Fairy Tale Village

This post is probably going to be long. Just finished our second day in Torla, a fairy tale village in the middle of the Pyrenees mountain range of Spain. The drive up here gave us so much to look forward to.. watching the mountains get closer and closer and eventually being submerged within them, seeing bodies of deep blue water, and passing through commercial villages that I excitingly told my parents weren’t as good as the place we were staying. After finally making it up to Torla around 2pm, the views were so breathtaking  that we couldn’t believe where we were. It’s so hard to describe it, and the pictures really couldn’t capture what we were seeing, but the feeling of being there was so tranquil. Even the village with its cobblestone pathways and family owned stores was awesome. We walked around the village and got lunch and eventually dinner, found a nice river, and did a little bit more walking around the area. No spot had a bad view. We went to bed early as we planned to wake up early the next morning to take a bus to a cool hiking area nearby. When we woke up the next morning, there was a rain scare that made us think twice about going hiking in the mountains that day. Eventually the storm passed and we knew that we had to go hiking on our only full day here, so my dad, my brother, and I took the chance and rode the bus up to Ordesa. The path we chose was easy (at least compared to the other hikes) because there was a chance of another storm later, but the hike was nothing less than surreal. It was freaking cool! I’ll let the pictures do the talking. Anyway, after getting a good 5 km away from our base spot, we decided to turn around due to time. Literally a minute after that it started to rain, and we knew we were in for something. It took about 3 minutes before huge amounts of hail were coming down, the paths were completely covered in water, and there was extremely loud thunder. We eventually found a cave with a bunch of hikers inside, so we took refuge in there until the storm ended. Every part of us not covered by ponchos was drenched by the time it ended, but luckily everything but our shoes had dried off by the time we got back. After returning, the family went to dinner and walked around the village some more. This place is a dream, I don’t want to leave tomorrow..

(been trying to post this since last night, actually in Madrid now)

- Jacob

Pictures of Torla:

Hiking Pictures: