Ancient and Primeval Beech Forests of the Carpathians and Other Regions of Europe

Overview

The Ancient and Primeval Beech Forests of the Carpathians and Other Regions of Europe is one UNESCO World Heritage listing chopped into 93 separate forest patches across 18 European countries, protected because European beech (Fagus sylvatica) still spreads through them by natural processes rather than by forestry. Six of those patches are in Spain, all added in the 2017 extension, and none of them is in Catalonia.

Spain’s components are Lizardoia and Aztaparreta in Navarre, Tejera Negra in Guadalajara, the Montejo beech wood about 100 km from Madrid, and Cuesta Fría and Canal de Asotín inside Picos de Europa National Park in Castile and León. Every one of them is a long drive west of Barcelona, so if you have come to Catalonia expecting to tick this site off, you cannot.

The Catalan beech wood routinely mixed up with the listing is the Fageda d’en Jordà, on the Olot to Santa Pau road in the Garrotxa. It grows on a lava flow from the Croscat volcano and it is protected as a partial nature reserve inside the Parc Natural de la Zona Volcànica de la Garrotxa, which is a Catalan designation and not a UNESCO one.

What makes the Fageda odd is the floor rather than the trees. The lava reached a marshy area, the water flashed to steam at around 1,000 ºC and bulged the half-solid crust into mounds that locals call tossols, some of them over 20 m high, and the beeches now grow over and between them. Beech usually wants cold and altitude; this wood sits at about 550 m and gets 900 to 1,000 mm of rain a year, which is enough to keep it going this far south.

History

Beech spread back across Europe after the last glaciation, roughly 11,000 years ago, and that slow recolonisation is what the UNESCO listing is actually about: it is inscribed under criterion (ix), for ongoing ecological and evolutionary processes, not for scenery. The first inscription in 2007 covered Carpathian forest in Slovakia and Ukraine, and extensions in 2011, 2017, 2021 and 2023 pushed the property to nearly 99,948 ha of core area with a buffer zone of roughly 296,276 ha.

Spain came in with the 2017 extension, and the six Spanish parts are all mountain woods in the north and the centre. Montejo covers about 250 ha and cannot be walked freely: the only way in is on the free guided visits run by the Sierra del Rincón resource centre.

The Fageda d’en Jordà has a volcanic history instead of a glacial one. Its ground is the Croscat lava flow, and where that flow met wet land the trapped steam pushed the cooling crust up into the tossols you now walk between, capped with broken basalt. The poet Joan Maragall wrote the verse that made the wood famous in Catalonia, and a monolith carrying the poem stands at the top of the steps by the car park.

Protection arrived through Llei 2/1982, which made the Garrotxa volcanic zone a natural area of national interest and created about twenty integral geobotanical reserves inside it; Llei 12/1985 then reclassified the whole thing as a natural park and the reserves as nature reserves, and the current special protection plan dates from 2010. The park now runs to 15,309 ha, of which 1,180 ha are the 28 partial nature reserves.

Most of the Fageda belongs to the Diputació de Girona and is managed by the park, which is why the rules there are tighter than in the farmland around it: no building, no hunting apart from wild boar, forestry only where it improves the wood rather than harvests it, and organised activity limited to scientific or educational work.

Visiting

Everything starts at the Can Serra visitor area, at km 4 of the Olot to Santa Pau road in Santa Pau. The park information centre there opens every day from 09:00 to 15:00 in summer 2026, and the phone number is 972 19 50 74. Can Serra has public toilets, a picnic area, drinks machines, reserved bays for blue badge holders and regulated parking for cars, coaches and bikes.

The car park is the only thing you pay for. It runs from 08:00 to 20:00, charges around the clock through an automatic system and takes bank cards only, no cash: cars are billed at 0.034 euros a minute for the first two hours and 0.017 euros a minute after that, motorbikes at half those rates. Two hours in the wood therefore costs a bit over 4 euros.

The short walk

Itinerary 2, the Sender Joan Maragall, is the one almost everyone does: 2.6 km, 40 m of climb, about an hour, graded very easy and circular. You leave the car park, cross the road, pass the Maragall monolith on your right, go down the steps into the wood, walk a full circle around one large tossol and come back the way you came. Bikes and horses are not allowed on it.

Longer options run from the same car park. Itinerary 1 loops the Fageda together with the Santa Margarida and Croscat volcanoes over 10.9 km with 290 m of climb, about 3 hours 15 minutes, graded moderate. Walking in from Olot instead is 13 km one way with 300 m of climb, around 4 hours, either from the bus station or from the Parc Nou.

Season and light

The wood changes completely through the year. Autumn is the reason most people come, for the reds and golds before the leaves drop; winter leaves grey trunks standing over a carpet of dry leaves; in summer the canopy blocks the sun almost entirely and you walk in permanent half light. October and November are the peak weeks across all the Spanish beech woods, the UNESCO ones included.

Getting there

Driving, the approach is the A-26 and N-260 towards Olot: from Girona and Figueres through Besalú, from Ripoll through the Capsacosta tunnels or the Coll de Canes, from Vic through the Bracons tunnels. Teisa runs buses to towns inside the park from Figueres, Girona, Ripoll, Vic and Barcelona. Once you are there, the park points visitors at the Rumbus line for moving around the central zone rather than driving between car parks.

Tips

• Take a card. The Can Serra car park machine accepts credit and debit cards only, and there is no cash option at all. Santa Margarida is the reverse, cash only.
• Time your arrival against the information centre, not the wood. The forest has no gate, but Can Serra shuts at 15:00 in summer 2026, so come before then if you want a map, a trail leaflet or advice in English.
• Bringing a school, walking club or tour group to the Croscat quarries means asking first. Any group visiting under a company or a named leader needs authorisation, whatever its size, and the park handles it by email at pnzvg@gencat.cat.
• Do not pick anything up. Collecting animals, rocks, minerals and plants is banned across the whole park, camping is not allowed anywhere in it and lighting a fire is prohibited outright.
• Stay on the marked routes for a practical reason as well as an ecological one: most of the park is privately owned land with people living and working on it.
• Cyclists should check the map before setting off. Bicycles are barred from stretches of the waymarked walking network, the Fageda loop among them.

• Booking rules differ at every UNESCO component, so check before you drive. Montejo can only be visited on a free guided walk arranged through the Sierra del Rincón centre, and Tejera Negra needs its car park reserved in advance in autumn.
• Combine rather than double back. The same Can Serra car park serves the walks to the Santa Margarida and Croscat volcanoes, so one parking charge covers a full day out.
• Pack for mud in the wet months. The Fageda takes 900 to 1,000 mm of rain a year, well above the Catalan coast, and the ground under the beeches holds it.