The Ordesa Hike in the Spanish Pyrenees

After hiking in and around the Cirque de Gavarnie in the French Pyrenees, we drove to Torla in the Spanish Pyrenees.  Torla is the town just outside the Ordesa and Monte Perdido national park.  The guide books say this is the hike to do if you've only got time for one.  It didn't disappoint.

Private cars aren't allowed into the park.  Instead, there's a big parking lot in Torla, and a continuous stream of buses taking visitors in.  The total number of visitors per day is limited, so it's recommended to arrive before 9:30 AM.

We really loved this series of cascading waterfalls.  At first, Jennifer thought this straight-edged dropoff was somehow artificial, but it was just the angular character of the rock in this part of the mountains.

We hiked into the Ordesa valley via the lower trail. This is a view looking back the way we came in.

I thought it would be fun to throw this photo in, something we saw on our drive from Gavarnie, across the Pyrenees, and into Torla.  Grazing rights are a major subject of the law in these mountainous borderlands.  We saw cows grazing on many mountain roads, sometimes supervised, and sometimes not.

As you can see in the first waterfalls photo above, there are several pools, one flowing into another.  This photo is taken a short way further up the trail, looking at the pools above these lower ones.  Of course, it takes a tripod to get the flowing water to look like this.

After passing all those waterfalls, we came into the wide-open central valley of Ordesa.  Note the hikers on the trail down the center of the valley.

Soon after coming into the open, we ran across a beautiful pool and stream.  We stopped and had our lunch there.  I made sure there were no people in this one.  We had fantastic sausage sandwiches from the hotel.  Some local type of sausage and green peppers on fresh bread.  I wish we could get those any time we wanted them!

After visiting the falls at the head of the valley, we decided to take the upper trail on the way back.  This is the view back to the head of the valley as we ascend to the high ridge on one side of the valley.

What we thought was a minor detour onto this ridge-line trail turned out to be a gradual, non-stop climb for an hour.  I was getting annoyed at the unexpectedly long climb, and worrying about the necessarily long descent to match, but the resulting views of the canyon were more than worth the effort.  By this time, we'd ascended far enough to have views like this of the opposite side of the valley.

We loved how there were trees at the top, then burnt orange vertical rock walls too steep for anything to cling to, followed by a step in the valley side, where more fir trees were growing in sparse groups.  The day was partly cloudy, so the shadows of the clouds were crawling up and down the mountains all around us as we hiked.  At this point, it was nearly all shade.

Another reason to take the ridge-line trail is that very few people choose to go this obviously more difficult way.  So, though there was a pretty continuous stream of hikers down below, we were alone on the trail much of the time way up here.

This is a view of the desolate gray and orange peak of Monte Perdido, towering over the valley far in the back.  Monte Perdido is the other namesake of this national park.

Looking up the valley, toward where we were heading. The sun visited us for this one.  It was nice out that day, not too hot, not too cold.  We had a couple of brief rain showers in the morning, then just a lot of passing clouds.

As promised in the guide book, once we got near the entrance, this trail turned into a 2000-foot steep descent of non-stop switchbacks.  We ran across a couple going very slowly on the way down,  The woman was wearing that type of shoe that is nothing but a cushioned leather sole and a leather strap across the top of the front of your foot.  Obviously, they'd never done much hiking.  But, they seemed to be OK.  When I asked if they were OK, they said, "Si, poco a poco", i.e, little by little.

This is the view on the way out of the park.

A half-hour later, we made it down to the rendezvous point and caught the short bus ride back to town, along with a crowd of other hikers.  And so, we said adios to Ordesa.

This is one of a series of articles about our travels across southern France and into Spain last August.  The others have great photos and inside info on what it's like to visit a bunch of great destinations along the way.

Part 1 River and valley photos from the Martel hike in the Gorge de Verdon.

Part 2 Kayaking the Gorge de Verdon, and hike the Styx trail.

Part 3 A drive from the Gorge de Verdon in the southeast of France to the Pyrenees in the southwest of France, withe sunflower fields, the famous Tour de France mountain pass called Col du Tourmalet, and waterfalls.

Part 4 Hiking from France into Spain via "La Breche de Roland."

Part 5 Hiking to the incredible waterfall of the Cirque de Gavarnie