Aigüestortes

The full name is Aigüestortes i Estany de Sant Maurici — "twisted waters and Saint Maurice's lake" — and it is a plain description. Ice carved this block of the Catalan Pyrenees into a granite shelf country where streams lose their gradient on flat valley floors and wander in loops through sedge meadows, then drop into the next of some two hundred lakes. The park, declared in 1955 and still Catalonia's only national one, is essentially two east–west valleys meeting at the Portarró d'Espot pass: the Escrita valley under the twin rock horns of Els Encantats — two shepherds petrified, the story says, for hunting during Mass — with Estany de Sant Maurici mirroring them, and the Sant Nicolau valley on the west, where the eponymous aigüestortes meander below the Estany Llong.

It is high country wearing a working past. The lakes were plumbed for hydropower in the early twentieth century — dams raised on Estany Negre and others, galleries bored between basins — and the concessions predate the park and persist inside it, an oddity the declaration simply absorbed. Above the black pines and firs the terrain is bare grey granite to summits just under three thousand metres, Besiberri and Comaloforno on the western rim; capercaillie hold the old-growth pinewoods, chamois the open slopes, and bearded vultures cruise the crests.

The park's western door is its cultural trump: the Vall de Boí, whose cluster of eleventh- and twelfth-century Romanesque churches — Sant Climent de Taüll with its slender six-storey tower and famous Pantocrator — is a UNESCO World Heritage ensemble. The frescoes are copies (the originals were peeled off and carried to Barcelona in the 1920s), but the buildings in their mountain hamlets are the real, unmoved thing, and the combination of a morning church and an afternoon among the lakes is not available anywhere else in the Pyrenees.

What's worth knowing before you go

The gateways are Espot on the east and Boí on the west; private cars are banned inside, so you walk in or take the 4x4 taxi shuttles from either village (to Sant Maurici and to Aigüestortes respectively). Crossing the park on foot between the two, over the Portarró, is a long but ordinary day. Nine staffed refuges ring the high ground and link into the Carros de Foc circuit, a five-to-seven-day hut-to-hut loop that books out for the summer; they open roughly mid-June to late September, which is also when the high passes shed their snow.

The connoisseur's hour is the last one before the Sant Maurici taxi stand closes, when the day-trippers have drained away and Els Encantats go copper in the lake — or early October in the Sant Nicolau valley, when the meanders run between gold birches and the first snow sits on the Besiberris.