Calar Alto
If ever a place illustrated why climbing mountains in southern Spain and Andalucía in particular is an acquired taste, Calar Alto is it.
Almost extraterrestrial in its desolation, with the fitting exception of one of the world’s best astronomical observatories on its summit, Calar Alto overlooks the A-92 autoroute as if from the vantage point of another world or even galaxy. No villages bustle on its pleats, no road forsakes its camouflage amid the scrub and pines, and no branch or bush betrays the Poniente winds that frequently lash the Sierra de Los Filabres from the west. Everything seems lifeless, embalmed in silence and inactivity behind the heat haze that engulfs the immense valley stretching south to the Sierra Nevada for much of the year.
A little further east lies the Desierto de Tabernas, Europe’s only true desert and film set de choix for many Hollywood westerns. To the west, towards Granada, legions of wind turbines whirr soundlessly, eerily. Devotees of cool, fragrant Alpine passes dotted with bell towers and edelweiss may want to turn back here rather than off the road towards Aulago or Gérgal; in Andalucia and at Calar Alto more than anywhere else, menace is the mountains’ only inhabitant.
Calar Alto is a mountain you’ll either love or you’ll hate. What it won’t do is leave you indifferent – or, for that matter, unchallenged.