With a privileged location, a valley crossed by rivers and surrounded by hills, Ourense has natural landscapes of great beauty that are worth exploring, starting with its rivers. Walking the banks of the Minho means to discover a world of small animals and riverside forests where to get lost, going through paths that extend along its tributaries, kilometres and kilometres of nature.
If you ascend by the slopes of its green belt to the areas of Cudeiro, Vilar, Palmés or Seixalbo, you will not only enjoy breathtaking views of the city of bridges, but you will also find rural villages that still retain their traditional architecture. In their ancient paths, camouflaged among the vegetation of the Ourense forest (halfway between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean forest), hiking and cycling routes are waiting for you, ideal to enter this green Ourense, a great unknown.
If you want more, here you have an ideal base camp to discover a province where nature becomes legend: river Sil’s canyons, Invernadoiro Natural Park, Baixa Limia-Gerés, the snowy mountains of Peña Trevinca …
Three major rivers, dozens of streams and a hundred rivulets flow in Ourense. The city is the daughter of river Minho and As Burgas, a fertile valley that would not have existed without the presence of water.
A different and healthy way of getting to know Ourense is to get out of its urban centre to discover its green belt, ideal for hiking. The gentle orography invites you to take long walks through landscapes and places of great natural, historical and ethnographic interest; trails, paths and tracks that will take you through magical places.
Trails along the river, trails within forests, urban parks, panoramic viewpoints …
A route through the green belt that surrounds the city, with nature and small villages where you can enjoy the traditional architecture of rural Galician.
Montealegre is Ourense’s great forest park, and has the farthest northwestern Mediterranean forest in Europe.