Today I will talk about a hike to know the mountains near the Costa Dorada (Golden coast in English), where you can found the tourist's popular towns of Salou, Cambrils or La Pineda.
The first mountain you found coming from the coast is La Mussara, that's a plateau of 900 meters of altitude where you can found a few towns, some of them abandoned (like the town of La Mussara, on the top of the mountain).
The hike I want to propose to you is an interesting walk from the base of the mountain to the abandoned town of La Mussara. A beautiful route where you'll see the mediterranean vegetation and a good views of the land between that mountain and the sea.
Whe start the trek from the town of Vilaplana. As an easy way to arrive to that town you can follow the route planned by ViaMichelin from Salou to Vilaplana. The trek starts crossing the small river at the end of the town, the town is small enought to found it quickly.
Our first steps give us a view of almond trees, a typical plantation of that area. the road ends on a fork and a post giving us two ways to arrive to La Mussara. Today we'll turn left to follow El camí de les campanilles. A few hundred meters from that point we found another fork where we'll turn right starting the ascension to the mountain, ending the cement road and leaving the plantations.
The path now goes inside a forest, where we'll found the tipical tree of the mediterranean forrests: the red pine. After a slope we'll found a post indicating that we need to leave the path and following the track in front of us. Our path is indicated by painted signals yellow and green, and there's no way to get lost. As usual in those marked paths, you'll found on the forks of the tracks a cross on a stone on the wrong paths.
After a hard slope inside the forest, we'll find an electrical tower, that give the name of our hike (Camí de les torres). Now we leave the forest to hike a beatiful path where we'll see the thickets with dozens of flowers (specially in spring). In that part of our hike we'll follow the electric towers a few hundred meters again.
Now the path climbs the mountain again with a hard slope (pay attention on a left curve where you'll see the way walked before), and finally the track will follow the face of the mountain with a beautiful red stone typical of that area.
A few meters and we'll found another post. That's the fork between el camí de les torres that follows the path on the same level, and el camí de les campanilles that's a hard slope that climbs the mountain and we'll use to descend of La Mussara in our return hike. We'll follow the path on the same level following again the electrical towers.
Again the path, a few hundred meters following the towers climbs the mountain. We had left the Mussara mountain on the right and now we'll start a hard slope that will give us to a path suitable for 4WD vehicles, where we'll turn on the right following that path.
Now we have found a metallic post giving us three ways: the final stage of our hike is rising the mountain to the left. It's the hardest stage of our hike and it's a good idea to rest a few minuts and eat something to get energy.
The final stage starts on the forest. The path leave the forest at the end in front of the face of the latest meters of our hike. Now we need to take care of our steps because the track is small accompanied by the face of the mountain and a precipice.
The first thing we see at the end of the track is a big stone with a metallic post in front of us that we need to climb, founding a prairie and the abandoned town of La Mussara. Take a look around and you'll see the land between the mountain and the sea.
Rear La Mussara you can wee the plateau. There is a lot of tracks that can start from that point and we'll see in a future hike. On the right, looking to the town you can see a television repeater with two towers.
Once we can take a look to the town and rested for a while, now we can take the return path. We'll to the return using a more abrupted path that will give us a reduction of the time of 30 minutes, using el camí de les campanilles. We start the return on the same way as we reach the top of the mountain until we reach the fork with the metallic post at the base of the latest stage of the hike, taking a path that starts from the fork and goes straight ahead of our way.
The path, not marked on the map I give you (click on the image to take a larger view of it), goes from point 25 to the 14 following the waypoints numbered between 22 to 25.
Finally we'll reach the path already walked with a fork marked by a wood post. Now the path is the already walked by us on the climb of the mountain.
I hope you'll try this hike, specially if you're a tourist on Salou. You'll know another kind of hollidays also interesting and beautiful.
For those that have a GPS map I give you the waypoints file to follow that hike. If you are also interested in the maps I have used to create the waypoints, feel free to send me an email.
Good luck.
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