Georgia 🇬🇪🇪🇺 Tbilisi

Catalonia 😍 Santa Coloma de Farners (Girona) 2️⃣

Catalonia 😍 Santa Coloma de Farners (Girona) 1️⃣

Barcelona 😍 Airport - City

Catalonia 😍 Muntanya de Montserrat

Catalan Nature Parks are quite something. And the Parc Natural de la Serra de Montserrat is the holy mother of all Catalan Nature Parks. Read on why... The morning is grey, and the day will remain so. It says nothing about the temperature, which climbs to 27 degrees. I mapped out a route to see the main ‘attractions’ of the Muntanya de Montserrat.

🌎 La Roca de Foradada, a triangular giant window in the mountain at 954 metres.
🌎 The Monastery of Montserrat, a famous place of pilgrimage (and that was evident from the flow of tour buses packed with tourists).
🌎 The iconic round-shaped mountains themselves, which seem to have been sculpted by a giant.
🌎 The beautiful gravel roads through this paradise, and the alternation between pine forests and olive groves on the flanks were an attraction in themselves.

The Muntanya de Montserrat is a wonder. Elongated, it rises high above the undulating Catalan landscape up to 1236m. The long ridge looks like blunt saw teeth carved in stone that in turn tower high above the trees and plants. Montserrat means ‘saw mountain’.

I start from El Bruc, a village at the foot of the south side. During the climb of the Coll into the natural paradise along the north side, through the typical Mediterranean maquis shrubs, some of which are purple in bloom, the Roca de Foradada suddenly appears high above me. From here, it looks like a small window, but it is gigantic. How can you ever get up there, I wonder.

Fortunately I meet Kim and Montserrat. Yes, the woman got her name from the mountain. It is a popular Catalan name. 

‘This mountain is also named after the Black Madonna of Montserrat, the Patroness of Catalonia’, says Kim.

Without them I would never have reached that viewpoint, because to get there you have to do some real mountain climbing. And for that I needed kindred spirits to persevere where it seemed crazy.

I leave my bike on the gravel path, tucked away between the bushes, and climb up together with Kim and Montserrat.

I notice the same urge in them. Urge with a capital U, to witness nature in all its glory. And the Foredada is a stunning creation of Mother Nature.

The contrast between the tight schedule I am following (I still have to drive to Barcelona today, and return the rental car and rental bike, and take the train to Girona) and the hundreds of thousands of years that Mother Nature has taken to erect this structure makes me dizzy. I don't break my head around it, I worship this 'goddess' by wallowing in the warm embrace of admiration.

That is why the Monastery of Montserrat, located on the northern flank of the mountain, seems so strange. Here, people worship… a statue. After all, this is the sanctuary where people worship the Black Madonna of Montserrat. Sounds like a cult, and in fact it is. Because after the descent from the mountain on steep and rocky hiking trails (bike on my back), and the beautiful climb to the monastery on asphalt, I end up in a feat of mass tourism: cable car and train to the top, countless souvenir shops and restaurants, an entire tourist village artificially constructed around the monastery.

The descent is thrilling, whizzing down the entire northern flank in 10 gentle bends to the river Lobregat. On the other side, a beautiful gravel road runs through the valley to the start of the cable car.

Then I suddenly hear that dreaded sound: pssssjjjjj. Yes, flat tire. Nail through outer tire, hole too big for tubeless fluid to seal. Punishment from the Black Madonna for calling her followers a cult? In any case, put in inner tube and get going.

There is still a beautiful finale to this route of barely 40 km: a 10 km climb, half on asphalt along the southern flank to Collbató and half from the village further on gravel through the vast olive groves back to El Bruc. What you can see in 40 km!

Rest of the day: car to car wash to hose down bike, car to Barcelona airport, return car to rental company, 15 km with bike from there to Terra Bike Tours in the center of Barcelona, ​​metro to train station, dinner, train to Girona, taxi to hotel. Quite an enterprise, but… it’s what I said to Xavier Gravier yesterday during Ranxo Gravel: ‘I would do anything to see the world!’

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Pieter Stockmans

Catalonia 😍 Muntanya de Montserrat

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Georgia 🇬🇪🇪🇺 Tbilisi

Catalonia 😍 Santa Coloma de Farners (Girona) 2️⃣

Catalonia 😍 Santa Coloma de Farners (Girona) 1️⃣

Barcelona 😍 Airport - City

Catalonia 😍 Muntanya de Montserrat

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