A journey through geological history

SPAIN HAS approximately 4,900 kilometres of coastline. Though much of it has been built up with hotels and housing, there are still many dreamlike stretches of beach and nature to be discovered. 

One of the especially fascinating examples is the Geopark Costa Vasca on the Atlantic coastline of the Basque region of northern Spain. Here a 14-kilometre trail between the towns of Zumaia and Deba takes you on a tour through geological history.

The Itzurun beach at Zumaia is book-ended on two sides by steep cliffs. Asier Hilario leads visitors along a dizzying path on one cliff, where there is a 20-metre vertical drop into the water. Asier is both a geologist and the director of the park, but even a lay person can see at once that the stone furrows are special. They look like clearly separated rock panels slanting downwards. 

“Each furrow accounts for 10,000 years,” Asier says. “What you are about to experience is not simply a hike along a coast but a trip through 50 million years of the Earth’s history.

“Geologists from around the world come here to study the history of our planet,” he says. “Much of their focus is on the flysch, a sequence of sedimentary layers of rocks and shales, often mixed in with sandstone that evolved during the formation of mountain ranges. The flysch sequence in Geopark Costa Vasca is not the only one in the world, but is a complete one. You can read the history of the earth here. Each layer is like the page of a book.”

The coastal landscape is a bizarre, alien-looking place. The erosion and land movements over these 50 million years have left their mark. What especially interests geologists are the fossils, as well as the colours of the stone layers that give evidence of the age of the stone and of the changing climate conditions over time.

Asier suddenly leaves the trail and leads the group into a crevice in the cliff. He calls attention to a greenish-brown line, maybe a centimetre thick, that runs for several metres through the stone. “This line is very important for studying the earth’s history and climate. It even tells us how the dinosaurs died out.”

It was this line that helped researchers such as the Dutchman Jan Smit to prove that around 65 million years ago a gigantic asteroid crashed into the earth, at what today is the Gulf of Mexico. The explosion was as powerful as 100 nuclear bombs, and the impact so mighty that it wiped out nearly 70 per cent of all living beings on the planet, including the dinosaurs. The impact sent waves of sediment and ash thousands of kilometres across the Atlantic Ocean, reaching today’s Spain.

Geologically less significant, but no less spectacular, is a coastal trail in the Asturia region, a trail peppered with “bufones” or sea geysers. It is a spectacular sight when, without warning, there is suddenly a loud blast and then water spurting high up through a hole in the cliff, launched by the pressure of the seawater from below. 

The 25-kilometre-long trail between Cobijeru beach and the municipality of Llanes leads along the cliffs. It actually a shock when you reach Arenillas where the bufones are and a powerful spray suddenly shoots up as high as 10 metres when the tide is especially strong.

The sea geysers here along the Costa Verde can make one think of Iceland, or perhaps the moss- and grass-covered landscape along the coasts of Ireland. All along the way are magnificent panoramas of steep cliffs, white sand beaches and rocky islands offshore. In the background the 2,000-metre-high peaks of Picos de Europa, Spain’s oldest natural park, rise up into clear blue skies.

The landscape on the southern side of the Iberian peninsula, at the Cabo de Gata park in the Andalusian region could not be more different from that up north. Here you have sand dunes, plains, cacti, and desert – no wonder, given that the sun shines 3,000 hours every year. Now a Unesco biosphere park, the barren and lonely landscape has been a favourite setting for the film industry. The “Spaghetti Western” films of Sergio Leone were shot here, as was the James Bond film “Never Say Never” with Sean Connery, and “Conan the Barbarian” with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

A 17-kilometre-long coast hiking trail leads from San Jose past the erstwhile film sets and picture-perfect beaches to the light tower of Cabo de Gata. And it becomes clear to the visitor that this stretch of the Mediterranean coast of Andalusia is one of the least built up and most authentic of any of Spain’s coasts.

The panoramas are breathtaking, especially in the nature park Brena y Marismas del Barbate where the view stretches to the Rif mountains of Morocco, on the other side of the Strait of Gibraltar. The coastal trail from Barbate to Canos de Meca leads along snow-white sand beaches and deep-green pine forests. Some of the pine trees have been sculpted into bizarre shapes by the winds that are always blowing here in the province of Cadiz. And through the trees one can get a glimpse of a far-distant light tower marking the spot on the coast where in 1805 the British navy defeated Spain’s fleet at the battle of Trafalgar. The victory was the beginning of the end of Napoleon’s rule over Europe and marked the beginning of Britain’s supremacy over the world’s seas.