To autumn 2020, with love despite all. Our Montseny hike chasing the most beautiful autumn colors!

Before the Christmas magic (overload?) starts we would like to share our love letter to autumn for this year. We all need a little bit of love specially this 2020, right?

In Spain we have been semi-confined for a couple weeks now, meaning that we don’t have restrictions to enter/leave our home, but there are strong measures in place. For instance, restaurants & bars are only allowed to serve take away, or we aren’t allowed to leave our municipalities during the weekend (which means my mom isn’t able to visit until contagion numbers start to drop, which I really hope it’s soon). Before all these measures started, we put our boots (well, booties is more appropriate in my case) and went chasing for fall colors. Our journey in today’s post takes us to El Montseny, a large natural park that is spread across 3 counties and that is probably the nearest to Barcelona (50km away), which makes the perfect spot for a 1-day autumn mountain trip. Let’s go!

Turó de Murou

El Montseny has quite a lot of different trails you can follow for all type of mountain hikers, since this was our first visit, I decided that we were going to begin with the most traditional one, the visit to El Pantà de Santa Fe (a swamp). However, this is a very short one, it takes only around 15 minutes to reach it, so we opted to start with a longer hike, have a picnic in the middle of it, and then visit the swamp before leaving. From all the options starting in the same meeting point we thought that the climb to el Turó de Murou was a good one for us because it went across different type of landscapes.

We are not big mountain pros and I don’t like when the path is too difficult (aka scary), I am there for the enjoyment of watching the leaves, animals and taking pictures, not to have a big challenge. Thus, I always look for easy trails, in fact my trick is to search on family blogs by the keywords “hikes with kids”. This was considered in some reviews medium level, but I think it’s for the final part of the trail, because it ends with a moderate rocky slope (small rocks) that depending on the weather could be slippery. We were completely fine with our shoes and no-sticks. Also, as you can see, the weather was super mild; no need for jackets or scarfs during the whole climb!

El Turó de Murou was a good choice for us because it goes across different types of landscapes; I prefer hikes that have variations rather than going through the same kind of woods the whole time.

El Turó de Murou hike starts flat, with a nice wood-board path and crosses a stream where we found sheep. I noticed that some sheep preferred to eat next to the apple trees, I guess the apple-flavored grass was more yummy than the regular one *wink*. Going forward we crossed two chestnut woods, while approaching the top of the hill we could see more and more rocks, even very large ones, you can see me sitting in some of them.

During our walk we stopped to have a very unusual picnic (for a Spanish mountain trail), we had homemade miso beef onigiris (ommm!) and drank green tea. We are in a onigiri rush when it comes to picnics, we started making them for the beach and now it’s my favorite food to take on our walks. We have already tried several types, salmon teriyaki, ikura (salmon eggs), egg sandwich, miso beef, teriyaki chicken. My favorite is still salmon, but I loved the miso beef too! I am thinking of buying bento boxes and cooking a more elaborate meal for next time to go with the onigiris. What is your favorite picnic food?

Look! We climbed up the clouds! The view was quite astonishing but we weren’t able to capture it fully without putting ourselves at risk, thus pics are made from a very safe distance and you can’t see the complete view, sorry about that.

Pantà de Santa Fe

When a hike says that it takes around 2h to complete, I always think about 4h due to the pictures, but also we are slow hikers. I like to randomly stop and check things around me, so I am not the best one to complete an intensive mountain climb. My brother-in-law, on the contrary, enjoys more the challenge that checking his surroundings, he has participated in some climbs that start on the earliest morning when it’s still pitch-black, go for hours in black (using lanterns) and they don’t stop at all in order to complete it in a day. This sounds insane to me, ha! I can understand the excitement he gets of course by reaching his goal in the shortest time possible, but I don’t share it. I guess my hiking clothes also give me away, I’m not the sporty gal type *wink*

Well, finishing El Turó de Murou climb, we still had like 30 minutes left before having to drive back home with still some daylight (we didn’t want to drive down the natural park without light), so it was perfect to add the super quick peeping of the swamp (El Pantà de Santa Fe). I really loved this path, I think although you only need around 15 minutes to reach the swamp, it has lots of lovely photography opportunities that we were only able to grasp a little, thus it would had been nice to have more time, still, I am very happy that we could fit two hikes in one day.

Hope you liked the virtual hike with us! We are not able to travel this year, but we are trying to make the most of our surroundings while keeping everyone and ourselves safe. In the hike there were no people around at all (this was on a week day) during the complete time, that’s why we aren’t wearing masks. However we, of course, had our masks at reach at all times in case we stumbled upon someone and were wearing them in the parking lot. Please stay safe!

I’ll see you next with some Christmas content, I was thinking of bringing back the Christmas postcard snail mail for this year, would you like to get some Christmas wishes from us? In case the answer is yes, what do you like more, a postcard with a photo from us or a Christmas motif one?

Big love!