British woman dies after 500m fall in Spain's Pyrenees mountains

A British woman has died in a mountain accident in northern Spain.

The 42-year-old was killed in front of her partner after falling around 500 metres on the slopes of a famous Pyrenees mountain called the Balaitus Peak.

She was crossing an area called the Great Diagonal, one of the most popular and accessible climbing routes to its 3,144 metre peak when she fell on Saturday evening.

Her 53-year-old partner was unharmed in the incident, in the municipality of Salient de Gallego in the province of Huesca.

Police sources confirmed today the dead woman was British and was born in the UK but lived in Finland like the man she was with, whose nationality has not been made public.

A spokesman for the Civil Guard confirmed: “An investigation is ongoing and a report drafted by officers will be sent to a local investigating court along with the post-mortem results.

“At this stage the woman’s death is being treated as a tragic accident resulting from a fall.”

The alarm was raised around 7.20pm on Saturday.

Mountain search and rescue experts from a specialist Civil Guard unit called Greim were mobilised and a helicopter sent to the area which ended up taking the British woman’s body to a nearby heliport after she was recovered.

She was then taken to Zaragoza’s Forensic Medicine Institute for the post-mortem.

One well-placed source said weather conditions in the area where the Brit fell had been good on Saturday but she was believed to have slipped in a snow-covered area as she descended the mountain.

The Balaitus Peak is a granite mass located right on the border between Spain and France, separating the Spanish Tena Valley from the French Val d’Azun.

It marks the starting point of the High Pyrenees and has seven different ridges.

Last month a 61-year-old British hiker was found dead after going missing in Spain in bad weather conditions.

The 61-year-old told emergency responders he was “lost and exhausted” when he made his last call around 7pm on May 14.

He had travelled to the Picos de Europa mountain range in northern Spain, which are situated in the autonomous communities of Asturias, Cantabria and Castile and Leon.

A helicopter was mobilised as part of a land and air search before his body was discovered on May 16.

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