Summer is doing its thing here on Mallorca, forcing everyone to adapt or get out, changing our circadian rythms and urging us to fresh pastures. I have just managed to finally tick off two quintissentially Mallorcan things on my wish list: “walk” down the Torrent de Pareis and go to the Herb Fair at Selva. Both were pretty ground-breaking for me, in their way. “Walk” is in inverted commas because I frequently had to climb, scramble, swing, leap, slither and plummet down the Torrent de Pareis. Relatively little actual walking was involved.

In summer, the sheep become nocturnal. Their light gamalan clonging starts up only in the cooler evening hours and keeps up an erratic lullaby all night, until the morning sun forces them to hug walls and corners, hanging their heads, seeking a scrap of shade and escaping the flies. They are shorn now.

Those bells seem expressely designed to lull the newcomer into a false sense of security. The baldies were warming up (or perhaps cooling down) their gamalans as I began the walk down the Torrent with a select group of Mallorcans as my guides: despite a clearly marked path, this trip is not to be attempted by anyone unfamiliar with the terrain, although countless visitors do so every year, often with disastrous and even fatal results.

Mallorcan folklore has taken hundreds, if not thousand years to develop – who am I to fly in the face of it and try to work things out from first principles? When growing things, eating things, pruning things or climbing things, I try to get a native to come along for the ride.

So it was Mallorcans who first discovered the route down the Torrent, at least the more difficult “dark” one, admittedly not all that long ago, in the scheme of things: July 24th 1965. I suppose before that they had better things to do trying to wrest a living from the land, without feeling the need to burrow down into it.

The Torrent de Pareis is a 400 ft high gorge, mostly dry for much of the year, strewn with enormous boulders the size of four story town houses which have been sculpted and polished to a glassy surface by millions of years of rain and countless walker’s bottoms. There are five “passes” or “leaps” on the way down, to traverse which great height is an advantage. Lacking this, as I do, knowing how to dance a a “passo doble” can help, or else advanced snowboarding technique. Needless to say, I have no experience whatsoever in either of these activities. One of the passes is called “fatty buckle up”, or some such, and people with big bone structures had better not even try it. For a person of average build, this pass helps them to vividly recall their earliest experiences, when they emerged from the birth canal.

We spent a night at “Entreforc” on our mats, with the plough framed narrowly at the top of the cliffs and the echoes of the owls ricocheting up and down the canyon. At dawn a goat came clattering across the stones at a gallop before standing stock still and staring at me bedded down on cut reeds in its alcove.

Our early morning “walk” ended at the hot mouth of the gorge, where we plunged into the chilly, crystal waters.

The Torrent de Pareis is not something you’ll want to do just once in a lifetime.

#TorrentdePareis #Mallorca #hikinginMallorca #July24th #1965