The Sakya Tashi Ling Loop

The Llobregat crossing depends on conditions. The Gual del Riu Llobregat was flooded on our ride, so we rerouted onto the walkpath along the C-245. Worth checking recent rainfall before you commit.

Sant Climent de Llobregat is the threshold. The farmhouses thin out, the surface turns to gravel, and nature takes over. From here the route winds inland through the Parc del Garraf on a mix of fire roads and more challenging singletrack, hence the 4/5 technicality.

After Begues you swing into a long anti-clockwise loop around the heart of the massif. The inflection point is Jafra, an abandoned village on a low hill. Documented since 1139, it lived off firewood and livestock, and later vineyards, until the phylloxera epidemic of 1879–80 wiped out the vines and the village's reason to exist. People drifted out over the following decades; by around 1950 it was empty. What remains is the ruined Church of Santa Maria de Jafre and a couple of farmhouses, quiet relics in the middle of the park.

Right after, you will pass by La Plana Novella, a tiny settlement in the municipality of Olivella built around the Palau Novella - a country palace put up in 1905 by an indiano family, Catalans who'd made their fortune in the Americas and came home to build something extravagant in the middle of nowhere. A century later, in 2006, it became the home of Sakya Tashi Ling, the first Buddhist monastery in Catalonia. A colonial-era Catalan palace housing a Tibetan order in the middle of a karst massif - it's one of the strangest sights on any ride out of Barcelona. Worth pausing for, even if you don't go in.

From there you climb the pista de la Plana Novella a Begues all the way to Puig Moltó (462 m), the high point of the day. Then back down into Begues.

From Begues the route runs east on trails that occasionally open up to sea views between the pines. Mostly downhill, but technical enough that you don't get to switch off. By the time you're back in l'Hospitalet, the city feels like a different country than the one you left that morning.