Beech woods, volcanoes and beans

Just before pulling into Olot, the bus passes the dramatically positioned village of Castellfollit. A vast senyera¹ draped from the church tower catches your eye. In Olot town centre, people crowd into the narrow streets, filled with market stalls on a Saturday morning, to a soundtrack of sardanas². This La Garrotxa, deep Catalunya.

¹ Catalan flag ² traditional Catalan dance music

As we walked out of town, the sun grew stronger, and the majestic snow-laden Pyrenees came into view, where hordes were skiing away the long weekend – the Puente de la Constitución. The mellow, late autumnal weather suited the gentle landscape of rounded hills – many of them volcanic cones -, fields, farmhouses and woods. Soon we were mingling with beech trees.

The reason the Fageda¹ d’en Jordá survives is presumably the lava flow on which it grows, which makes the land not worth cultivating. It’s surprisingly flat and – at 550-600m – low for an Iberian beech wood so near the southern edge of the tree’s range. In nearby Montseny, much more under the Mediteranean’s influence, beeches grow mainly between 1300-1700m.

¹ Beech wood

The Fageda’s accessibility means that on Sunday mornings it can feel like a genteel park, where people stroll sedately and bid each other good day. If men still wore hats they’d be doffing them. A final touch would be to hide speakers in the bird boxes to broadcast sardanas.

But on Saturday afternoon it was so peaceful you could hear a murmuring of decomposition from the thick carpet of coppery leaves, recently-shed. The beautiful monotony of the wood casts a spell as you wander around, endlessly repeating the here and now.

For beeches are good at fending off other species of trees and plants. They are experts at monopolising light, water and nutrients. Their weapons are a densely knit canopy, widespreading roots and copious leaf litter to smother the ground. Their leaves even contain a compound that impedes the germination of other plants.

Outcrops of black volcanic rock – resembling the carbon¹ naughty children get at Christmas – push out of the leaf bed and disrupt the uniformity. The rock is used in long stretches of moss-softened walls.

¹ sweets that look like lumps of coal

Our destination was Santa Pau, a fortified Medieval village, so picturesque that from a distance you can see camera flashes going off as visitors prowl its walls. Bags of fesols are sold – the local speciality of dried beans – though the sheer quantity of beans for sale makes you wonder if they’re all locally grown.

The next day we found a wilder, steeper beech forest on the higher slopes of the Serra de Finestres, which guards La Garrotxa to the south. The walk took us through contrasting woods: in a sheltered corner of the hills there were evergreen Holm oaks, densely tangled with creepers, typical of a Mediterranean climate. These gave way to deciduous oaks, the pale sun shining through their mustard-coloured leaves. Finally, higher up, we entered the clean silent grandeur of beech wood, whose leafless branches look like smoke from a distance.

Once at the top, looking south, the other face of the mountain was formed of exposed cliffs, like a waistband above skirts of dark green Holm oak. On a clearer day we would’ve seen the Costa Brava from up here, as well as the Pyrenees to the north. In the ruined walls near the Santuari de Santa Maria, excursionists were feasting on freshly grilled butifarras¹ and wine, and we were cordially invited to join in.

¹ sausages

Soon clouds started to settle on the sierra, and we began the descent. Smoke from the farmhouses merged with the mist, and flocks of chaffinches and hawfinches flew up from the fields. Two hunting dogs, with bells attached to their collars, came along the track, out on their own excursion. Woodpeckers tapped industriously. As the mist dropped lower, the day slowly turned to night.

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