Yesterday we were invited by friends of us to join them on a day trip to Alcalá del Júcar, a little town in the mountains between Requena and Albacete, around 100km away from Valencia in the Autonomous Region of Castile-La Mancha.
[from Spain.info:]
Alcalá del Júcar is located in an exceptional setting, on a hill below which we find the gorge formed by the Júcar river.
The plan was not to visit the village of Alcalá del Júcar, but instead to do a walking route to the neighbouring villages and back.
To find the beginning of the track was a bit hard, but the friendly locals helped us along and around 13:00hr we started our steep ascent of the mountain. A few minutes later we had fantastic views over the village below, with its castle, the church and the river gorge.
Then our hike took us along a plateau to La Gila, the first stop on the map, where we had our picnic lunch. In the “town square” there was a picnic table that seemed made for us.
After lunch we decided to cut our route a bit shorter and walked down the mountain to the river bed. There we could see a place with a rooftop terrace that looked gorgeous, so we went there for a couple of refreshing drinks.
Back on the track we continued our hike along the river and after a good hour we came back to Alcalá del Júcar where we had another couple of drinks before heading back home.
All in all it was a fantastic day!
I had my GPS tracking device with me, so I could track our hike and I have been able to import it into Google Earth. I also tried to add some pictures, but I am not entirely sure whether that worked out the way it should have… In the next couple of days I will look into it a bit more to see how that all works. But for now at least you can see below the map with the route we walked; a total of 15.3km, 6.5hrs from parking to finish.
