Edu Ruano Sends Cosi Fan Tutte 8c+ at Piscineta

Edu Ruano just sent Cosi Fan Tutte, an 8c+ at Piscineta in Rodellar. This is the kind of route that doesn't care how motivated you are on any given day. It cares whether you showed up on the right one. You have to be well rested. You have to be strong and fit. The conditions in summer are hard to get them your way in this crag, and yet Edu managed them all well enough to put this super classic to bed.

Cosi Fan Tutte sits on the steep end of Rodellar's reputation, one of Europe's best limestone sport climbing areas. The climbing here is technical, steep, and pumpy. Add a hard boulder mid route and you have Cosi Fan Tutte.

Piscineta is one of my favorite climbing spots in the world. It is just too close to a paradisiacal landscape, and is hard to resist. It's not just the rock, it's the whole approach. You park at the bottom of the valley and walk up the riverbed, wet feet within the first ten minutes. Then you load your bags onto a paddleboard or a small boat and paddle up a canal with walls closing in on both sides, endless rock left and right, water so clear and blue it barely looks real. It goes completely quiet, just you and the river, until, after about 10 minutes up the canal, you park the boat and get back on your feet, water up to your hips, scrambling boulders up and down and the river around you doing what the river does. You are wet, and the risk of falling in is just there. 15 minutes later you get to the crag and it is just so calm, with this beautiful pool right underneath.

Cosi Fan Tutte is the line. Starting on a perfect single dark tufa, followed by a 7b+/c boulder into an athletic headwall, tufas, mushroom-like holds, blocks, crimps, it's got it all, and it's definitely the line that catches your eye as soon as you arrive.

The Ride to Cosi Fan Tutte

He'd been on it around 4 months spread over 2 summers. Early starts, hour-long attempts hanging off every draw trying to piece the sequence together, a heart breaking fall at the chains I will not forget and I'm sure he won't either, then three months of dedicated training before it finally went down.

He worked hard on the training block that got him to that day and that's the part people don't see in the Instagram post. The post is the good day. Getting there was two summers of tough ones and the last 3 months of extra dedication and effort.

I was there a couple days before it happened. He fell from the last hold, with the anchor at his face. I'm still replaying it in my head. He took a 12-15 meter lob, and I wasn't sure whether to feel jealous or bad for him. It was the kind of fall that stays with you when you're watching it live.

What I find most inspiring about it all is the amount of heart he has put into doing a route like this, not for its difficulty, as this is just the beginning for him, but because Rodellar is a 3+ hour drive and he didn't miss one weekend for two summers, until the end of the season. And this route had already beaten him once at the anchor the weekend before, and he still did the drive, paddled the canal, got wet one more time, scrambled up and down the boulders, and tied in. Talking from experience, I can share that tying in that knot, that day, it was the hardest knot to tie. It was Edu's first 8c+, and the first one is always the hardest. After falling from the top on his last visit to Piscineta, I guarantee the ghost in his head came to stay.

I've known Edu since he was trying Pince Sans Rire 7b+. I've watched him cruise every grade after that, up until his first 8c+. This truly is a good example of what mixing dedication, discipline, and good habits brings to you. And something important to bear in mind is that the send is just the day the hard and consistent work catches up with you.

Massive congrats to Edu. Onto the next one.