A walk through the thunder mountains

To begin at the beginning - 11,000 years ago the last and biggest Catalonian volcano erupted in the heart of the unstable Garroxta region in north-eastern Spain.

Towering and sizzling over its humped neighbours, El Croscat rose to 2,578ft, then cooled, solidified and slept.

The centuries clothed its flanks with chestnut, holm-oak and aromatic grass; the once-bubbling landscape for miles around was hunted, then farmed until eventually the dormant cones were dotted with golden stone Romanesque churches and walled towns dozing in the sun.

El Croscat watched it all, benevolently. Then, as it entered its 102nd century, the Catalan authorities decided to let mineral excavations nibble at its stately flanks. In 1982 they decided to stop but someone thought, 'Hey, let's take advantage of the mess' and decreed that El Croscat's wounds should be tidied up and extended until it appeared to have been cut open, removing a large slice, like a piece of pie, to demonstrate what a volcanic cone looks like inside.

So now you can stand in a surreal, V-shaped arena (not for nothing was Salvador Dali born round here), looking at layers of rock and ash in stripes from black on the outside to red at the heart, just as if you had stepped into a cutaway diagram.

Husband Paul and I had walked a great many miles over rocks to look at this. It was worth it. There are many prettier landscapes on our 50-mile meander across this wild corner of Spain but none so arresting.

Croscat was a keynote moment in a strenuous, intriguing yomp across a land of volcanoes, revolutions, surrealism and unbeatably good cusexpeditionstard. Our walk had begun well north of the volcanic Garroxta region, up in the high foothills of the Pyrenees. We slept the first night 3,000ft up in a gorgeous medieval village called Mollo. After a dinner laced with local mushrooms so wonderful that tears still spring to my eyes at the memory, we slept like tops, got in a suitably Catalan mood by daring each other to eat garlicky chorizo sausage with our breakfast (it does not go well with marmalade), lit a candle in the church and set off.

This is one of Inntravel's newer leading across country with few British tourists and fewer English speakers. As usual they book you a chain of inns, supply a file of maps and directions and a taxi to transport the serious baggage. It is softie backpacking: you carry only your picnic, water, firstaid, compass, waterproof and whistle - but you need good boots and enough nous not to end up on the wrong side of the mountain. Your reward for getting it right is a very good dinner, often with mouthwatering-Creme Catalan (custard made by angels).

An hour out from Mollo, puffing uphill, we had the first surreal experience: cattle conversing with an echo. The golden bullocks in front of the farm called Mas Costa were bellowing furiously - from across the deep, wooded valley. The echoes came back clear and weirdly amplified. Every time it happened the animals would look mildly startled, then repeat the complaint in endless conversation with a phantom herd.

We watched for a while, then marched on into a thick woodland of beech and birch, maple and wild cherry, eyes darting anxiously for the next splash of red-and-white paint on a rock or a tree confirming we were on the track.

We are not very intrepid. Inntravel know their market perfectly - romantic but time-poor puffers like us who want to be alone on wild tracks, ford streams, gasp up mountainsides, see boar and eagles and attempt arm-waving conversations with old men on benches outside taverns but flinch at the thought of sleeping in a dank bivi-bag or arriving in a village to find no beds.

We trudged along a dried riverbed and rocky paths of the type which walking notes tend to describe romantically as 'shattered mule tracks' (I know just how the shattered mule feels). We saluted grave old churches, staging points on the old pilgrim route from the East towards Santiago de Compostela; we reared in amazement at enormous, exotic mushrooms and crossed wonderful high meadows full of clover and rare flowers.

This is a region of microclimates: plants and trees are halfway between Alpine and Mediterranean, which gives an odd sense of dislocation - here's a pine, a holmoak grove and lavender, oops, no, fruit trees now and suddenly an olive, oops again, we're back in the Alps with starry flowers.

I turned up the end of my trousers at one point to avoid some serious mud and, two hours later, on a hard roadway, was puzzled by a chirruping coming from my nether garments. I unrolled them and about 50 tiny grasshoppers tumbled out, cursing. I must have taken them miles out of their way.

Ruined cottages and farmhouses spoke eloquently of the depopulation of rural Catalonia and only very few spraunced-up ones suggested the holiday-cottage set from Barcelona.

We ate our lunch on a bank of thyme (pricklier and less romantic than it sounds), crawled under an old watermill to see the ancient wheel, then found the road to Beget after a spirited discussion with Paul about whether we should walk along it and get in a bath as fast as possible, or take the woodland track high over the river.

Paul won, the hearty bastard. We climbed. Beget was a welcome sight but all its golden stone charm and towering church - even the sight of our marble bathroom and faithfully waiting luggage - were not as beautiful as the bottle of Estrella beer on the pub table.

Hostal El Forn fed us on rabbit with dried figs and wild boar, and after a bit of balcony-gazing we slid into unconsciousness.

The second day's walking leads right into the heart of the Alta Garroxta and, after a deceptively gentle amble along a riverbank, the track rears up for a couple of punishing miles on rocky tracks in dense woodland, the sweating effort relieved occasionally by glimpses of the deep Hortmoier valley below.

When it flattened out the scene was wide, wild and beautiful: a secret valley with steep sides and a tumbling river. At the summit lay a wonderful little abandoned farmyard overseeing a dizzying view; I had to hurry Paul past as he is dangerously vulnerable to any peasant-farming opportunity. If we had stayed much longer he would have bought it and forced me to herd goats up there.

More solemn reflections followed us along the last, long section as we crossed and recrossed the Riera de Oix. You can't walk in remote Catalonia without being reminded of its long history of fights for freedom.

Long before its desperate struggles in the Spanish Civil War, there were others. We saw the precipitous cliff called El Salt dels Liberals, off which Liberal soldiers in the 19th Century wars were thrown to their death for challenging the conservative Carlist dynasty. Half an hour later we glanced up to see the Castel de Oix, shimmering above the hot path. It was built in the 15th Century to quell a peasants' revolt against feudal dues.

We saluted the libertarian traditions of men as unyielding as their rocks and limped into Oix village to find the Hostal de la Rovira, where a small, wiry man paused from shouting Catalan into a phone to show us to our room. He gave us a large shot of home-brewed pastis which, he assured us, was 'no comercial'. Too right it wasn't. We drank it at a gulp and passed out cold for the two hours 'til dinner.

We wrecked ourselves on Day Three. Maybe it was the sinister shot-glasses which Manuel of the Mountains kept refilling with his cry of 'no comercial', maybe it was because we are feeble. The task was to nip over two passes - a footling 2,230ft and 1,706ft - heading south out of the Alta Garroxta towards the true volcanic zone.

We started very bouncy, enjoying the cool, overcast weather, and roared up to some fabulous high views towards villages which clung to clifftops.

Then we scuttled down through scented woods - the soil here is poorer, which makes the aromatic plants thrive - and it was like a full aromatherapy treatment delivered on the hoof. Beyond a base of pine were wild lavender, mint, thyme, chives and juniper (it really does smell of gin).

We were drunk on it. However, after going down a long way we began to dread the next ridge and nearly opted to sneak off to the invisible main road and hitch to Olot. Paul's puritanical streak triumphed and we climbed onward. And so did the merciless sun.

We fell into weary, confused panics about the perfectly clear directions (When is a T-junction not a T-junction? How long should you walk north, hoping that the path will swing south? When they say a broken-down wall, how broken? Do a couple of mossy stones count?). Well, we were tired. We should have built in a rest day, as sensible walkers do. And, while Catalan rural maps improve year after year, it is barely a decade since they stopped being military secrets, and an over-reliance on aerial photographs means that paths vanish when they go through woods. Still, as long as the notes define the occasional farm or ruin by name, I find that old ladies feeding chickens are very good at pointing.

By the time we got down the long, long hard final road into St Joan we could only shake our fists, pucefaced, at the spectacular waterfall and dial for a cab with trembling fingers (the notes recommend the bus, but we missed it). It took us the few minutes into Olot, a businesslike town rebuilt after an earthquake and dotted with urban volcanoes, Dali-esque green humps among the buildings. We fell into hot baths, gasping.

Next day, reader forgive us, we cut out half the prescribed fivehour walk and took a taxi up to the Croscat. A girl should be fresh to meet a volcano.

The cutaway Croscat was startling enough, representing the logical conclusion of the scientific mind ('if you want to see what makes it work, take it to pieces').

If you want a romantic volcano, though, Garroxta can also oblige. Fifteen minutes away you can climb to the rim of the Volca Santa Margarida and see that, deep in its heart, alone in the circular crater, lies a 12th Century church dedicated (so the guidebook says) to the saint who tamed the dragon lurking below.

Two hours beyond the volcanoes lies Santa Pau, a walled town, tiny and perfect with alleys and cloisters and a fabulously ornate Gothic church. But it is perfect in a very European, living way, unlike the National Trustish heritage stuffiness that would mark it out in Britain.

You see a wonderfully ancient carved and pillared stone window - but hanging outside it on a rack were two pairs of children's shellsuit trousers and some T-shirts. Here is a facade of golden antiquity but at every inhabited window is a cheap, green, plastic roll-up blind, because someone lives there and that is what they want.

He effect is definitely pleasing. So is the bar in the square and the Rossbiff of Pig Fillet at the restaurant Cal Sastre and the coin-operated, light-up Nativity scene in the church.

With difficulty we retained enough grip on ourselves after the final Muscatel to nod understandingly through our land-lady's late-night tour of the sepia photographs of the sastre - the tailors - who made her family's fortune and then remade it in hotels after 1945.

There was a further 2,000ft ridge to climb to the north of us, the Serra del Torn, more puffing and scrambling and another wild, silent, roadless valley where the only signs of life were the rooting-holes and vast, piggy wallows of the wild boar that swarm the place.

We flopped in a wide, generous old inn at Can Jou, where Inntravel riding holidays are run by a cheerful Irishman called Mick and his beautiful Catalan wife Rose, and watched the riders come home as the dusk crept across the golden distant Pyrenees.

We had covered a great arc of truly wild country on our own two feet, lost the modern world for days on end and been inside a volcano. What more could you ask?

Getting there

Inntravel (01653 629010) offers independent walking holidays from the Pyrenees to the Garroxta from around £600 per week.This includes return flights from London or Manchester, half-board accommodation, picnic lunches and rail and taxi transfers. Luggage is transferred daily and maps are provided. Domestic connections from Scotland to Heathrow cost an additional £80.