Geological Landscape
For 180 million years, this territory was covered by sea water.
The instability of the earth's crust with powerful vertical movements and posterior advancing and receding of the water left a landscape with a great variety of rock and types of sedimentation.
From this landscape, the passing of time and the process of erosion have completed the picture of rugged relief, with singular contrasts: ravines, folds, crests, steep hills or plates.
Some places of great natural beauty:
Sceneries
The effects of the climate, type of ground relief, and man´s intervention have created a landscape of vegetation with great contrasts unique to the mediterranean mountainous areas.
The areas that are most elevated and bare of vegetation ''moorland'' are covered by types xerophytic type, with great profusion of aromatic plants (thyme, lavender, sage. Rosemary, etc.) This upper layer corresponds, however, where there has not been deforestation in the past, to the dominion Pinus silvestris with thickets of boxwood and creeping sabine. Here in autumn, the appreciated and coveted robellon (mushroom) abounds. These pines are often the object of forest exploitation.
In some areas, they alternate with pastures and grazing land which, in turn, have sustained the raising of livestock from time immemorial.
Médium elevations are occupied by mixed masses of good European black pines alternating with kermes oak groves in the warmest exposed areas and quercus in the wettest exposed areas.
River banks are another of the Mediterranean ecosystems of the zone. Exuberant and leafy, they constitute an oasis of coolness and shade contrasting with the dry and sunny limestone plateaus.
In front of Mediterranean Sea
Starting out at sea level, going towards the highlands, the traveller will find a change to crops limited in size due to the temperatura. Particularly noteworthy in these surroundings of sheer cliffs descending to the sea is The Natural Park of Irta Mountain Range which is one of the most beautiful landscapes of the coast. The progressive abandonment of agricultural and livestock exploitation which it has suffered for centuries has allowed the presence of natural and ethnological values which make this landscape a privileged area in the Mediterranean.
La coastal maquis of this mountain range is composed mainly of European fan palm, Kermes oak, Mastic tree, Prickly Cedar, and Rhamnus lycioides. The destruction of this original maquis gives way to other species such as Rosemary, Mediterranean Heath, Ulex parviflorus, albaida (Anthyllis cytisoides), Globularia Alypum, etc...
Another area of interest is The Lower Ebro and the first foothills of Els Ports where the orange groves give way to almond and olive trees.
Labyrinth of Silence
Without a doubt, one of the most treasured values of the Maestres Area is its tranquillity and solitary character which often gives the hiker the impression of being the first person to set foot on these paths.
Far from the main roads, the Heart of Spain finds in these lands a true example of abandoned landscape, surroundings and, at the same time, a delicate balance between nature and man.
But the landscape is also memories; it reconstructs memories and casts shadows from other times: villages lost in history, kilometres of walls of dry stone, the remains of the splendour of livestock farming, country houses left to an uncertain fate in the middle of the countryside, innumerable places where the silence speaks.
The population density is currently at 2.5 persons per square kilometre, which the European Union defines as deserted. This demographic characteristic, aggravated by the continual drain of migration and the aging population which makes succession of generations difficult, conditions economic activity enormously.
