Lecrin Valley Limpers

Hi. I wasn’t able to go on the Sunday Christmas walk so Cees offered to organise  it, and show everyone around his village. He is always wittering on about what a beautiful place it is. I always thought he was a bit jealous of  the rest of us, the true limpers who live up in the Lecrin Valley, but, after listening to some of the people who went on the walk and seeing the photos I will admit I was wrong, it is the Beautiful Village of Velez de Benaudalla. Thank you Cees for leading the walk. Walk Sunday 27th December. Kees has asked me to write a few words about our Sunday walk. He was a bit worried that if he wrote it he would simply wax lyrically about the Beautiful Village of Velez de Benaudalla and drive everybody nuts. So! Here goes! We met at 9.30 in front of the Magnificent church in the centre of the most Wonderful Village of Velez de Benaudalla. Without further ado Kees led us up through the Charming streets of this Fascinating Village to the Na...

Summer has arrived early, everyone is back in T shirts and skimpy tops. flowers are blooming and even the local animals are walking around with their offspring. There is no snow on the mountains and it is a long time since we have seen any rain. What a fantastic winter we are having. No doubt we will pay for it with a wet spring, or when we have nothing to drink in the summer.  This week we had organised a very easy walk after a special request from Conchi. After a big debate within the group we decided to do a linear walk that necessitated driving to the start of the walk and then walking back to Padul.  We met in Padul by the kiosk and it was good to see Elisa and Jesus after all this time. They had returned from Scotland for a holiday, eager to check out if the sun was still shining, as they had not seen it for 18 months. Sadly Conchi was unable to join us as she was sunbathing on the beach in Malaga as we were tramping down the hillside.  The logi...

This week we had planned to go up to Pampaneira to do a walk of the 3 villages, but, by Saturday morning the weather forecast was for temperatures of around 3 degrees and rain. Yes that is right RAIN, after months of waiting we were finally promised some, it never appeared apart from a few spots, but we did get a promise. With the prospect of walking in the rain and temperatures at near freezing I decided to change our plans and head down to Velez de Benaudalla, that beautiful village at the bottom of the hill and a way marked walk called the camera del agua.   The walk starts besides the river which we followed for 10 minutes, just long enough to warm the muscles up before the climb. The path twists and turns as it makes its way up the hillside until it eventually levels off and runs along the hillside next to a large acequia. This is the camera del agua and it feeds a hydroelectric plant down by the river. We stopped here for a short break and to admire the view of the ...

This week we had a cold start to our circular walk from Nigúelas, it was only 3 degrees at 9 am when we all met up in the carpark. We set off at a brisk pace to try and warm up, but that only made things worse. We were heading downhill to the Rio Torrente and we were moving so fast the wind chill made us even colder. It was only after we had climbed out of the valley up into Acequias that we actually began to feel warm. From Acequias the path continues along the GR7 as it climbs up the well graded path to  Cerro Alto. Looking back it was quite surreal to see the windmills poking out of the mist that was drifting up from the coast.  At the top the path meets the Nigúelas / Lanjaron track which we followed for a short distance, before climbing again on a track that takes you towards the Rio Torrente. Normally at this time of the year you have views of the snow covered pico Caballo. This year there was nothing, the little snow we have had is long gone. Does anyone want to...

The weather this last week has been fantastic, warm and sunny, we were even walking in shorts and T-shirts on Tuesday. Things did not look quite so rosy for our walk on Sunday, with  the  temperatures set to plummet in a cold arctic blast. Our walk was to the Húetor Parque Natural, always a great place to visit.   We awoke to a cloudless sky, and by the time we met up at Cozvijar the temperature was a balmy 3 degrees. We were is such a hurry to get back into the cars that we nearly left Elsa and Maria Jose behind in the carpark. On the drive over to Húetor the views of the snow covered Sierras were superb. The whole range above 2500 metres was white. By the time we met up with the rest of the group for the start of the walk the temperature had fallen to 1 degree. Mike set off like a “bat out of hell”, the ones at the back were running to try and keep up with him. To start with I thought he was trying to get warm but it transpired he was rushing to get ho...

After missing last week's walk due to injury, and thank you to everyone who expressed their sympathy, I was really looking forward to this week’s walk. For those who posted less than sympathetic comments on facebook retribution will be swift and painful. I feel I have done the world a service by discovering a potential major accident area. I just need health and safety to take up my case and I feel sure I should be able to claim compensation.    Sunday was a beautiful day, a cloudless sky, warm sunshine and a great new walk around Lanjaron.  We met in Beznar and then drove over to Lanjaron to meet up with Martin who was our guide for the day.  The local council have recently opened up, and way marked, some new paths in the hills and valleys around the village, and Martin kindly volunteered to show us some of them.  I was surprised to find our group consisted of 23 people all out to enjoy a day's walking  in the hills, particularly as the...

Hi. This week was a little different from normal, we had arranged for Conchi and her nephew to lead the walk down to the Baños in Durcal, and then on to Cueva de Moros which I was looking forward to exploring never having visited before. Unfortunately I sprained my ankle in the middle of the week and was unable to go. So Conchi was promoted to La jeffa in charge. This week the very biased report was written by Mike. What a wonderful day. Not a cloud in the sky, the rain a distant memory, hardly an ounce of breeze, and a lovely senorita to lead us. What more could a body want? Twenty six people pitched up outside Flamboyan to follow Conchi, and she didn't disappoint. We set off at a brisk pace up the Durcal High Street; at the Iglesia San Blas we collected Conchi's nephew and headed off down to the "Agua Medicinales." I've been down this road many times and always finished up at some rather uninspiring, ancient, Arab warm baths. Conchi had other ide...

This week it was our big end of the month walk, I know it was officially the 1st of November but the 2015 Limper calendar said October had 32 days. We had organised 2 walks, an easy walk and a harder walk, in a new area for the Sunday group.  The original plan was that both walks would start off together high above Guejar Sierra. We would follow a superb path along a ridge with views over to Veleta and Mulhacen. At the summit of Catifas the easy group would return back along the path and the hard group would return along a longer, circular path. In the past if we had wanted to do a high altitude walk in this area we needed 4X4s to get us into the mountains, but in the summer the Tuesday group discovered another access point using good roads, mind looking at the pale faces of some of the drivers when we arrived at the car park, they might disagree with the word good. Whilst the road is tarmaced it is narrow , twisty and climbs 900 metres into the mountains.  When ...

This week we went to the Ermita in Pinos del Valle. The start of the walk was on a new track to me, it was discovered by Jan earlier this year. Just to make sure he got all the plaudits for discovering the new track I made sure everyone knew about his discovery before the start of the walk. This also absolved me of any comeback if things went wrong.  The walk started from the carpark by the side of the Beznar dam and followed the road across the dam wall. It’s like looking into the bowels of the earth when you look over the side.  At the far side we took a campo road that headed up the hillside. The path was a delight as it made its way in and out of the orange and olive groves, along acequia and finally meeting a concrete road, which we followed up hill until we met the Guájar Faragúit road. Rene and Hilary decided this was a good place to say goodbye to us and make their own way back, I suspect they were heading for the bar Venecia in Pinos. It was not an idea...

Hi This week we had planned to do a circular walk around Cerro Huenes above Cumbres Verde, the walk we had postponed from the week before. The problem was the weather forecast, it was predicting rain but they had been saying that all week and nothing came of it, so we went armed with a couple of backup plans. Setting of from Cozvijar to drive to Cumbres Verde the weather looked promising with high broken cloud and some sunshine but by the time we arrived the clouds were gathering around the hills and it looked like we might get wet if we stayed out too long.  I decided to put plan C into action, this was a circular walk to Boca de la Pesca and there were  lots of possibilities to shorten the route if conditions deteriorated.    We had not been walking long when we came to a chain across the farm track we were on, and a notice saying “No pasar”, or you will be shot. Now we have done this walk a number of times in the past and we have never seen the n...

This week we had a local walk that started above Pinos del Valle. We had a convoy of 5 cars for the 4km drive on a compo road to the start of the walk. There were a few complaints from some of the drivers about the state of the road, but we all arrived at the start of the walk safe and well. Once again Dave was leading this easy circular walk but, after a couple of kms, I decided to reduce the pressure he was under and took over at the front. We had only gone about 1 km when Dave announced we had taken a wrong turn. I shrugged this damning criticism off as a training exercise for him, I don’t think anyone else noticed my error.  Returning back along the track we picked up the right path and continued the climb up on to the ridge. From here the views opened up over Los Guajares and down to the coast, up until now our views were of the Sierra Nevada, well what we believed to be the Sierra Nevada as they were covered in low clouds, which increasingly were getting darker...