Hiking to Castillo De Oria
Daily hikes have been more of a challenge in Oria due to the heat, but on Monday, Katia and I woke up bright and early (if you consider 07:30 early) to tackle the mountain up to Castillo De Oria (Castle of Oria). It was also a good reason to have a daddy-daughter day while Micheka and Emmeline spent some time together.
After a quick breakfast snack, we snuck out the door quickly to begin our journey. We took the steep hill into town and began searching for the castle walking path. Unfortunately, Google Maps was not quite accurate in this case and took us up the mountain’s west face, which didn’t get us too far! Perhaps we were distracted by the lone goat tied up at someone’s front door that Katia wanted to pet.
As Katia did some climbing and unsuccessfully tried to coax me to scale the rockface to the castle ruins above, I checked the map again and came up with a Plan B. After a strategic retreat back to the main path, we began circumnavigating the mountain back counter-clockwise towards the south and resumed our search.
Although this was not the most direct path up the mountain, it proved to be fun from an exploration perspective. As it turns out, we explored some of the original portions of Oria town with walking-only streets and buildings built out of the rockface (this helps regulate the temperature throughout the year). Although many of these buildings are now abandoned, Katia was keen to explore inside to see what they were like. While I did provide a firm ‘no’ on many occasions, I agreed to enter a couple of them (I was curious too) when they seemed more structurally sound. Unfortunately, our resident structural engineer was not with us, but my conservative amateur opinion was the next best thing.
It was very interesting to see the inside of these dwellings including the hearth where the cooking was done and the rooms in which they lived. Anyway, after some urban adventures, we got back to the mountain path and finally on the east side we saw the path we were looking for. Unfortunately for us, we missed the trailhead and ended up scaling the mountain slightly. This was super easy for Katia but I’m starting to realize that some caution is required on my part.
In no time we were on the trail to the castle and climbed up the remaining way. As anticipated, the views of the valley next to Oria were amazing and Katia was enthralled with the whole experience. She wanted to touch and explore all of the castle ruins in our area. It was really just basic ruins and dated back to the Muslim rule of Spain over a millennium ago but is not much to look at today.
After exploring for a while, we headed back down the train and discovered that the trailhead was near one of the main junctions in town that we had passed before. Oh well! The exploration was fun and worth it.
As a final treat, we headed to Bar Gasolinera for a coffee and lemonade slushy (very popular everywhere here) before heading home to escape the heat. We also caught a glimpse of the castle from below, reminding us of what we had just accomplished!