The huge mountain that is such a landmark on the Costa Blanca. The distinctive notch in its top makes it instantly recognisable. It is the 2nd highest mountain on the Costa Blanca at 1400m and plays host to some truly spectacular trad routes.

Character

This huge mountain dominates the village of Finestrat that lies at its feet. It is primarily characterised by a number of very long trad routes although it also has a few sport routes.

Tips

This is very large mountain and should be treated as such:

	If you try one of the long routes allow plenty of time; plenty of people have been benighted which has lead to accidents occurring. Rescues are not uncommon.
	Please leave your details: names, route name, etc, with someone so that they can provide useful information to the rescue team should one be required.
	It can get cold on top especially if you climb in the winter months.

Local Guide

A local definitive guide exists for the whole mountain that obviously contains far more routes than the Rockfax can cover. You can find further details on the Spanish Guides page.

Espolon Central Micro Guide Alan James and Chris Craggs have recently climbed Espolon central for the first time and have produced a micro guide especially for that one route. This is absolutely perfect for printing out and taking with you as it's only a single page.

RockFax Routes Database

Check out the Puig Campana page of the RockFax Routes Database for details of routes at Puig Campana.

Barranco de Puig

A new area of crags have been developed by Richard Mayfield of the Orange House. These sport routes range from 2 - 7a and details can be found on their website. Click the Areas button and then the Barranco de Puig image.

Videos

A couple of videos have been created of the Espolon Central route. They give a feeling for the scale of the mountain if nothing else.

Al Dossetter's Film made with a hand held video camera.

Espolon central puig campana. A film made using stills and a rock sound track.

Favourite Routes

Espolón Central 4+

Description: 14 pitches of severe.  It's just fantastic climbing.  Not too hard, long, perfect rock. Pity about the descent though. We took note of the advice in the RockFax guide and got up early. Started the route at 10ish, topped out at 5:30. Got back in the dark, but we did the bad part of the descent before then.

Name: Andrew Roberts

Description: Great climbing, amazing exposure, and not as hard route finding as we expected. The bolted belays higher up helped. We made one big mistake, to save weight we didn't take shoes/boots to hike down in. Both our climbing shoes and feet were destroyed on the scree path, I could hardly walk by the time we got to our bags. Other than that a fantastic day. Start early and you should be OK even in winter.

Name: Debra

Check out the following article on the Espolon Central route. This captures a feel of the mountain as well as containing some useful tips.

Route: Diedro Magico 6a+

Description: Obvious choice and well worth the hike up. The crack is just asking to be climbed and the quality of the route is peach, just do it.

Name: Harvey

Route: El Moro

Topo of El Moro

Description: First known ascent in 1988, by D. Morrod, takes the right hand buttresses (to the left of the descent gully) to the summit, reversing back to the normal descent gully.

El Moro, on the Puig Campana is a mountaineering route with something like 10 pitches. It really finishes at the start of the descent in to the main gully (that traverses across from El Sentral). The actual summit is reached in a further four or five pitches - mostly scrambling. The hardest pitch is VDiff but there are many alternative lines that can be taken to make the climb much harder.

By reversing the upper third of the climb the first large, red dot, marking the descent into the main descent gully (seen during the ascent) is returned to.

Name: Dennis Morrod

Vote for own Favourite

Vote for your own favourite routes by using this page: Favourite Routes.