Balma del Pantà and Abrigo de Santa Eulaliade la Peña
Plan this ride
Recorded distance
467 km
Riding-time estimate
8 h 13
Journey
Recorded itinerary
Distance and timing basis
Ordered leg totals agree within rounding. Stop distances are approximate sums of rounded legs. Stops, delays, approach and any separate return travel add time. Basis: producer-declared routed record.
Reading history stays on this device. My road watch requires a separate selection; opening it does not subscribe this ride.
Distance and riding time are measured on the routed road. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
From Camarasa it runs 467 km to Camarasa; allow about 8 h 13 of riding. The stops in between: Monderes, El Remosillo, Corral de la Gascona and Abrigo de Santa Eulaliade la Peña. The stored terrain estimate reaches about 1,050 m; a measured road-elevation profile is not available. It was put together for the scenery rather than the shortest line.
Waypoint introductions and full write-ups
1. Balma del Pantà
Camarasa is a small town beneath a big wall of water. The dam across the Noguera Pallaresa, built in the early twentieth century, holds back a long reservoir, the Pantà de Camarasa, in a dry, rocky corner of Lleida where the pre-Pyrenees fall toward the Ebro plain. The cliffs rise steep and ochre above the water, and in the folds of that rock, shelters hold painted scenes from long before there was a dam or even a town. The Balma del Pantà is one of the sites of the Levantine rock art of the Iberian Mediterranean, a tradition listed by UNESCO in 1998.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Planning note
Balma del Pantà is where the day begins. Next is Monderes.
2. Monderes
The plain of Lleida is one of the great orchards of Spain, a flat, fertile basin of peach, pear and apple trees, irrigated by canals drawn from the Segre. Alfarràs, Algerri and Almenar are villages in this agricultural world, set among fields and ditches on the edge of Catalonia, where the green plain begins to rise towards the dry hills of the Montsec to the north. In spring the orchards bloom in pink and white, and in late summer the fruit lorries crowd the roads. It is not dramatic scenery, but it is a landscape built by water, and the canals, including the long Canal d'Urgell and the canal of Aragon and Catalonia, are the reason it exists.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Planning note
Monderes comes up about 48 km into the recorded legs. Next is El Remosillo.
3. El Remosillo
If you ride north from Barbastro toward Graus, the Ésera river eventually forces its way through a ridge of limestone, and the result is the Congosto de Olvena, a short, deep gorge with the road squeezed between rock and water. Up on the cliffs around here are rock shelters with prehistoric paintings, and El Remosillo is one of the best known in this corner of Aragón, between Estadilla, Graus and Fonz.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Planning note
about 103 km into the recorded legs you reach El Remosillo. Next is Corral de la Gascona.
4. Corral de la Gascona
Alquézar is one of the most dramatic villages in Spain: a cluster of ochre houses piled on a rocky spur above the canyon of the Vero river, crowned by a castle and a collegiate church built on the site of a Moorish fortress. It lies at the southern edge of the Sierra de Guara, a limestone range in Aragon cut by deep canyons, and the area is famous across Europe for canyoning, with people abseiling, jumping and swimming through the narrow gorges in summer. The Corral de la Gascona is one of the rock-art sites in the Vero canyon and its surroundings, part of the UNESCO-listed rock art of the Mediterranean Basin.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Planning note
Corral de la Gascona, about halfway. Next is Abrigo de Santa Eulaliade la Peña.
5. Abrigo de Santa Eulaliade la Peña
Just north of Huesca, where the flat cereal land of the Hoya suddenly rears up into the first limestone walls of the Pre-Pyrenees, lies the little village of Nueno and, above it, the rock shelter named after Santa Eulalia de la Peña. This is the southern edge of the Sierra de Guara country, a landscape of gorges, conglomerate cliffs and scrub where griffon vultures ride the thermals and the light comes hard off pale stone.