Blog Posts in Category: Costa Blanca

Costa Blanca Bolted Multipitch

While there is lots of excellent single pitch sport routes in the Costa Blanca, it is also an excellent destination for bolted multi pitch. This year we didn’t climb as many multi pitch routes when compared to last year, but the quality of the routes that we did climb was excellent. Carillo-Cantabella, Leyva After landing at Alicante we headed down south to Leyva, which is a spectacular mountain crag above a forrest filled valley. It is more famous for some of the harder routes, but there is an excellent mid grade route called Carillo-Cantabella. It is a five pitch f5+ with two pitches of f5+ and the rest being slightly easier. The bolting on the route was excellent, and the climbing was interesting with a technical sequence though the crux and un unexpected steep corner at the finish. Marin On the last day of the trip we headed to Marin which is 45mins away from Alicante airport. This was an excellent destination for quality lower grade short multi pitch routes, as the crag had a plentiful supply of 2 pitch bolted routes between f4 and f6a. We climbed the class f4. Read the full article…

Espolón Central

It isn’t often that a long easy rock route is quite as striking as the like of Espolón Central on Puig Campana. From the valley the climb follows the obvious ridge of rock up the centre of the rock face, which looks improbable at the grade of Hard Severe from the valley. We set off on a beautiful misty morning which gave us a beautiful inversion at the start of the walk. We had a bit of a navigational error at the start which meant that we had an unnecessarily hard time getting up onto the plateau, however we made good time up to the crag and found other teams in front of us on the route. By the time we had geared up the first pitch was free, and we didn’t need to queue again for the entire day. The climb started as it meant to carry on, with excellent well protected climbing which was interesting but not too difficult. The first five pitches gain the rocky spur at the base of the main ridge, then the next nine pitches headed straight up the main ridge. This section was the. Read the full article…

Diedros Mágicos

On our last day we headed up to the the impressive south face of Puig Campana to climb the classic corner of Diedros Mágicos which is a 5 pitch f6a. Unusually for Spain, the route had no bolts other than for the belays which gave the route a UK grade of E1. Also unusually for Spain there was actually a decent size walk in, although it looked pretty short from the car as the south face is so large. After a hot walk in with a fantastic view of the south face, we were soon at the crag which other than a team on the classic ridge of Espolón Central we had to ourselves. From below the groove of Diedros Mágicos looked very impressive so I was pretty psyched to get onto the route and the lack of bolts made me even more excited. The first pitch was much harder than I was expecting, but the climbing was amazing. It involved excellent bridging and laybacking up the steep corner, with excellent unpolished rock, loads of gear and it finished at a very comfy cave belay.   The next two pitches involved more of the same, just a bit. Read the full article…

El Dorado

As we didn’t have time to climb El Dorado yesterday we had another chilled out start this morning with the aim of climbing El Dorado in the afternoon. To warm up we headed to the main cliffs of Sierra de Toix for a few sport routes in the morning. El Dorado is an impressive line up a striking cliff face above the sea below Sierra de Toix. The first pitch is an exposed traverse onto a ledge below the main groove line, while the climbing was never hard it was pretty serious due to a lack of bolts or natural gear. The main pitches then follow a huge groove line up the cliff, from the bottom this looks incredibly intimidating as it is incredibly steep. The climbing up the main pitch was absolutely fantastic, it is now also fully equipped with good bolts so it was just a case of enjoying the outstanding climbing. The route was impressively steep, but generally the holds were excellent so it was often possible to get the weight off your arms. This just lead to a brilliant atmospheric pitch, from the hanging belay towards. Read the full article…