After 4 days in Granada we felt like it was time for some activity in nature again, so we headed west to El Torcal. All we knew was that it involved mountains, weird rock formations and plenty of hiking trails.
As so often google maps routed us along the most inconvenient road for a large slightly overweight campervan. Descending on a very steep road close to our destination I started to feel the brakes fading, so we decided to save the van another steep incline/decline and park it at the bottom of El Torcal and hike up instead.
There is a convenient parking with a track up to the top of El Torcal – 7.5 km distance return and about 300 m elevation on a partly very rough and rocky path will get get you to the visitors center where the scenic walks start. If you do the walks up there it adds up to no more than 10 km.
Of course you can also just drive up, park at the visitor center, drink a coffee, have a feed at the restaurant and enjoy the view from the nearby lookout. The views to the south range out to the Mediterranean sea.
We preferred to do it bavarian style: hike up and have a summit beer.
The hike up is very pretty and we had the slopes of El Torcal to ourselves. The tracks on top are a lot more populated than the track up but the views up there are breathtaking.
We managed to take a wrong turn which led us on a less populated shortcut and were rewarded by a group of 3 wild mountain goats that were not impressed by our intrusion but let us pass quietly at close distance.
A great occurrence to gloat about when we ran into a group of Czech wildlife photographers shortly after. We pointed them in the right direction, but with their huge tele lenses that they had mounted on their cameras they could have spotted the lice in the goats fur rather than get the actual animal.