The Romans dubbed the El Chorro mountains ‘the Hills of Hell’ and looking at the Garganta del Chorro, better known as the El Chorro Gorge, it is easy to see why. The 5km long narrow cleft through a limestone massif some 200m high is enough to strike at least awe, if not downright fear, into most hearts. The bare jagged unforgiving rock, which seems to rise sheer from the earth, is more reminiscent of some primeval landscape in a Steven Spielberg film than as a tourist attraction and mecca for climbers.

Unbelievably, about halfway up the side of this fearsome massive throat of rock which twists and turns through the Sierras there is a ‘catwalk’ anchored to the rock-face. It was built during the 1920s as part of hydro-electric scheme and named El Camino del Rey (or Caminito del Rey) because King Alfonso XIII of Spain (the last King of Spain before the Spanish Civil War) was the first person to walk this elevated route which hangs out over the chasm. He must have had an incredible head for heights or perhaps he just had to put a brave face on it when he discovered exactly what it was that he was expected to walk along.

The waters of the Rio del Gaudalhorce run through the bottom of the Gorge and emerge into a murky and sinister looking lake below the mostly sheer faced mountain peaks which surround El Chorro. For about eighteen months a spectacular waterfall tumbled out of a cleft in the rocks of the gorge close to the El Chorro entrance and poured down into the river. A wooden foot bridge perched precariously across the gorge to carry the Camino del Rey across the narrow chasm gave a spectacular view of the waterfall.
However, the water fall has now dried up and local water supplies have been badly affected by whatever was happening within the mountain.

Today much of the Camino is in a wobbly state of repair and parts of the initial section, near a green metal bridge across a ravine where the El Chorro railway line emerges from a series of tunnels shortly before arriving at El Chorro station, are missing. Although some parts are passable, other parts are unsafe and a tourist was killed in 1998 when she fell from the Camino into the gorge. Until renovation work is completed it is safer to leave the Camino to experienced climbers. The best and safest way to see the gorge is to travel on the railway , which follows the gorge through the mountain, mostly through a series of tunnels, and to see the breathtaking views at the points it emerges from the tunnels along the route.

The small village of El Chorro clings to the mountainside overlooking the hydro electric works and the murky lake. A series of large caves are visible in the rock faces looming over the village. Although there are a number of cave houses in the area, access to these particular caves above El Chorro would only be possible by Superman. The village is quite small but there is a campsite; a shop; a restaurant/hotel in a former mill; and a railway station with orange trees and café tables on the platform. Tunnel mouths gape at either side of the station.

Take the Ardales road out of El Chorro past Pilar’s café and climb up towards the white church of La Virgen de Villaverde, with a number of cave houses in the hillside behind it; follow the winding road past a bed of bamboo on the left and some geological curiosities on the right (which ‘just shouldn’t be there, but they are’ said one geologist) to a left turning marked Bobastro. The road to Bobastro climbs steeply for about 3km and then, a short way past the turning for Valle de Las Vinas (on the right), it is a scramble over rocks on the left hand side of the road to reach what remains of a once impregnable city.

Bobastro was a Moorish city built in the late 9th and early 10th century by a Christian convert named Umar-bin-Hafsun who left his rather splendid home in Mijas to lead a revolt against the caliphal government of Córdoba. After his conversion from Islam to Christianity in AD 899 he built a church at Bobastro, the ruins of which can still be seen. For almost forty years (AD 879-AD 918) he ruled a rebel kingdom of some 8000 people from in his city on Las Mesas de Villaverde among the Tintilla, Castillón and Encantada hills. The views are stunning; the position inviolable.

After Umar-bin-Hafsun died his sons continued to rule for another ten years until they were, finally, defeated and captured by the Moorish leader, Abd-er-Rahman III. Rahman was neither magnanimous nor merciful in his victory and had the mouldering corpse of Ibn-bin-Hafsun exhumed and crucified alongside his sons in front of the mosque in Córdoba. Today no one lives in the remote and desolate ruins of Bobastro and there is little left, except an impressive Moorish arch and a few stones, of the once teeming city.