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Alicante's Secret Mountains

Land of the Moors

Just twenty-five kilometres from the Costa Blanca, as the crow flies, rise the secret mountains of Alicante. This is another world completely, where terraced slopes, dotted with small villages, climb towards craggy limestone peaks that soar over a thousand metres into the sky. As you walk, you discover secret fertile valleys and also sweeping views.

Nights: 4
Grade: 2
Terrain: deep ravines, limestone ridges, terraced valleys
Hotels: one rural inn; one 2-star hotel
Meals: dinner & breakfast each day; plus 2 picnics
Climate: Alicante has a long, hot summer and a warm spring and autumn - in March and November, the average daytime temperature is 19ºC, rising to 23ºC in May and October and reaching 27ºC in June and September

Starting point: Hotel de Tárbena (2*), Tárbena. You are warmly welcomed to Alicante and the Hotel de Tárbena by Paco, who runs this tranquil, well appointed village hotel and prepares excellent breakfasts and delicious home-cooked dinners for you.

Day 1: your first walk is an excellent introduction to the region, revealing very varied landscapes and passing several breathtaking viewpoints from which you can admire the panorama of hills, gorges and fertile valleys. The area has been cultivated for centuries, watered by numerous springs, and you pass many almond groves and other fruit orchards. (16km, 5hrs)

Accommodation: Hotel de Tárbena, as above.

Day 2: today's rewarding walk is again a very varied journey through a changing landscape. After passing through a cultivated valley, you descend into a dramatic gorge between 100-metre-high rock walls. Then, with views to the coast in clear weather, you gradually ascend the northern flanks of the Racó Roig Sierra, from where your route winds downhill to another broad cultivated valley and descends past terraces in a tiny hidden valley to the village of Castell de Castells. (17km, 6hrs)

Accommodation: Casa Pilar (rural inn), Castell de Castells. Converted from a traditional townhouse, this is a small, family-run hotel where charming owners Pilar and Juanjo have created a relaxed, friendly atmosphere. Dinner and breakfast are served in the old vaulted stables.

Day 3: for your last day, we offer a choice of two circular walks. The first starts with a short transfer (pay locally), after which you walk along the floor of a gorge planted with almond and olive trees to the site of some fascinating 8,000-year-old Neolithic cave paintings, which you have time to visit. You return to Castell on paths and tracks that follow the course of a dry riverbed. The second ascends past olive, almond and carob groves to La Llacuna, so named because it was once the site of a former mountain lake. Nowadays it is home to considerable numbers of partridges and even quails. (17.5km, 6hrs or 10.5km, 4hrs)

Accommodation: Casa Pilar, as above

Prices & travel 2008

*Price includes: 4 nights' dinner & breakfast, 2 picnics; return taxi from Alicante airport (out 0h55/home 1h10)
Recommended destination airport: Alicante
Latest flight arrival time: flexible
Earliest flight departure time: flexible
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