Aralar

The Aralar range is shared between Navarre and Gipuzkoa; the Gipuzkoan side, with 10,971 hectares, has been a Natural Park since 1994. It is a great limestone platform that emerged some 50 million years ago and that dissolution has gradually perforated, turning it into a textbook karst massif riddled with shafts, caves and underground rivers. The most recognisable silhouette of the whole is Txindoki (Larrunarri), whose pyramid dominates the Goierri valley and has become one of the emblematic mountains of Basque mountaineering.

A quarter of the park's area is covered in beech woods, which occupy above all the middle slopes and the passes; above them open extensive high-altitude pastures used for millennia by flocks of latxa sheep, whose milk sustains the traditional production of Idiazabal cheese. That centuries-old grazing is what has kept the summit meadows open and explains much of the landscape's present appearance.

Aralar is also one of the great megalithic complexes of southern Europe: its pastures are dotted with dolmens, barrows and stone circles raised by the pastoral communities of the Neolithic and the Bronze Age, many of them signposted and studied. As for wildlife, it shares with neighbouring Aizkorri-Aratz the bearded vulture monitoring project run by the Provincial Council of Gipuzkoa, and it hosts griffon vultures on its crags, as well as wildcat, pine marten, wild boar and roe deer in its woods.