Holiday in Spain: Chemin de la Mature

Though this is in France, obviously. We'd seen Canfranc, and come over the Col du Somport, down the long steep windy valley, and realised we'd go past the Chemin de la Mature, so we stopped. We'd been here before, ages ago, during one of our holidays in Lescun. It is part of the GR10, but we'll just walk to the dramatic bit.

There is a turn-off the road, then a track up which you can drive if you're lazy or have lazy infants in your car, to a car-park. Then its a 10-15 or so minute walk up a good path to the dramatic bit, pictured here. The road was hacked out of the cliff in order to get tree trunks for ships masts - hence the "mature", which has a hat on the a turning it into "masture" (Manfred taught me that). From the path, you can look down on the Fort du Portalet [*]:



Here is a better view of the cliff, and a clearer one of the path itself.

Notes and Queries: the area is good for rock climbing (indeed, M and I climbed there just one route I think all those years ago). It is quite intimidating though. The rucksac and rope that you can see in the corner of the main pic is a solo-ist who has hung his sac out of the way of hikers, flung his rope over and abseiled down, and will be climbing up self-protecting on the rope.

[*] Portalet or Pourtalet? I thought it was Portalet, and wrote that originally, before finding my ref, and adding the "u". But then a frog corrected me.

Refs

* Spot the location