Fermín Cabanillas I Santa Ana la Real (Huelva), (EFE).- Surely when the mayor of Santa Ana la Real (Huelva), José Antonio Ramos, met with his team and thought about ‘El Bosque de las Letras’, he never He imagined that thousands of people and any hiker come every year to this corner of the Huelva mountains to walk among nature, poems and books.
The mayor has been in office for twenty years, and you only need to talk to him for half a minute to realize that this trail is one of his great prides, in a town that has less than 500 inhabitants, but that has managed to make more than 600 people at the same time walk along this five-kilometer trail in a natural setting on their “peak days”, something that each year gains followers for a different way of experiencing nature.
And it was not easy, because it was about adapting some paths that already existed in the town, although not adapted to the walk, “but it had to be done in a different way, in an original way”, based on the fact that “twenty years ago hiking was something that did not exist”, and today, Santa Ana can boast of being a pioneer in many ways.
It is the town, by the way, of the international model Laura Sánchez, who is precisely this weekend between her roots charging batteries, and the mayor greets her just before walking with EFE along her path, which has a route of about five kilometers , with departure and arrival at the municipality itself, visiting orchards, riverbanks and the Mediterranean forest in which the town is located.
Links via QR code
But what distinguishes this path from the others is that you can make stops in different places where you can find literary texts by writers from the region, who have collaborated with the initiative by giving up their poems or short texts, designed to be enjoyed in the natural environment.
Interestingly, at each information point you can find internet links through a QR code, which allow you to find out more about the author of each text, as well as information about his work, and it is curious above all because the peace of the path is such that the Telephone coverage disappears in some areas.
And everything is completed with a series of libraries in the middle of the field, yes, in the middle of the same field that is being explored, “where you just have to open them and take the book you want to read or take home”, says the mayor while opens one of those compartments in the middle of the field with about thirty books: “people read them right here, in the rest areas, or they take them home, and they have the option of returning the one they have taken or bringing another when he comes back to visit us.”
Everything is planned, even the trees that end up falling due to the weight of age or the wind, because “we take advantage of them to make the benches along the path, which, in reality, do not last long, just over two years”, but that means that nothing external is placed, and everything is used inside, giving nature what man needs and vice versa.
a circular route
By the way, if you want to do a more “professional” path of hiking, from this town you can do the ‘Desafío Patanegra’, which goes around the area known as the central sierra, from Aracena to Cortegana, along 105 kilometers and 4,000 meters of positive elevation gain, starting and finishing in Santa Ana.
The mayor, together with a couple of friends, goes through a good part of the “Forest of Letters” to explain its characteristics, he explains that there are no litter bins or any service, “because, in the end, if someone carries a bag with a sandwich, that The same bag can be used to pick up the packaging”, and, in fact, although it is not scientific data, it could be said that 99% of users leave no trace of their passage.
In the event of a mistake, a series of wooden signs guide the walker on the route to follow, even with several options, because it is true that it is a circular route, which begins and ends in a historic washhouse with fourteen vats whose origin is as old as the fountain that crowns it, but within the route you can choose different paths so that the walk is more or less long.
The route lasts just over an hour, with hardly any unevenness, with several families present this very weekend, and with the opportunity to look for one of the rest areas, pick up a book and let time pass, unhurriedly, in half of nothing EFE
