Rocks and mountains

The valley is formed from massive impressive glaciated mountains with almost edibly delicious swirls and stripes of different coloured rocks, towering cliffs and rounded peaks, terrifying drops and what seem to be totally inaccessible hanging valleys and forests high above. A national park was created back in 1918, and it's now part of the UNESCO world heritage conservation programme due to the precious diversity and pristine atmosphere.

You can see the Torla Fold on the left of this picture 

You are only allowed to get up to the park on a bus, and we (being old) had a price reduction for our tickets. There was a long queue to get onto a bus, and each bus has kennels underneath for lucky pooches being taken walkies in tham thar hills. (It does look a bit like a Western movie).

We did our five miles or so along a rough but well-maintained gravelly pathway - boulders, sand, rocks, some parts paved where mountain streams are likely to wash the road away, some very loose scree. How this path survives winter snows and melts is a question.
Parts of the path almost looked like somewhere in Surrey - till you look up and see the massive mountains above you, through the trees. Far, far above.  In the slightly misty air it was hard to estimate how far away they are, how tall.  In fact they are getting on for 3000m high.
It was really amazing the number of people and how old and how young they were, we saw on the path. The map says it's an hour to the first waterfall, but we found it was quite a lot longer than that, even going at a fair lick.   We saw lots of babies being carried back-pack style, tiny toddlers, slightly disgruntled young teens, masses of hefty keen walkers, many older or even elderly couples or groups.  The young couples ignored us.  The families were friendly.  It was the older people who were most likely to say 'Olá!' or give us some other greeting.   We estimated that even at this time of year there must be well over a thousand people trekking along to see the waterfalls every day, and we were on just one of many possible paths through the park. There are loos at the carpark area, but none along the route. So, occasionally, as on the famous St James camino pathways, you see scraps of tissue where people have ducked behind trees for a pee or more.  The climb (which is not just up but also down and up) is said to be about 100m altitude - but the waterfalls are beautiful, interesting and noisy. 
We had noticed that some areas of paving in Broto and Torla have strange undulated veins running over them, reminiscent of the blood vessels on the coats of some well-groomed horses, and I asked via Facebook what this effect is called. It led to an interesting debate, with one friend, Duncan Grant, promptly sending a reference to something called the Torla Fold (see left of photo above), which is a mighty toffee-like squidgey sandwich of rock stripes bending back on itself, which we could see from our lunchtime seats in an excellent tapas bar.  There were no clear answers about this paved surface, but it sent us out to do more research and we came to the conclusion that it's a natural effect of the solidified rock being laid down as mud (500 million years ago), possibly heated, with possible intrusions, some of which look like white marble, and some of which are these thready decorations.  Very handy as a foot surface in a place with such icy winters.

The hotels all close for 3 months a year, maybe the whole village shuts down. There's no ski-ing here.
Our final call of the day was to break into prison, the Torre de Carcel de Broto which I mentioned before. The gaoler is now a very pleasant housewife who lives just along the alley. The tower looks pretty much like an ordinary house. However, it has three floors. The lowest is a cellar or warehouse, now completely separate from the museum, accessed from the street below, further down the hill. The prison is a stone room about fifteen feet square, lit only by two miniscule squints to the west.  No facilities at all, walls all blackened and sooty, or just dirty.  The top chamber presumably belonged to the Magistrate, with a barrel-vaulted roof, a proper window space though no fireplace, and a magnificent, well-designed bog in the wall, complete with a cylindrical stone drop for his poo to go down through to some unknown heap somewhere below.  The whole message of this was, I suppose, to emphasise that prisoners had to live in their own squalor. The ongoing fight for use of the high mountain pastures was always going to be hazardous, with the risk of imprisonment in dungeons like this if you were caught by the other side.  The prison seems to have been in use for hundreds of years. The prisoners - some of them - artists and free spirits - spent their time carving holy graffiti into the blackened walls of their cell - saints, musicians, soldiers, a Calvary, geometric shapes, crosses, animals, lots of free-flying birds....  They must have used little shards of stone to while away their stinking hours, in the near pitch darkness, drawing images of radiant light and godliness.
Life in the mountains is always going to be tough, breeding tough people with a strong spiritual quality. They apparently need few 'things' to help them live in these vast stony valleys. Just their eyes.