Desert de les Palmes Natural Park

It’s not actually a desert. The name refers to a Carmelite tradition of calling remote spiritual retreats “holy deserts” — and the monks who settled these mountains in 1697 found their solitude beneath the only palm tree species native to Europe.

A monastery destroyed by an earthquake, not war

Discalced Carmelite friars founded the original monastery here in 1697, a genuine retreat into what was then a remote, near-empty range of mountains between Benicàssim and Castelló. It stood for nearly a century until 1783, when torrential rains and earth movements — a genuine earthquake, not the fire or war that destroys most Spanish monastic ruins — seriously damaged the structure. The friars abandoned the site and built a new, safer monastery close by between 1784 and 1791, which still functions today. The original ruins remain, quietly picturesque, a short walk from the working monastery that replaced them.

Thirty-five friars, a chapel-pantheon, and 1936

Beneath the newer monastery’s church sits a chapel-pantheon holding the remains of thirty-five friars of the Discalced Carmelite province of Aragon-Valencia, killed during the religious persecution of 1936 amid the Spanish Civil War. Many had lived at the Desert de les Palmes at some point in their lives before being caught up in the violence elsewhere. Their cause for canonisation is reportedly well advanced within the Church — a detail that adds real weight to what might otherwise read as a simple hiking destination, and a reminder that this landscape’s isolation has sheltered people from the world’s troubles more than once, not always successfully.

Recovering from fire, not just history

The park’s forest cover today is noticeably sparser than its name and reputation might suggest, and that’s a modern story rather than an ancient one: major wildfires in 1985 and 1992 burned through large sections of the range, leaving relatively little old-growth woodland compared to less fire-prone parts of the Valencian coast. Protection as a natural park followed in 1989, partly in direct response to that damage, and the landscape today is as much a study in post-fire Mediterranean regeneration as it is a historic religious retreat.

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