Mequinenza is a town that was moved. In the 1960s the Ebro was dammed below the confluence with the Segre and the Cinca, and the new reservoir, known as the Mar de Aragón, drowned the old river valley. The old town was largely abandoned and its people rehoused up the slope, which is why the place feels more planned than ancient. What remained was the castle on its rock, a coal-mining history that fed the power stations of the lower Ebro, and a landscape of limestone ridges, pine and rock rose dropping to a long, green-blue lake. The Barranco de la Plana is one of the dry ravines running down to it, and the shelter that gives this stop its name sits among the rock art of the Mediterranean Basin that UNESCO listed in 1998.
The shelters in this part of the Ebro country are small and easily missed, with red figures painted in the Levantine style that suggest hunters, animals and groups of people. Finding them takes a guide or a good map, and the paintings are fragile, so regulations apply. The surroundings are better known to anglers, since the reservoir is famous across Europe for its huge catfish, introduced decades ago and now enormous. The local restaurants will happily serve river fish and rice, and the town has a small museum devoted to the mining past.
For a motorcyclist, Mequinenza sits where Aragon, Catalonia and the dry flat plains of the Ebro basin meet. Roads along the lake run through low hills with an easy rhythm of curves, and the views of the water against pale ground are surprisingly handsome. Traffic is light, the surface generally reasonable, and the scrub smells of thyme in the evening. In summer the heat is severe and the best riding is before ten in the morning and again after sunset. A cold wind called the cierzo comes down the valley in winter and can blow a bike sideways.
The town itself, under a kilometre away, has fuel, a supermarket and a handful of bars, and Fayón, across the water, is much smaller. Seròs, a little further along the Segre, has a few shops as well. Carry water on the walk to the shelter, wear solid shoes on the loose stone, and keep a close eye on your phone battery, because signals fade in the ravines.