Mallos de Riglos

Above the tiny village of Riglos in Aragon, a wall of rust-red rock towers rise straight out of the hillside, so vertical and so close together that they look like a giant stone organ. These are the Mallos de Riglos – "mallo" is an Aragonese word for a steep, isolated rock – a cluster of conglomerate monoliths in the pre-Pyrenean ranges of Huesca province. Their faces reach up to about 275 metres in height, often vertical and in places leaning outwards: the overhang of La Visera, which projects some 60 metres beyond its base, is considered the largest in Spain.

The rock tells the story of the Pyrenees themselves. As the range was pushed up during the Alpine orogeny, rivers carried huge quantities of boulders, gravel and sand southwards towards the old Ebro basin and dumped them in vast alluvial fans. Cemented by carbonate, these Miocene deposits hardened into conglomerate, which was later uplifted, fractured and attacked by running water. Erosion widened the cracks into deep gullies and chimneys and left the solid blocks standing apart as separate towers. Each has a name: the great mallos include Firé, Pisón and the slender Puro, alongside smaller pinnacles such as Colorado, Cuchillo and Aguja Roja, some named after village houses, some after their shape and some after climbers.

Nineteenth-century travellers and writers, among them Santiago Ramón y Cajal, already marvelled at these rocks, and in the twentieth century they became one of the great proving grounds of Spanish climbing. The Puro defeated several attempts, two of them fatal, before Manuel Bescós, Alberto Rabadá and Ángel López "Cintero" reached its top in 1953; Rabadá and Ernesto Navarro went on to open some of the most celebrated lines on the walls. In 2016 the Mallos de Riglos, together with the neighbouring Mallos de Agüero and Peña Rueba, were declared a natural monument. At their foot, the village of Riglos keeps the eleventh-century Romanesque church of San Martín and the parish church of Nuestra Señora del Mallo.

Getting there

Riglos lies on the left bank of the Gállego river, about 45 km north-west of Huesca by road (about 35 km in a straight line), on the A-132 between Ayerbe and Murillo de Gállego. The nearest airport is Zaragoza Airport (ZAZ), about 80 km away. Riglos has a halt on the Zaragoza–Canfranc railway line.