UKC

I'm off to El Chorro in a few weeks and thought on a rest day I might take my Wife along the Camino Del Rey (I did it years ago when it was crumbling into the gorge and anyone could just wonder along and thought it was pretty cool). I see it's a big touristy thing now (which is booked up months in advance) but there is some mention of access for climbers. Does anyone have any recent experience of this? If you rock up with a rope and helmets will they let you through? Or it still worth it now its been sanitised?

Many of the gorge routes are inaccessible due to the 'new' walkway. Access to the railtrack, which has always been slightly problematic has also become much more difficult cutting off access to even more routes. Some routes are still available, but it is much simpler to climb on the many other sections of El Chorro. 

Thanks, I didn't really wany to climb there, I just wondered if there was a cheeky way to access the gorge as i remember it being spectacular, but it sounds like there isn't

Sounds a real shame as I recall the when they re did it there was some promise of not affecting access.

As far as I remember that lasted about 16.67ms.

For what it's worth - in the absence for more up to date info - I was there just after the new camino opened (March 2015) and climbers were allowed in (unaccompanied and free) as long as you had a helmet. Much of course may have changed since then.

Much has changed!

Let me know how you get on - again was out a few years back and thinking of going out again. Alot had changed even then like secutity guards on tunnel entrance.

I got told when last out there nov 22 ‘Officially’ You have to enter from the lake side as it’s all one way and you get escorted to where the path forks to meet the path to makinadromo 

I'm not sure about what 'booked up months in advance' amounts to. When I last went a year ago you could take a free bus from outside El Chorro railway station which took you up the winding road and dropped you at the entrance to a short tunnel that's the start of the path, next to a restaurant by the lake. A ~10 minute walk along the winding path, with a boggy swamp on the left and rocky woodland on the right, brought us to a gate and automatic ticket machine, we paid about €9 each for a ticket. People who'd bought entrance in advance had .pdfs of their tickets on their phones, while we just had the things from the machines. I think the people who'd bought in advance were in one queue, and we were in another, so they had some sort of 'priority', but the main point of the queue(s) is just to equip everyone with a hairnet and helmet and to make sure they all understand that they have to go one way (downhill) and that there are sections where everyone has to be spaced out by a metre or two so that they don't overload the walkway structure. The queue moved fast (it wasn't peak season, I guess), like a total of 5 minutes. We had our own helmets so that saved some time, and no need for a hairnet. And then, yeah, you get to walk the gorge, and end up back near the station in El Chorro.

If you'd like to save the expense, it's totally free to walk up from El Chorro along the railway tunnels on the opposite side of the gorge from the Caminito, and there's no need for a helmet. There's plenty of space between the railway tracks and the tunnel walls so that you can be well out of the way of any trains (1 an hour, at most, and always visible and audible a long way in advance). There are security guards in one of the 'exit' kiosks on the path after the end of the actual Caminito, near to a railway bridge, and while they're ostensibly their to prevent anyone from walking up the Caminito the wrong way and without a ticket or helmet, they were also happy to point out to us where we could get down to the railway tracks from the path (a short slope just before the railway bridge, very easily accessible). Helpful and friendly, and absolutely familiar with seeing climbers walking along the railway to the climbing venues on that side of the river.