Climbing at Siurana

What to do

By car it’s about 30 minutes. On foot or by fast hike it’s roughly two hours, door to crag — Kai’s own pace, running these trails himself, so a fit, fast two hours, not a gentle stroll. That walk-in is the thing most rentals near Siurana can’t offer at all. What this house adds beyond the walk-in itself is somewhere to come back to — a pool and a wood-fired sauna, rather than a car park at the end of a climbing day. No guiding, gear hire or entry cost applies; Siurana is open-access outdoor climbing on natural rock. The village itself is worth the trip even if you never touch the rock. It sits on a spur with the drop on three sides, and it is small enough to walk in twenty minutes. It was the last Moorish stronghold in Catalonia, held for more than two centuries until it fell in 1153, which is a long time to hold a hilltop and easy to believe once you have stood on it. The legend attached to the place is the Moorish queen’s leap: with the Christian troops inside the walls, the wali’s daughter rode her horse off the cliff rather than be taken. There is a hoof-shaped mark worn into the rock at the edge that the story says the animal made trying to stop. Whether you believe the mark or not, standing where it is tells you what kind of place this was to besiege. Getting there is a real choice, not a detail. Driving takes about half an hour on roads that wind. Walking takes roughly two hours at pace, and it is the better version of the day: you arrive at a hilltop village on foot, the way people arrived at it for eight hundred years, instead of parking below it. The climbing that made the village famous again is on the limestone below it, and the range runs from ordinary to the very top of the sport: some of the hardest pitches in the world are here, including routes people travel from other continents to try. That is the reason the campsite bar has the atmosphere it does. At the top of the village there is a bar half built into a cave, with a large deck hanging over the view. It is the sunset spot, and it is the kind of place that would be ruined by being twice the size. There are a couple of good restaurants in the village too. Lunch, though, is better taken slightly outside it. The nearby campsite has a restaurant, and it is where the climbing world actually eats — topos on the wall, gear in the corner, and people pairing up for the afternoon. Kai sends people there rather than into the village, and the reason is the owner: Toni Arbonés has run the place for over twenty years, was among the first to climb here in the nineties, and bolted a great many of the routes on the walls above. He was still climbing at the top of the grade well into his fifties. It is an unremarkable-looking campsite restaurant where the man who put up the pitches you spent the morning on is likely to be behind the bar. A good Siurana day climbs or walks in the morning, eats at the campsite, wanders the village in the afternoon, and ends on that cave-bar deck when the light goes. Or walk back down and have the sauna on instead — which is the version most guests end up preferring, and the one no other rental within sight of the crag can offer.