Olot is a city with a rich culture and history. It started around the ninth century. I don't know what was going through the builders' heads, but the city stands on a whopping four volcanoes! Montolivet, Montsacopa, Garrinada, and Bisaroques.
I definitely wouldn't envy the locals if the volcanoes ever decide to wake up, because they are right in the center. This time I didn't bother riding up a volcano; instead, I rolled along the narrow-gauge railway of the already familiar "greenway" concept towards Girona. Olot, by the way, is also famous for being home to the oldest person on Earth — Maria Branyas, who is almost 116 years old. That's based on documents, of course. If we start counting all sorts of breatharians, we'd eventually get to the biblical patriarchs. Those guys, according to the Bible, lived for hundreds of years, some pushing a thousand. Adam, for instance, lived to be 930! What if Warren Buffett didn't actually make his dough through brains and savvy, but just bought up some stocks back in the 19th century?
Be that as it may, I kept rolling along the greenway. It warmed up, and the weather turned pleasant: even a little bit of sun came out. Along the way, I came across a cute statue of a girl and some graffiti with a tricky inscription in Catalan that Google Translate couldn't handle, so I had to look for other sources. The inscription read: "We were, are, and will be the valley," and the graffiti depicted working women, ¿drawing? a rainbow. It turned out to be this feminist slogan created as part of a campaign against rural violence towards women in the mountain valley and comarca (administrative district) I was riding through.
The creators of the velobus are crafty, and the greenway route from Olot to Girona drops in elevation quite heavily. For most of the way, you're rolling downhill. This was very handy because my tires were poorly inflated, so while the ride was soft, it wasn't exactly easy. But it was incredibly atmospheric: a decent chunk of the route went through a gorge carved right into the rock. Natural stone walls often towered around me, covered in a gorgeous carpet of moss and other plants. As I mentioned before, the narrow-gauge railway is sprinkled with fine gravel, and riding on it is a pure joy. Nevertheless, covering 70 km took me almost five hours, despite the fact that I dropped 670 meters of elevation. True, I also gained 380 meters according to the barometer — which is no small feat; around our parts, it's hard to rack up that much even on a hundred-kilometer ride.
