Blazing a trail

The Pyrenees reserves its best treasures for walkers prepared to venture off the well-beaten trail, says Teresa Levonian Cole, on a solo holiday in Ribes de Freser

- Teresa Levonian

’IT was a beautiful, sunny day in late April when I set off for the Hermitage of St Anthony, in the Spanish Pyrenees, following not one of the two well-marked trails from town, but the detailed walking notes I had been given, along a less-trodden path. Up I climbed, along a narrow, stony track, the rush of the El Freser river below me growing ever fainter, the drop ever more vertiginous and confidence in my map-reading fast dwindling. I sniffed the air and inhaled a wonderful perfume of pine mixed with musty earth. ‘Rain,’ I thought... and then the heavens opened.

With considerable relief, I reached a mountain road, where two cars passed me, windscreen wipers at a metronomic 120 ticks-per-minute, kindly offering lifts. ‘Persevere,’ I told myself, ‘how much further can it be?’ Quite a way, as it turned out. I passed through a meadow under the baleful eye of a bull, through a forest and, eventually, reached the Hermitage to find it... shut. I had hoped to see an icon of the Devil that, I'd been told, is in the small chapel—an anomaly, as the chapel is dedicated to St Anthony of Padua and not to the Desert Father, Anthony the Great, of Temptation fame. Oh well...

By now drenched and spouting water from my hat like a gargoyle, I surveyed the scene: not a soul. Some ugly television antennas had been raised in this popular beauty spot. Of the fabled views from 1,271m (more than 4,000ft), I could see nothing in the now enveloping mist. Worse: in these conditions, the steep and slippery descent of the mountain was out of the question. Remarkably, there is signal throughout the area, but my phone, almost as wet as I was, had to be coaxed into cooperation. Sheepishly, I called the hotel, and someone came rushing to my rescue. It must have taken the car’s upholstery a week to dry out.