Volcan de Santa Margarida → Bardenas Reales

01 Volcano

Santa Margarida Volcano

Volcán de Santa Margarita

At the bottom of this almost perfectly round crater, some 350 metres wide and 79 deep, stands the Romanesque hermitage of Santa Margarida. See how the forest wraps around the cone, whose floor forms a circular flat area around the hermitage. The volcano erupted some 11,000 years ago, in what is now the Garrotxa.

02 Mountain

Roques de la Vila

Two rows of vertical limestone strata form an enclosure on the shore of the Canelles reservoir, nicknamed the Great Wall of China of Finestras. Take the track from Estopiñán del Castillo to the 11th-century Romanesque hermitage of San Vicente, nestled between the two walls. The nearby hamlet of Finestras emptied in 1960 with the dam.

03 Nature

Monegros Desert

Desierto de los Monegros

04 Castle

Castle of Loarre

Castillo de Loarre

Built between 1033 and 1035 for Sancho Garcés III of Pamplona, Loarre overlooks the whole plain of the Hoya de Huesca, at the foot of the Pyrenees. Look at how the limestone rock serves as the walls' foundation: no besieger could undermine them. Considered the best-preserved Romanesque fortress in Europe, it shelters a domed church, a rarity in Romanesque art.

05 Village

Agüero, Huesca

Agüero

Look up at the Mallos, needles of reddish conglomerate rising north of the village. In the early 12th century, Queen Bertha ruled the kingdom of the Mallos from here, received as her dowry. On the square, the Romanesque portal of El Salvador displays Christ in Majesty between the symbols of the Evangelists.

06 Heritage

Cuevas de Arguedas

07 Nature park

Bardenas Reales

Parque Natural de las Bardenas Reales

There is neither village nor municipality in this Navarrese desert, run for centuries by a community of twenty-two entities with usage rights. Water and wind have sculpted clays, gypsum and sandstone into ravines, mesas and solitary buttes, the cabezos, on ground whitened by salt. Wait for the end of the day, when the low light deepens every gully.