Forty kilometres of old railway through the Matarraña

The line closed in 1972, after barely forty years of trains. It never carried much more than almonds, olive oil and the odd passenger between villages that the main roads had already forgotten. What is left is forty kilometres of track bed, nine tunnels and a dozen iron and stone viaducts, now walked and cycled instead of ridden.

You start at the old station in Vall-de-roures, where the platform is still there under the weeds, and follow the river Matarranya west. The grade never climbs more than a railway can take, so the ride feels flatter than the land around it: it cuts straight through hills that the road has to climb over.

The tunnels are the part people remember. Some are short enough to see daylight at both ends; others need a light, and on a hot day the cold air coming out of them hits you from fifty metres away. Bats roost in a few, and nobody minds them.

Calaceite marks roughly the halfway point, and it is worth stopping for longer than the legs ask for. The village sits on a ridge above its own almond and olive groves, and the bar on the main square still fries whatever the first farmer back from the fields brings in.

By the time the line reaches Arnes and the Port de Tortosa, the almond trees have mostly given way to holm oak and rosemary, and the old station buildings are private houses with washing on the line where the ticket window used to be. Forty kilometres, and almost none of it on a road.