El Torcal

For adults and children, Torcal is a fascinating place to explore. Take your own food and drink, there is nothing up there, not even an information office or a fountain and it gets very hot. If you go at the weekend, go early. The car park is small, rapidly fills and is entered via a one track road. Spring and autumn are the best times to go, the flowers are wonderful.

Up to around 100 million years ago the rock that forms El Torcal was beneath the Tethys Sea. Layer upon layer of shells and the skeletons of small sea creatures had collected as a sediment on the sea bed mixed with small amounts of other sedimentary rocks washed into the Tethys Sea. Over many thousands of years this become compressed into limestone hundreds of feet thick. The seabed uplifted when the African tectonic plate collided with the European plate and forced the limestone thousands of metres above sea level. For millions of years the softer rock surrounding El Torcal and Torcal itself was eroded until El Torcal remains as it is seen today, a limestone ridge towering above a plain over 1000 metres above sea level. The exposed rock on Torcal was subject to wind and rain erosion as soon as it emerged from the sea. Because some of the limestone layers are softer than others a phenomenon known as differential erosion occurred resulting in the weird shapes of the formations seen today.

To appreciate Torcal it is best to park up and take one or both of the signposted routes from the car park. The green route is an easy 2 km and the blue route is a somewhat harder 4 km with some scrambling involved.

Whichever route you take you will find yourself wandering through a landscape that is very hard to describe, as though a crazy sculptor had been at work. The Spanish Ibex made this area its own thousands of years before man came on the scene and you stand a very good chance of seeing a few sunbathing on the pinnacles of rock. All the ones we saw were youngsters with small horns but there are some adults around with the spectacular horns you associate with this animal.

Make sure you look in the rock crevices. These cavities, protected from the worst of the weather, are home to some species of plant that only occur here including a number of orchids and ferns. Ferns are some of the oldest plants on earth and some that occur on Torcal have not evolved since they first seeded here all those millions of years ago.

Wild figs are also well established creating living sculptures as they grow up the limestone buttresses. Just off the beaten track there are plenty of places to just sit and observe the birds that have also made Torcal their home. There are plenty of tits, jays, warblers and larks and wheeling overhead in the thermals there are vultures and eagles. Keep your eyes open for the Montpellier snake basking on a rock. This snake grows to seven feet in length and although poisonous its fangs are at the back of its mouth so it can only sink them into the small creatures on which it preys, a human is far too large, unless maybe you stick your finger in its mouth. Mentioning large creatures, the ants here are huge so be careful where you sit.

How to get there: Take the A7 to Malaga and then follow the signs for Antequera on the N331. Leave this road at Caserbermeja following the signs for Villanueva de la Conception. There follow the signs for Torcal.