The Montsant, year-round

What to do

The Montsant is the wall you see from the house, and it is the single strongest reason to be here for anyone who walks or runs. It has been a natural park since 2002, protected for its geology as much as its wildlife, and the shape of it is unusual enough to be worth describing: a raised block of conglomerate rock, ringed almost the whole way round by cliffs, with deep ravines cut into the sides and a broad plateau on top. You do not walk up a peak here so much as find a way through the rim and come out onto the roof. The high point is Roca Corbatera at 1,163 metres, which is the classic ascent, and the south side carries the Cingle Major — a run of vertical wall that is the thing photographs of the range are usually of. It is raptor country: peregrines and Bonelli’s eagles both breed here, and on a still day watching one work the updraught along the cliff line is worth stopping the walk for. This is the terrain most of the trail-running guide’s 19 routes actually run through, and it is where the big days live. But it is not a runners-only mountain. The same valleys are walkable at a gentler pace, and the waterfalls and swimming holes in them are reachable on foot by anyone prepared to take a couple of hours over it. At the foot of the range sits the Cartoixa d’Escaladei, the Carthusian monastery founded in the twelfth century and the first of its order on the Iberian peninsula. It is a ruin now, but a substantial and legible one, and it explains the whole area: those monks planted the terraces that became the Priorat, and the wine region still carries the name of the priory. A morning on the mountain and an afternoon at the monastery is a good day, and the two are ten minutes apart. The honest weakness is high summer. The massif is dry and hot then, the water sits down in the valleys rather than up top, and the plateau offers very little shade in the middle of the day. If you are here in July or August, go early or go late, take more water than feels necessary, and use the Gorgs del Febró for swimming instead of hoping to find it up here. Getting onto it is easier than the cliffs suggest. Several villages around the base — Cornudella, La Morera, Escaladei among them — have marked paths that work up through the breaks in the rim, so you can choose a two-hour circuit or a full day on the plateau from more or less the same starting points. Nothing needs technical equipment, and nothing needs a guide; what it needs is a proper map or a downloaded track, because the plateau is broad and featureless enough in mist to be disorienting. The rock itself is conglomerate, which is unusual to walk on and unmistakable once you have seen it: whole cliffs made of rounded stones set in a natural cement, as though somebody poured a riverbed vertically and let it set. It weathers into caves, overhangs and pillars, and it is why the skyline from the house has the lumpy, castellated look it does rather than the clean lines of limestone. Every other season the mountain is the best thing about the location. Autumn is ideal: the heat has gone, the light is long, and the harvest is happening in the villages below. Winter days are often clear and cold and completely empty of people. Spring brings the water back and the ravines run properly again, which is when the walk-in routes to the waterfalls are at their best. One last thing in its favour, and it is the reason it beats a more famous mountain: it is ten minutes from the door. You are not spending an hour of the morning driving to a trailhead. On a good week here people go up it three or four times and take a different line each day.