Hasta the vista

Bet you didn't know concrete Benidorm has a beautiful neighbour. To find it, all you do is look up. Janet Street-Porter spent a few days walking the peaks of the Sierra Aitana

Just a few miles inland from the hideousness that is Benidorm lie spectacular mountains, unspoilt villages and empty footpaths. I'd decided to walk in the Sierra Aitana, a relatively undiscovered part of Spain which is only now being developed for visitors, and in a more eco-friendly way than the coastal concrete jungle.

Just a few miles inland from the hideousness that is Benidorm lie spectacular mountains, unspoilt villages and empty footpaths. I'd decided to walk in the Sierra Aitana, a relatively undiscovered part of Spain which is only now being developed for visitors, and in a more eco-friendly way than the coastal concrete jungle.

My definition of a perfect walking holiday isn't just a well-marked trail. I want a good picnic, a home-cooked dinner with local dishes, and small, friendly hotels. Would I find it in the province of Alicante? My flight was full of Brits heading for the opposite kind of holiday - sea, sand, sangria and probably sunburn. The omens weren't good. The drive from the airport was through a coastal strip of dusty fields, passing the cluster of tower blocks that is Benidorm - a sort of Mediterranean Hong Kong. We climbed up into the mountains passing Altea with more expensive villas and terraced fields. I stopped in the village and bought an Holà ! to improve my Spanish.

Then, we took the road to Castell de Castells at the end of an extraordinarily beautiful valley, with long mountain ridges of limestone pockmarked with huge caves and sheer cliffs marked with indentations caused by wind and rain. The village sat up one side of the valley, extremely isolated. It was 3pm, siesta time, and all shutters were drawn. Our guest house, Casa Pilar, was a restored old corner house with a large, airy sitting room on the top floor looking out over the village. Our bedroom had a 1920s wooden double bed - very cosy!

Down in the basement (once a stable) we ate lunch: delicious serrano ham, salad, olives, with local cheeses and white wine and a dessert of blocks of almond paste that looked like fudge and melted in your mouth. After our siesta we took a short drive, then walked to an amazing double rock arch high above the valley. The path took us through wild camomile and fennel in flower, cornflowers, daisies, thyme, rosemary, sistus, palms and sage.

Next, we drove to the other side of Castells to see 7,000-year-old cave paintings at Pla de Petracos, only discovered in 1980. Large, red images of figures high on a cliff face, fenced off, very clear through binoculars.

Back in the village a lot of conversations were echoing around its tiered streets - how unlike an English village. I sat in the lounge on the top floor of the guest house, watching the clouds go gold and birds flying to their night resting spots. Sadly, no live bullfighting on TV, but a noisy cat fight in the square below. Cathedrals on TV. Then Pilar, who had been impressed because she saw my picture in Holà !, asked us to accompany her and her husband for a stroll after supper. A huge dinner of chickpea and noodle soup, then grilled vegetables with roughly chopped chicken baked in lots of olive oil.

By 11pm I was exhausted and slept well. Breakfast was a banana with home-made, dark, thick-cut marmalade in it - delicious - and camomile tea. Luckily it was slightly overcast (good for walking). We drove through groves of oranges, medlars, almonds and olives, finally taking a dirt road up to about 2,000 feet. Then it was time to heave on our rucksacks and set off along an indistinct path up a steep rocky cliff. We were heading for the ruins of the Castillo del Serrella, built by the Moors to defend their territory, on the very tip of an outcrop of rock with a sheer drop on three sides. The views from the 14th-century castle were superb. The Mediterranean lay far away to the east, Benidorm thankfully scarcely visible under a heat haze.

We gingerly climbed back down to the dirt road and said farewell to our guide, Jose Miguel, who was to meet us at the other end of our walk with the car. Our plan was to ascend to the escarpment of the Sierra de Serrella and walk due west.

After one false start which led to a sheer cliff we cut across rocky slopes to rejoin the real footpath up a ridge, then zigzagged down to a gully. From here, it was a sweltering 40-minute ascent to a pass with sheer cliffs on either side.

Over lunch we decided to follow my compass and strike out across rough ground up the hill. From then on we had an hour-and-a-half of the finest escarpment-walking along the Serrella range you could imagine, with breathtaking views on all sides.

At the Pico de Serrella (4,327ft) we gingerly descended a steep slope, avoiding loose rocks and thorn bushes. This was a low moment. Jose Miguel had told me to aim for a hill rock below - but how? It seemed interminable and my knees were like jelly. Overhead, swifts scythed through the air, making swooshing sounds, emitting mocking screeches.

Having dropped from the high ridge, we climbed a secondary one, only this path featured a prickly Spanish mountain version of holly, and soon my legs were painfully scratched. We then skirted the base of a steep rocky escarpment to our right, walking carefully across scree - eventually reaching a gravel road after four-and-a-quarter hours. We plodded up its zigzag route over the top, then contoured along through shady pine trees, before zigzagging once more down to the dirt road.

A couple of phone calls to Jose Miguel on the mobile phone he had lent us (he couldn't believe we'd done it so quickly) and we met him in the car further down the road.

A short drive took us to Pension El Trestellador high above the village at Benimantell, with a fantastic view of the valley down to the sea, and the rocky crags of the Sierra de Aitana to the south. At 6pm the owners were still having lunch, laughing uproariously. Covered in dust and parched, I downed two beers, one after the other.

The pension was modern with clean, tiled rooms and no lounge - really a restaurant with rooms which people come up from the coast to visit. It was in an idyllic position, and Charo, our hostess, brought us plates of local cured ham and cheese.

I had a bath and inspected my scratched legs, searched for bullfighting on TV (no luck), but settled for the Open tennis championship. Dinner started with bread and cabbage soup with ham stock and beans. This would have been a meal in itself, but it was followed by a salad of pickled beetroot, peppers, egg, asparagus and lettuce and a large earthenware casserole of slow-cooked lamb with roast potatoes and aubergines. It was delicious, if somewhat oily, and I crawled up to bed feeling extremely bloated. I tried to stay awake to digest this monster feast, but to no avail. The night was extremely tormented - I woke up sneezing and parched every hour as my summer cold really blossomed.

Breakfast and a huge plate of fruit so very perfect it looked like a Dutch still life - bunches of medlars with the branch and leaves still attached, dark-red cherries, lumpy, large, ripe, perfumed pears and apricots with the palest flesh.

Jose Miguel had described the previous day's walk as moderate, but I would disagree - sections of it are not on paths at all and involve walking down steep slippery slopes. Most normal walkers would want to do it with a guide as there is no water en route and a possibility of getting lost if you can't read maps.

This morning, we were to climb the Sierra de Aitana and started with a drive up an extremely impressive new road built with EU money (ironic when you realise that local schools have to close because the villages cannot afford teachers) up the mountain to a parking area at Fuente Partagas, with picnic tables under trees and a stream running down through the site. We were to climb Aitana, the highest mountain in the province at 1,558m, a long ridge desecrated at one end by a cluster of transmitters and radar domes - but with a wall of impressive sheer cliffs facing us - the Partagas.

Jose Miguel guided us up the track a little way and then left us to climb along a well-defined path to a pass behind a crag. It was sweltering and my cold was a nuisance, but the environment was so pleasant it was a joy to walk through - clouds of sage with purple-blue flowers, lavender (not yet out, but still smelling strongly) poppies, camomile and pink flowering thyme.

From there, we took a little path, climbing gradually until we emerged on to a forest road. After a few hundred yards another track took us south-east until it fizzled out on a plateau below towering cliffs. Now we followed a path directly to them, scrambling up diagonally - I had to pull myself through a narrow gap in between two rocks known locally as "two vixens pass" or in an English guide book "fat man's burden".

We emerged on to the summit which seemed as if a giant had put his foot down and squashed the earth. The rocks we had crawled through formed a façade behind which the ground sloped away at 40 degrees with high fissures in the limestone. It was very hard to walk on the protruding little sandstone spines, but we found a footpath and started to traverse the ridge.

We followed the edge of the sheer cliffs in a switchback walk heading east with excellent views of the valley below. We dropped down to a forest track and followed it back down the mountain to our starting point.

Our final day's walk was a relatively easy walk from Bienemantel to the old hill-top village of Sella. We started by contouring around the eastern end of the Aitana range, following a patch once used by the village postman. Again there was an almost secret route through the cliffs, up a gully, and we emerged into a completely different landscape of grassy fields. Then the path on this plateau joined a dirt road which dropped south down a sheltered valley which was the home of a Buddhist retreat.

Another sweltering haul up a beautifully restored path brought us to the top of the cliff and the dirt road to Sella, a completely quiet unspoilt village with about 300 residents, arranged in tiers up the hillside.

At the end of four days in Alicante I was exhausted but mentally refreshed. On a clean, pebbly beach, near the posh Montiboli hotel outside Villajoyosa, I tried to tan my legs so the scratches wouldn't seem so bad. My holiday reading lay unopened - on the last night I'd finally located live bull fighting on TV. Hoorah!

Getting ThereJanet Street-Porter travelled as guest of the Valencia Region Tourist Board (tel: 00 34 96 398 64 22).

British Airways (tel: 0845 77 333 77) flies daily from London Gatwick to Alicante (through GB Airways). Return flights cost from £185.20, including taxes.

Her self-guided walking trip was organised by Terra Ferma (tel: 00 34 965 89 03 92). An eight-day holiday costs £280 per person, based on four travelling together, including b&b, packed lunches, airport and luggage transfers and travel insurance. Contact Exodus (tel: 0208 675 5550) and Origins Travel (tel: 01433 659331).

The five-star Hotel El Montiboli (tel: 00 34 965 89 02 50) offers b&b in a double room from £95 per night.

Recommended Reading'Mountain Walks on the Costa Blanca', by Bob Stansfield (Cicerone Guides, £9.99). 'Landscapes of the Costa Blanca', by John and Christine Oldfield (Sunflower Books, £9.99).