11112019 - Penya Migjorn, Xixona

In the morning we headed out to Xixona. About 45 min drive north from our village. Our plan was to get to the peak Penya Migjorn at 1226 meters above sea level.



But the path got too scary for me. We only got to 1150 meters because of me. The middle picture of the collage I took sitting and leaning to the mountainside. The next picture to right you can see my husband taking from bit higher up (he went to see if the route would change into bit easier, but it didn't) where I'm still leaning towards the side. The steep endless drop I was facing can't be seen in the picture. It was a work for me just to get back from that spot back to safer grounds.

We still got to see some really beautiful landscapes. And lots of griffon vultures. Amazing.

It was also a very cold day. Only a bit over 10°C on the mountainside with over 30km/hour wind with stronger gusts. Going up I was sweating and going down it was pretty cool. But nice hike with beautiful views all the way.

We drove bit higher than the original route suggested and as we didn't get to the top, we did elevation of 500 meters. But it was so steep, that my legs went spaghetti already going down.

My plan was to visit turrón factory after the hike to buy some fresh made sweets, but they went to siesta already at 13:30! So that didn't happen either. Now I need to stick to the ones that the stores sell (everywhere before Christmas). Instead we visited the Xixona castle.

Btw, Xixona is the same as Jijona. Starting with J it's the Castellano (Spanish) and with the X's it's the Valencian name. "The town is famous for a type of soft nougat, known in Spanish as Turrón de Jijona and in Valencian as Torró de Xixona. This is mostly due to the extensive almond farming that has existed since the Moorish farmers originally cultivated the almond trees following the Islamic conquest of the Iberian peninsula. Several factories produce turrón, which is all distributed for sale in December, although now they are trying to expand it during the other months." I have no trouble eating turrón all year long. My hips might disagree ;-)