Caminito del Rey

Somewhat fitting, but totally unrelated to the three kings day, today Rachel, Laura and I traveled to El Chorro, Spain:

To walk the Caminito del Rey, at times known as "the world's most dangerous walkway", though now it is a perfectly safe cliff hike in a Spanish National Park. This walkway is bolted to the side of a canyon that contains a number of hydroelectric projects for southern Spain. It's both a tourist attraction and a service corridor for the dam projects.

We caught the train out of Sevilla this morning, made it to El Chorro by around 10:30am, checked into the hotel and then caught the shuttle bus to the top of the trailhead. We met our guide and walked the 8km trail back down to the hotel.

Hardhats were required. Mostly to protect from falling rocks from above:

Much of the walkway was like this--bolted onto the sides of the canyon:

A look up the canyon:

An old bridge across the river from one side of the canyon to the other:

Our tour guide, Estella, spoke alternately in Spanish and English:

She was a good Spanish language listening exercise for us.

The sky was deep blue. There's an abandoned building along the way:

Another look up the canyon:

On the right, other visitors on the walkway. On the left, a railroad bridge:

We actually crossed the railroad bridge on our way to El Chorro on the train.

Here we see the new walkway above the original service walkway:

The last canyon opened out onto a reservoir. The town and our hotel are on this reservoir. To get there, we had to cross that bridge:

Here's another view of the new walkway above the old one:

Here's the walkway bridge across the canyon at the end of the hike:

Some video of the three of us trekking across the suspension bridge:



Here's Rachel taking pictures back towards the canyon from the reservoir:

Here's the special Christmas Cruzcampo beer I had at dinner: