gorge too so we could catch that down this afternoon and then tomorrow morning, we will take it back up to start our long day from Nuria.

Nuria itself is rather strange – it is mainly a large church based around a statue of Mary, supposedly from 700AD which was lost and then found again after a prophecy. Anyway, it’s a grand set up including big hotel in the middle of nowhere, with no road access and also now a (very) small ski resort.