Last week, we had a long, four-day weekend here in Spain for Semana Santa, or Easter, so we decided to head to the mountains. My partner’s family has an apartment in the Pyrenean town of Biescas. It’s a convenient place to go for a long weekend because we don’t have to do much planning or booking ahead of time. We can also bring the cat; although I’m not sure how much she really likes it since she spends much of the time tucked in bed.
In advance of the four-day-long trip, I planned to relax and fit in my 50k training, taking advantage of the gorgeous snow-free trails at the lower elevations of the town. My partner planned to climb the still-snow-covered mountains at the higher elevations. But we did manage to compromise on one day activity together, going our separate ways the other days.
So for the first day of our vacation, we opted for exploring a few old villages and going for a short run on a portion of a trail we had never been on before—La Senda de Izarbe.
We started in the tiny village of Lasieso to see a church and some anthropomorphic tombs. The church (or churches of Lasieso, as I will soon explain) is included in a group of restored Medieval and Mozarabic churches within the area called the churches of Serrablo. I have seen most of them already, so it’s nice to be able to check another off my list.
The church in Lasieso is actually two churches combined—one from the Mozarabic period of the 10th century and one from the 11th century. It sits in the upper part of the village, and the tombs are slightly lower down the hill, toward the pastureland at the base of the village, and a bit more difficult to find if you don’t know where they are.
After checking out the outside of the church, one of the men from the village told me the tombs were “down and to the left,” so I kept going down from the village until I reached the pastureland further below. I figured I must have missed them, so I started back up, running into my partner just at the tombs, which were much closer to the church than I had gone.
The tombs are quite interesting as they have been carved into rock just as you would dig a grave in soil. Except, instead of a long, deep rectangle, they have more of a human-shaped outline. One of the women from the village who showed my partner the tombs commented that the rock in the area is quite soft and the tombs have even eroded substantially in just the last 10 years. So, although they currently don’t seem deep enough to house a body, they were likely a lot deeper when first created around the 10th century.
While I walked downhill searching for the tombs, my partner talked to a couple of men who have been hiking and trail running in the region, hunting for and exploring the old trails to many of the abandoned villages of the region. Initially, it sounded very interesting to me. I have seen one of the abandoned villages in the area, but there are a number of them that I would really like to see. However, in retrospect, I don’t particularly like bushwhacking, and this would inevitably involve a lot of it.
After Lasieso, we continued to the town of Caldearenas, where the Senda de Izarbe starts. We began our run at the parking lot for the small train station, following the trail signs down through the town and past the old flour mill that we would return to later. At first the trail navigated between some farm fields before crossing under the train tracks. The terrain or views were not particularly noteworthy, but the interesting part of the Senda de Izarbe is that it is lined with art. Periodically along the main trail, and in particular on a couple of deviations, we found painted rocks and logs, mosaics, and hanging sculptures.
We also took a detour to a photography exhibit about pastoral life in an old shepard’s hut that was unfortunately closed. After, we followed the trail down to the river—Rio Gállego—crossing it to return to town via a fire road.
Back at the train station, we cooled down and had a snack before going to the old flour mill. The young man staffing the museum gave us a tour of the small but complex three-story system that operated until the 40s and even provided flour as far as Argentina and Chile. The system had been restored and, for the tour, is able to operate on a slow speed so you can see how it all works without damaging the complicated network of belts.
Next, we ate lunch at a local restaurant before going to the town of Javierrelatre. The church here is high above the town, perched just near the top of a dramatic hill overlooking the farmland below and the mountains beyond. It’s not exactly at the top of the hill and it is speculated there might have been a castle at the top of the hill, which would be fairly typical here, but now there is only a cemetery. We circled a trail around the top of the hill, just below the cemetery, and went back into town before continuing our church tour.
The next stop was Latre, where we had trouble finding the church. The town is sort of broken into two sections, with the church in the section farthest from where we entered and closer to the continuation of the main road.
Then, we headed toward the next town—Orna de Gállego—high up on a hill along a narrow, curving road. As we approached the town, we saw a line of RVs waiting to enter, so we parked along the side of the road and walked the short distance to the church. When we entered the village, we were shocked. The entire area surrounding the church was full to capacity of RVs, like some sort of festival. Everyone was decked out in neon sports attire and looked rather tired and dirty. We wondered if there was some sort of race or if this town was one of the few small villages in the area that had enough space to be “RV friendly.” But really, it didn´t seem like it had enough space. It was chaotic and packed.
Overwhelmed by the sheer number of people, we did a quick lap around the church and called it a day. We had planned to see one more village but decided to just go home and leave it for another time. As we drove back down, we hoped to not encounter any more RVs coming up for the night, and we were fortunately lucky.
That night, my partner packed for his excursion to the mountains with some friends, and I relaxed while I scoped out a route for an easy hike for the next day.
