Baqueira Beret by Arnie Wilson
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La Pleta by Rafael Hotels
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As a group of royal bodyguards skied nonchalantly past us (though sadly there was no king to be seen), Jordi Cuadrat, my guide, pointed to the high mountain bowls around Marimanha and said: "There are a lot of flakes up there!”
This was reassuring news, as you need a lot of snow to be able to ski off-piste, and we were having a field day in Baqueira Beret, Spain´s most celebrated ski resort. But it turned out that Jodri, the manager of the La Pleta hotel, had actually said: “There are lots of lakes up there.” A keen fisherman, he spends many happy summer days catching trout there.
All the same, there were indeed lots of flakes, and I felt sorry that King Juan Carlos and his family – regular visitors to Baqueira – weren´t here to enjoy near perfect conditions (albeit at minus 15 degrees). The King’s visits are rarer these days, but the heir to the throne, Felipe, his wife Leticia, and his sisters Elena and Cristina and their families, are regular visitors, staying in their own royal mountainside enclave, La Pleta de Ley (the ‘King´s hamlet’). For some reason Baqueira-Beret is little known to non-Spanish skiers. (France, of course, has plenty of world-class skiing if its own, although Baqueira is popular with skiers in the neighbouring Bordeaux region.)
The resort, snuggled into the picturesque Aran Valley in Catalonia, is a major find. It has some of the best and most extensive above-the-treeline bowl skiing in the Pyrenees, and possibly the whole of Europe, very friendly locals and a nice line in tapas bars which serve up delicious fare every bit as eclectic as you´d find in the back streets of old San Sebastian.
The resort, 4750 acres divided into the separate sections of Baqueira, Beret and the recently developed Bonaigua section where we had been enjoying superb powder, has almost 100 kilometres (nearly 60 miles) of skiing on 77 mainly good intermediate runs, boundless off-piste (some of it exhilaratingly steep – the Escornacrabes couloir is easily as good as Whistler’s celebrated Couloir Extreme), and a healthy vertical drop of 1010 metres (3313 feet) all served by 30 lifts. There are 500 snow cannon, though none was needed during my stay.
I rented my skis from the delightful José Moga, once one of Spain´s top ski racers, who accompanies the King when he visits. There are photographs of Moga (himself the father of two ski-champion daughters and a champion son-in-law) with the royal family on the walls of his ski shop at the La Pleta Hotel. José, now in his 70s, enjoys inviting special guests to the back of his shop (mere journalists as well as kings) for a glass or two of red wine with a small dish of berberechos (cockles) which somehow taste more like oysters than the ones you get on Brighton pier. If you’re lucky you’ll get a Montecristo cigar too, and perhaps a glass of Orujo Hiervas, a powerful yellow grappa made from plants.
Thursday is marisco (sea-food) day in Baqueira. Giant prawns, crabs, cockles, and the much sought after perecebes (goose-barnacles), rather sinister-looking crustaceans retrieved with some peril (hence their high price) from cliff-top habitat, arrive here, at 1500 metres, in deep-frozen containers from the Galicia coast, to be distributed to the many fine restaurants and tapas bars in the area. Some ends up at the Urtau tapas bar, run by the three Sanmarti brothers. Two are ski instructors. The third, Xavi, has never put on a pair of skis in his life. The locals think this is so eccentric that they persuaded the lift company to produce a king-sized all-season lift pass for him, complete with photograph, which is displayed proudly on the wall.
Because of the region´s proximity to France, the local cuisine has much in common with that of Gascony, including seasoning techniques. In spite of the excellent fish available, meat is still the staple of the valley. One of the best ways of sampling it is to tuck into a bowl (or two, if your appetite is sufficiently rampant) of Olha Aranesa – a pot of soup-cum-stew with all kinds of pork sausage and potatoes. We were told that the variety we sampled, served with great relish, at the Eth Restilhe restaurant in the picturesque little village of Garós, had been cooked for four hours.
The Spanish habit of eating a little, late, is equally entrenched in the mountains: lunch at the La Pleta (recently re-invented as a five star hotel with an impressive spa, Occitania, and now allowed into the ranks of the Small Luxury Hotels of the World) does now start until 1.30, with dinner served from 8 pm onwards. However if you are impatient, you can always try one of the hotel´s exotic spa treatments. Occitania Dreams, for example, includes music therapy, aromatherapy, and herbal tea. Or if you want to go really wild, you could try the Essence of Cassis massage, in which a mixture of cassis and oils is rubbed into your skin, which may mean you smell like a Kir Royal over dinner. The hotel also boasts a cigar bar, where you can accompany the smoke of your choice with a fine old brandy.
Historically, this is an interesting and complex part of the world. The Val d´Aran is at the western end of the Catalan Pyrenees, in north-west Catalonia, close to the plains of Aquitaine through which the Garonne flows into the sea near Bordeaux. The inhabitants of the valley have their own language: Aranese, a variant of Gascon, one of the Occitan family of languages. Everyone speaks Spanish too, and most people also speak Catalan.
This means even French struggles to get a look in, and if you happen to pick up the “wrong” menu you might find yourself struggling with such items as “Arroç Cremós Verduretes, Llagostins I Formatge Manchego (Catalan for Creamy Rice of Baby Vegetables, Prawns and Manchego Cheese) or Borratxos de Rom I Yema Cremada (basically a Rum Baba-style cake). Although everyone at the reception desk of the La Pleta spoke surprisingly good English, the local tourist office´s prospect of preparing informative literature about the resort in five languages is daunting. However the skiing is so good that language is almost superfluous.