Aitana is a limestone massif at the eastern tip of the Iberian Peninsula, part of the Prebaetic System, spread across some 2,000 hectares only about ten miles from the Mediterranean. Its main peak is the roof of Alicante province, but it does not stand alone. A whole family of summits crowds the ridge around it: Penya Alta at 1,506 metres, Penya Catxa at 1,467, El Mulero at 1,308, and Alt del Carrascar at 1,208. From the coastal resorts the range appears as a long, pale wall on the inland horizon, a wall of stone that catches the last light of the day after the beaches have fallen into shadow. A tall antenna marks the true summit, a modern silhouette on ancient rock.

The snow trade shaped these slopes for centuries. At the spring called the Font de l'Arbre, the remains of rock-built snow reservoirs still stand, relics of a vanished economy in which the mountain's cold was a commodity. Ice cut and packed here traveled downhill to chill drinks, preserve food, and treat the sick in the villages of the Marina Baixa long before anyone could buy a bag of ice at a shop. It was brutal, seasonal labor, carried out by people whose names went unrecorded, and the crumbling stone pits are their monument. Today the same clearing is a shady rest stop, its deciduous trees offering cool in summer and letting sunlight through in winter.

Near the summit, the mountain splits open. The chasms of Partagás are deep cracks in the limestone, some fifteen or twenty metres wide but plunging more than a hundred metres down, a natural spectacle that stops walkers in their tracks. Water made them. Rain and meltwater absorb carbon dioxide to form a weak carbonic acid, and over unimaginable stretches of time that acid has dissolved the rock from within, carving these fissures grain by grain. To reach them, hikers thread through the Pas de la Rabosa, a narrow cleft that pierces the summit ridge like a doorway in the stone, and emerge to some of the most dramatic views in the Valencian mountains.

Aitana's summit has drawn a different kind of suffering in modern times: professional cyclists. The Alto de Aitana has served as a stage finish in the Vuelta a España, Spain's grand tour, more than once. The climb is a grinding 22.3 kilometres with an average gradient of six percent, long enough and steep enough to be mentioned in the same breath as France's fearsome Mont Ventoux, though Ventoux is the harder of the two. For the riders who crest it, the reward is the same view the ice-cutters once knew: the whole coastal plain unrolling toward a sea that shimmers, on a clear day, far below.