UKH

I was flipping through a bunch of Spanish climbing guides in my local climbing shop yesterday, looking for ideas for some winter sun. I could only see French-graded routes from 6a & up - no 4's and 5's. However, the guides did have routes on the same walls with Roman numeral grades of III, IV, V etc.

Normally I seeing these I would assume they're UIAA grades and hence indicate a trad route. But given that I literally couldn't find any French-graded routes below 6a, even in sectors/regions where the contents/overview section indicated there were many....are they using both grading systems for sport routes, UIAA for easy stuff and French for hard? Seems odd but it's the best explanation I or the guy in the shop could think of. (I checked the intro sections of course for any explanations of grading, but there was nothing I could find in any of them that mentioned it)

It was definitely the case in Costa Blanca Climbs (which is expicitly a sport climbing book), but also in 2x others I looked at. One of the Cara Sur books for Montserrat, I can't remember the third.

Anyone come across this before?

Yeah seems pretty standard in Spain, certainly in Costa Blanca Climbs the sub 6a routes all get a roman numeral, and certainly in the areas I've used it they've all been sport routes. Its also often the case at the crags where the name and grade are written at the base of the route that the grade is a roman numeral below 6a. The rockfax guides however do stick to 5a, b, c etc, although the letter grades can sometimes feel a little random.

They're not UIAA grades, just a rather old fashioned way of writing French grades.

I would agree, and support it by saying that many modern Spanish guidebooks will use '3', '4' and '5'; and some will even split the grades into a, b, c.   

I've often wondered why in some places you'll see 5 and 5+, and in others you'll see 5a 5b 5c. I'd wondered if one system was French one was Spanish. But is it that one system just more modern than the other?

My understanding is that the grades once were just III, IV, V, VI, ... with a + added to give finer granularity. But then when plenty of VIs were established and freeclimbing took off they started to be subdivided into a,b,c (not unlike the way the Extremely Severe became subdivided, but in this case limited to 3 divisions.) I suspect (but don't really know!) that the change to Arabic from Roman numerals was to indicate a freeclimbing sport grade rather than an Alpine (or "French-free") grade for the new harder routes. The abc divisions must have proved popular because since then there's been a gradual trend to apply them retrospectively to 5s and 4s.

I'd be interested to know how much of the above is true and how much is supposition, if anyone (Jon?) knows better.

... and, just to make things more confusing: in Germany,* which is pretty much the only country I know of that uses UIAA grades for single pitch sport routes, UIAA grades are written with arabic not roman numerals

* except Elbsandstein, which has its own entirely separate grading system

In Spain we don't use the UIAA grades, mainly are the french grades with roman numbers.

Depending the area and the author, you can find the normal numbers or roman numbers (p.e. When I produce a guidebook, I prefer to use normal numbers to have the same format in all the guidebook).

Them, We don't normally use thefrench format below 6a (taht means, we don't add a, b, c, in grades 5, 4, 3, 2), we prefer to add only a + (5 or 5+), but comparing grades 5+ should be a 5c, and a 5 close to 5b (more or less).

Hope it will be a help for you.

David Mora

Mountain Guide

Very old fashioned - 2000 years old

Thanks for the insight folks!

Just to continue the theme of "is it trad or not?" - there are some routes, especially multipitch ones, where UKC/rockfax seems to disagree with other sources. E.g. Diedro UBSA https://www.ukclimbing.com/logbook/crags/penon_de_ifach-1697/diedro_ubsa-22...: rockfax has this as an HVS route, but comments + (e.g.) thecrag.com has it as a sport route. Admittedly with "spicy" bolting and lots of reccommendations to bring a small rack anyway!

Is this common in this part of the world, that routes marked as trad are more like "sport but with scary bolting" ? I am a trad noob, but makes me think it might be worth borrowing some nuts from my pal if it opens up some more possibilities