Sardinia, Punta Cucuttos, Gorropu Gorge, "Hotel Sopramonte

Hotels Sopramonte

The best stories always begin by chance... in 1983 I landed in Sardinia for the first time at the end of my military service; after eighteen months of sailing I could finally devote myself to rock again. Just climbing was the watchword. The Supramonte in those years was still quite wild and Sardinian climbing was only in its infancy. Travelling around the Piana dell'Oddoene by motorbike, we came across Monte Oddeu, where a shepherd, seeing us climbing, invited us into his sheepfold to eat carasau and pecorino cheese. You know, between one drop of cannonau and another, the tongue loosens up and our new friend gives us valuable information: a little further on, he says, there is a gorge from where a river comes out with very high, red and grey walls. Curiosity gets the best of us, so the next day, recovered from our hangover, we head for Gorropu. This was my first encounter with Sardinia's largest canyon: I found myself at the entrance to the mighty gorge with my nose turned upwards. Metres and metres of overhanging walls of fantastic rock, a virgin dream, set in the Supramonte but with one small problem at the time: everything was 'too much': too difficult, too overhanging and too few of us to tackle it.

1998, eighteen years have passed since then. Fate takes me there again, with a different companion but one who shares my same visionary madness of free climbing this wall.

We spent four days on the wall in the company of the swallows that circled around us, chasing a line of footholds that were seemingly invisible but revealed themselves with every pass we tried; we weren't looking for anything new, we wanted to free climb as much as possible.

Little did we know that this route would become one of the most beautiful sport climbs in the world and as we climbed, it even seemed too difficult for our abilities. We finished it the following year and almost in disbelief and with our fingers pierced, we even managed to climb all the pitches in RP except for one passage which Pietro freed two years later.

To sum up this wall in a few words... perhaps it is the synthesis of vertical Sardinia: wild, perfect, difficult....a dream.