Day 7 – at Valdelinares

For the next couple of weeks, could be more, I am in the Montañas Vacías, or Empty Mountains. The area, the Serranía Celtibérica, also has the nickname, the Spanish Lapland, with territories belonging to 10 Spanish provinces, in all, 13% of the total area of Spain.

Several ares have population densities less than 1 person per km, less than Finnish Lapland, which is 2.

It is suffering from what is termed ‘Demothanasia’ (in Spanish), a process that due to political action, either direct or indirect, is causing the slow and silent disappearance of the population.

I’m actually parked up just below the ski resort, about 500 meters off and above the road on a track. It’s very quiet, occasional traffic, and a few people out to hike or bike. It’s pleasantly cool, maybe 20C maximum, but windy, so feeling less, down to 5 or 6C at night. Too cold for most Spanish I think.

We hike in the morning for 3 hours or so, then read, (just finished Paolo Cognetti’s Without Ever Reaching The Summit, which won the Stanford Book Travel Prize this year), listen to some podcasts, and late on watch something on TV; last night a rewatch of The Wire Series Four, motivated by the sad death of Michael Kenneth Williams.

This morning I planned a circular route that took in the ski resort, then downhill through pine forests to the village of Valdelinares, and back up, again mainly in the forest. There’s very few people around, though this is not one of the ‘demothanasia’ areas I mentioned above.

It’s all extremely dry, so no wonder the dog took the option of climbing into the cattle trough when he spotted it..