Echo Valley climbing

Crag: Val de Guadar/Echo Valley, Costa Blanca, Spain
Routes: Espolon Alderlon (f4+:sec), Romero's Birthday (f4+:sec), Synovial (f5:sec), Phalanges (f5+:led), Marian Jones (f6a:sec), Sin Chapa (f6a:led), Pro-Wire (f3:sol), Regalo por Ali (f5:sec), X.M.A.S. (f6a:sec), Phantom (f5+:sec)
It seemed prudent to opt for a single pitch venue after yesterday's monster outing. Scouring the guidebook, Echo Valley seemed to offer a number of advantages: it wasn't far away from our cabin, and seemed likely to offer relaxed and unpolished routes. After breakfast on the fringes of Benidorm, we headed up to the valley: another extraordinary oasis, beautiful tranquility just minutes away from the bustle and unpleasantness of the coast. Echo 1.5 is a newly bolted venue, offering modestly graded routes and the kind of soothing climbing we needed. The lower crag was very short, so we headed to the upper crag and were pleased to find a nice sweep of limestone, rather like a smaller version of Sella but without the polish. It was still a good 30m/100ft high, though, and looked much better than I'd expected. The views over the huge neighbouring crags of Ponoch and down to Calpe and the Med were magnificent. The weather was getting progressively warmer: 22C today and not a cloud in the deep blue sky, but with occasional sea breezes it was quite delightful. Two easy climbs on the left gave a good warm-up, before I seconded Dave up the pleasant Synovial at f5. I opted for Phalanges, a grade harder at f5+, and to my surprise it proved a magnificent outing. A steep slab, just my cup of tea, with superb small incut holds and tiny pockets, led to a small ledge 20 metres up. Sustained and technical up to this point, with some reachy moves, but solutions were always there. Above, the route steepens, but the bulge is overcome on gigantic holds. Superb jugs lead to the lower-off. A tremendous pitch for the grade, as good if not better than anything else on this trip: three stars would not be an exaggeration of its quality as single pitches go. Dave then led the 6a further left: this had a scrappy start, slightly dirty, followed by a short layback leading to technical crack climbing. Low in the grade and not quite the same quality, but worthwhile. I then had a bash at Sin Chapa, a 6a+ and a bit of an eliminate. This was in a similar vein to Phalanges, sustained climbing on small holds and smears. It went well to the top ledge but I didn't fancy the crux 6a+ move from the ledge (mainly because the bolting meant I would have landed on the ledge if I'd fluffed it!). So I used the lower chain to get down. After some excellent tuna and onion empenadas, we moved down to the lower tier as the sun began to sink behind the mountains further up the valley. This was nowhere near as good, but the f5 up the obvious shallow groove, which Vic led, was good. Two soft touch short routes at 6a and 5+ pushed the count to ten, and we retired to the cabin for salmon, lentil and chorizo stew, and kebabs.