El Cerro de Los Almendros

High above the lakes there are a number of places which offer spectacular views of the water. I have been to most of them many times, and written about them, too. There is one I had heard about but never been to, because I hadn't found the path until now. A few weeks ago I finally discovered it and I have the photos to prove it.

The path goes up from beside a lake, one of a series of paths which diverge from a spot I have passed dozens of times. It looks as though it just gets lost among the trees on the hill and then drops down to another path bordering another arm of the same lake on the other side of the hill, whichg is why I had never bothered with it. In fact it does not do this at all.

It climbs steeply through the trees for a few hundred yards, a rocky, pebbly path very hard to ride on. There is an area beside it that was once used for baking rocks to make quicklime, which was then mixed with water and used for coating houses mainly. There is an old oven still visible, and some other structures that look like more recent attempts to imitate the procedure.

Nearby there is a cave, but it's set into a rock face that is hard to climb down to (especially in the presence of Mrs Hickory who has third-party vertigo), so I know where it is but I haven't seen it yet.

Then it rises out of the trees and follows the ridge several miles with views of haof a dozen lakes and also the valleys on the other side, some of which are rather wild. The best views are at the beginning and that's where the photos are from. It rejoins the waterside again much further up at one of the higher lakes, passing out through some farm buildings hidden among the trees.