Ordesa y Monte Perdido
Europe's highest limestone massif and its four carved valleys — Spain's 1918 answer to Yellowstone, shared across the crest with Gavarnie.
Monte Perdido — the "lost mountain", at 3,355 metres the highest limestone massif in Europe — anchors a stack of sedimentary layers that erosion has cut into four radically different valleys, and the park, one of Spain's two originals from 1918, is those four valleys and the karst desert above them. Ordesa itself is the show valley: a flat-floored trench under six-hundred-metre banded walls, hanging waterfalls stepping down the Arazas river to the Cola de Caballo, beech and silver fir below, and the Faja de Pelay ledge running the whole south wall like a balcony bolted at 1,900 metres. Añisclo, the second valley, is its inverse — a slot canyon barely wide enough for its river and a paradisiacal chaos of box and lime trees; Escuaín is a gorge for vultures, and Pineta a broad glacial trough ending in Monte Perdido's north face.
The park owes its existence to French enthusiasm as much as Spanish: Lucien Briet, a photographer who spent a decade around Torla proclaiming Ordesa's "matchless glory", pushed the valley into the same 1918 decree as Covadonga. The frontier ridge above was already famous — the Brèche de Roland, the hundred-metre gash in the crest that legend says Roland cut with his sword, leads through to the Cirque de Gavarnie, and since 1997 the two flanks form a single UNESCO World Heritage property, Pyrénées–Mont Perdu, one mountain with a border on its summit plateau.
Ordesa is also where the Pyrenean ibex ended. The bucardo's last individual, a female called Celia, was killed by a falling tree in the park in January 2000; cloned tissue produced a kid in 2003 that lived a few minutes — the first de-extinction and the first second extinction. The valleys still hold sarrios (the local chamois), marmots, wallcreepers on the shaded faces and lammergeiers over every ridge, and the park remains the emblem of what Pyrenean protection came too late to save and just in time to keep.
What's worth knowing before you go
Torla is the Ordesa gateway: in the high season the road to the Pradera trailhead closes and a shuttle bus runs from the village. Añisclo is entered from Escalona on a one-way loop road, Pineta by the dead-end valley road from Bielsa, Escuaín from the village of the same name; there is no road link between valleys, so pick your valley per day. The Cola de Caballo out-and-back is the honest classic (allow six hours); Monte Perdido itself is a two-day affair via the Góriz refuge, which books out months ahead. Snow holds the Faja ledges and the high routes into June; October, when the beeches turn under fresh-powdered walls, is the valley's finest hour.
The connoisseur's route is the Faja de Pelay done clockwise — up the brutal Senda de los Cazadores first thing, then the balcony southward with the whole canyon underfoot and the crowds reduced to colored dots on the valley floor.