Walkin to the big Jesus on the mountain

So yesterday some friends and I decided to hike to that big Jesus statue located on that distant mountain top I can see from my window. We got directions on where to go from whence the map we have ends, because the route is on the part outside of the range of the map of the city. I later learned it was about 5 km outside the city, which would explain why going up took about 2 and a half hours and also why it wasn't even on the map. Here it is in this picture I marked, it's barely visible from here but they keep it lit up at night so you can see it there.

So the hike started around 3:30 PM, which is when we were finally outside the urban part of the city and into the beginning of the countryside, which took about 30 min just to get to aside from the 2 hr 30 min it took from there on to get to Jesus. If you turned to the left from the angle here you would be heading up the road on the beginning of our route. To the right would be the city and behind, obviously where we came from.

In this video, I was in the middle of just trying to film a panoramic view of our current location when an elderly man walking a dog passed by and stopped a bit away from us and asked us, in spanish of course, if we were walking up the mountain, so when I replied we were he told us the better shortcut to take because it had "less curves" as he said more or less.

So this is a view of the city about 30 min into the hike into the countryside, it's quite a bit farther away now as you can see.

Around the corner a few minutes later we came accross this building, named the Santa Maria del Naranco Hall.





This building dates from the 9th century, that's right, it's about 1,100 years old.








This is about an hour into the hike now and you can see the city off to the right. The speed limit, or rather speed suggestion as I'd put it based on the way they drive by, is 40 kmh. Note the lack of guardrails. Nice.






About an hour and a half later we're still walkin along this windy road, there's a guardrail here because for some reason it's safe to do up to 60 kmh in this part. That of course didn't matter for us pedestrians aside from making dodging the passing cars a little more interesting.






Here is how far away the city looks now at about an hour and 45 min into the walk.






Shortly after we found a path that at least took us off the road fortunately. Note the steep grade at which the path ascends as it curves to the left in this picture because that will help put in perspective the angle of the slope in the next picture of the path we walked.






Yes, that's going up and away at that steep looking angle, it's not my camera angle, i took it looking straight ahead, not upwards. It wasn't that bad but I don't think I'd want to run laps on it or anything.








At the top of this incline here is the view of the city down below that we walked from.







Finally after walking another 15 minutes or so we came to the final path to the giant Jesus.







And here he is. Not sure how old the sculpture is or the exact size but I'd estimate it's over 50 feet tall.

These are the mountains in the distance that lay behind the city and beyond.

This is a 360 pan shot I took of the view from up top here next to the monument. It was pretty hard to take it all in and accept it as real and not just a pretty photo background or special effect. The view was definately worth the journey to get to it.

And this is a zoomed in shot of the city from the top.

And lastly, for all the pictures I haven't posted that I did take is at least this one that I think is very worth posting, it is the sun as it's setting and I caught it at a good moment. I took about 90 photos of our hike so this is merely a portion of the narrative but at the least sufficient to express the highlights of what we saw. It was worth the sore muscles in the morning the next day.