Andorra: Tiny Country, Giant Duty Free Shop

We spent a few days in Andorra on our way out from Spain, and the first feeling you get is that you’re in one giant duty free shop. There’s alcohol, tobacco, perfume & designer accessory shops EVERYWHERE. They even have giant stacks of Toblerones, just like at the airport.

Andorra is a bit of a tax haven, which basically means that every second shop is a duty free shop and right after you cross the border you have these enormous mega duty free shops with everything under the sun like cheese.

Luckily it’s not all duty free shopping (seeing as we can’t really take full advantage of 4.5L bottles of alcohol) and there’s plenty of nice mountain scenery and hiking as well. We were staying in the centre of the city but since it’s so small it didn’t take long to get to the hiking trails.

Now that the weather’s getting warmer we could go hiking which was a nice change from all the city scenery we’ve been seeing so far. The first day was an easy hike, we even got to see two families of deer. So encouraged by this easy hike we thought we’d try something a bit more ambitious for the next day. The hiking guide had it listed at 350m elevation gain over 8.5km & 3.5hr, seemed easy enough…

First problem: we didn’t take into account the 350m climb over 4km that we had to hike from the city up to the starting point of the trail. We were pretty puffed out by the time we got there.

Second problem: the guide lied. The 350m was the altitude difference between the landmarks listed in the guide. Since we were crossing lots of creeks, this meant LOTS of up and down sections so we probably ended up doing an extra 350m of elevation gain that wasn’t listed.

Pedr can be annoying when we’re hiking because he’s a jack rabbit (he’ll run up a section fast, then stop and rest for a bit and then do it again), whereas I’m a tortoise (I’ll just keep plodding along at a constant pace and eventually get there). Luckily for me he didn’t run off and abandon me, and was happy to carry the bag with all the water in it. So he was assigned the role of running up ahead to see if he could see any landmarks to make sure we weren’t getting lost.

Several hours after we started we eventually made it to the top of the hike, 700m above the city.

Getting down was pretty fast. It was literally a straight path down the mountain taking the shortest (steepest) route possible. And I beat Pedr to the bottom since it turns out I’m pretty good at picking a path down steep slopes. 😀

Lucky for us we didn’t attempt the other route that sounded interesting; 950m climb over 12.5km, which would’ve taken us up to 2300m above sea level. The only thing that stopped us trying that one was the fact that there was still snow up high on the mountains. The hiking guide had this one listed as 4hr total….