Joanne's long walks: Road to Home 2023 Day 89: La Spezia

The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes

– Marcel Proust

Having overcome the obstacles between Sarzana, on the Via Francigena, and La Spezia, on the Via della Costa - two motorways, railway lines, a river and a military and commercial port - I faced another, equally daunting obstacle today: the Cinque Terre!

Most people don't think of the Cinque Terre as an obstacle. In fact, they come from all over the world to see them! They offer some of the most scenic, and most popular, hiking trails in Italy.

But if you want to get from A to B - say, from Rome to Santiago, or from England to Chiavari, to take just a couple of common examples 😂 - the Cinque Terre represent a major hurdle to be overcome. Their daunting geography, with plenty of ups and downs, ins and outs, and their equally daunting prices, given their popularity as a tourist destination, require careful planning and consideration.

There are basically three ways to hike across the Cinque Terre. The first and most obvious way is via the lowest path, closest to the sea. But it involves a lot of steep ups and downs, the payment of a daily ticket to access the national park, and throngs of tourists. I only hike these trails in winter, when the tourists have gone home!

The second route is the Via dei Santuari. Each of the five villages of the Cinque Terre has its own sanctuary, perched up in the hills high above the village. I've walked this route, not all at once but as a series of day hikes at different times, and it's pretty tough, as it involves even more ups and downs than the lower route, as well as as series of ins and outs, twists and turns, as the trail follows the conformation of the hills along the coast, running halfway up the hillsides.

The most direct way to get past the Cinque Terre is right across the top! The Alta Via delle Cinque Terre, abbreviated AV5T, requires an initial climb from sea level to around 700 metres, but then it stays there, with relatively few variations in elevation, as the trail runs along the top of the mountain ridge behind and above the Cinque Terre. The major disadvantage of this route is that you spend all day among the trees, and see nothing of the famous villages and vineyards of the Cinque Terre! 😄

But I've seen them before, and will no doubt see them again, so the choice is clear! The Alta Via it is! But... how to get up there from La Spezia?

How to get from down here to up there?

This sign is not very helpful!

I thought I would go up through Biassa, but the ever-helpful mapy.cz suggested a different route would be shorter: trail 523, connecting Pegazzano - presumably originally a separate village, but now a tucked-away corner of La Spezia - with the Sanctuary of Vignale, 300 metres above sea level and above the city, then passing through the forest between Monte Biassa and Monte Parodi to connect up with the AV5T trail at Sella di Carpena. The trail passes through several inhabited areas, so you are not alone in the woods, except in a couple of short stretches. And there are no hunters about, as most of the trail is within the buffer zone of the national park!

I huffed and puffed my way up the trail, with occasional views over the city of La Spezia, getting smaller and smaller below.

Then I spent the rest of the day walking along the AV5T, in the opposite direction from the way I walked it in 2015, on my first Long Walk to Rome. My memories of the trail were vague: I expected an easy day on a broad, flat trail once I got to the top, but in actual fact the trail does go up and down within a range of 500 and 750 metres in altitude, and there are narrow sections on the side of the mountains, and bits scrambling up and down rocky slopes, where I was too busy scrambling to take pictures, as well as the broad, flat, easy sections I remembered.

The highlights of the day were a quick glimpse of one of the Cinque Terre villages, Manarola, way down below, and a menhir - not even standing up, but fallen over and broken, so basically just a big rock beside the trail; I would never even have realised it was a menhir if someone hadn't written MENHIR on it in black felt pen!!

By the time I reached the end of the AV5T at the appropriately named village of Termine, which means "end", I was perfectly ready to end the day's walk - after only 21 kilometres! But these are 21 Ligurian kilometres, not 21 kilometres in the flat lands of the Po valley, and they came with a cumulative climb of over 1300 metres - more than the day we crossed the Cisa Pass!!

So I followed the road to the Sanctuary of Soviore, where I had stayed, and had a lovely evening, on my way to Rome in 2015. I was delighted to find that the Sanctuary was still open - until the end of October, when it closes for the winter - and still offered simple hostel accommodations in addition to the hotel-style rooms advertised on the website! I booked myself in and sat down to a slice of cheesecake in the café in order to regain some of the calories sweated off puffing my way up the mountain!

In the evening I returned to the restaurant for dinner. I spoke to a couple of Canadians sitting at the next table with an Australian friend they had met on the bus up to Soviore (yes, there is a bus service all the way up there!) and they invited me to join them. I took my glass of wine over to their table and we spent a pleasant evening conversing before retiring to our respective rooms - they on the hotel side, in the big pink building that also houses the restaurant, and me as the sole guest of the hostel, in a rather dilapidated building tucked away behind the church. It was just a bit spooky, being the only one there!