Comapedrosa

Comapedrosa is the kind of mountain that Andorra doesn’t advertise nearly as hard as it should. Everyone talks about the skiing and the shopping, and meanwhile there’s a 2,942-meter granite summit sitting at the country’s western edge with a natural park around it full of glacial lakes that most visitors never see because it requires actual walking, no chairlift shortcuts involved. We did the hike from Arinsal, which is the standard approach, and it’s long — the better part of a full day up and back — but nothing about it felt padded or unnecessary.

The lower stretch runs through forest and pasture, the kind of easy walking that lulls you into thinking the whole day will be like that. It isn’t. Past a certain point the trail turns to scrambling over loose granite, the vegetation drops away, and the massif opens up into something genuinely alpine — bare rock, wind that doesn’t let up, and views back down into three different valleys at once. Lia, who’s fitter than me and usually has to wait at every stop, was breathing hard by the final push to the ridge, which told me everything about how honest this climb actually is.

The lakes are what make the park, though, more than the summit itself. Estany Negre sits in a rock bowl that traps the cold air so thoroughly it felt like a different season than the trail twenty minutes below. We didn’t swim — I wanted to, Lia called me an idiot, she was right — but we sat at the edge long enough to eat lunch and watch the light change on the water, which shifted from black to a strange dark green as clouds moved overhead.

We didn’t push on to the actual summit that day — the weather turned, clouds coming up fast from the French side, and I’ve learned the hard way in the Pyrenees that you don’t argue with a mountain about timing. We turned back at the ridge with the peak still above us, which annoyed me for about a day and then settled into something more like an excuse to go back.

When to go: July through September for a clear shot at the summit without snow on the upper ridges; start early, since afternoon storms build fast at this altitude and the descent takes longer than most people plan for.