Day 40: La Jonquera to Llançà

42km, 1600m elevation gain.

My biggest day of the hike. Walking for over 12 hours, and managed to break the 40km mark. I didn’t set out to do this but was feeling in the groove and leaves me with one final day tomorrow to walk out from this town to the end of the GR11 and swim in the Mediterranean.

This part of Spain is dry, dusty, hot and reminds me of Australia a lot. Heaps of great fruit growing all around - olives, figs, grapes, blackberries. Parts of these sections went through national park that was officially closed due to fire risk, however I had spoken to some GR11 hikers moving east to west and they said they whipped through and weren’t hassled. So I rushed through these sections and in fact passed a couple of groups of local hikers doing the same. Not ideal, but would have been a shame to call it quits just 1 or 2 days from the finish.