It is a 3.5km walk up to Fuente de, and the bottom teleferique station (1078m). This cable car takes us a further 800 vertical meters in three minutes. At the top we take a photo in front of the breathe taking view, then follow a path away from the mirador and the vertiginous excitement of snappers and their cliques teetering at the edge of its plumb drop. Within minutes we find ourselves in a back country of astral plains and craters, strewn with the glacial debris of an ice age it seems we could have only just missed. Rounded peaks, knife edge ridges and cliffs eroded to form rocky minarets of gothic proportions surround us like the fingers of a cupped hand. The Hoyo de Lloroza, a circular depression caused by karstification, is the vast palm of this landscape, its surface prune like and weather beaten. Waves and lines score the surface of every great slab of rock, channels from a lifetime of caustic erosion that read like the mountains fortune and future. Carpets of green grass grow dense and thick within hollows between the grey.
At midday we stop in a boulder field beneath a small cliff reputed to be a wallcreeper hotspot. We have no luck seeing this crimson winged ‘hoopoe of the rocks’, only an Alpine accentor disappearing into the labyrinth of miniature passages and caverns between the boulders.
Taking a fork to the left, an old mining track that skirts around and above the Hoyo, I catch a flash of a rebeco’s (chamois) white rump as it bounds across our path and, to my astonishment, gung ho off the cliff edge. There is no chance of following so we peer down into the Hoyo and none to hopefully scan the maze of rock and scree, all the time looking further and further a field. Then, in a pocket of green far away in the deepest convex of the Hoyo, Shenaz spots something. Through squinting eyes and binoculars shaded from drifting sleet, I could just make out the delicate pin legged silhouettes of grazing undulates far below us.
Through a telescope we could see more clearly the taupe patterned bodies of rebecos. When these goat like antelope lift their heads, as they did frequently to scan for danger or simply to check what their neighbour was eating (clear grazing hierarchy within the group), we were able to make out bold streaks of white black and gold geometric markings across the head, neck and nape of each animal. This facial war paint could have looked fearsome on many animals but rebecos with their thin questioning lips, doleful eyes, manicured antlers, podgy midriff balanced on matchstick legs and teetering on dainty high hooves are camp looking creatures. On the other hand, when the wind gets icy and the sleet turns to thick clods of snow, it is us, not the rebecos, who wimp out and head back to the mirador café for a nice espresso latte.
Later we track the rebecos a little closer into the hoyo until fierce blizzards send us packing.
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