A BRITON hiking in the mountains of northern Spain survived for six days, stranded at 1,200 metres (4,000ft) with a broken hip, only because he drank his urine and had the right equipment with him.

Paul Beck, 33, was walking from village to village in the craggy Picos de Europa when he slipped from a path and skidded in the snow for about 300m.

“The weather was lovely and sunny, but the ground was hard and icy in places,” he said.

“I realised I had broken my hip and it was dislocated. I was in great pain. I thought I could perhaps drag myself on my bum in the direction of a village, but it became too dangerous and I was afraid I’d plunge all the way down.

“I found a hollow and dragged myself in there. Luckily the weather remained fine but it was well below freezing during the nights. I tried shouting but, of course, no one came. I became more thirsty than hungry and had to drink my own urine. It was salty and not nice.”

The only thing that kept him going was the knowledge that his mother, who is Spanish and has a home in Galicia, northwest Spain, would raise the alarm when he failed to meet her in Coruña last Friday.

When she did so, a Civil Guard rescue team with a helicopter immediately started searching the area where she thought her son had been walking.

Paco Alorcón, an officer with the Civil Guard Mountain Rescue Team in Cangas de Onís, said yesterday: “We had no luck but then we found his car parked at Sotres, a village in the Picos.

“Local people said the Englishman had said he was going to walk to Bulnes via the base of a famous peak called El Naranjo de Bulnes. Our helicopter spotted him on Sunday in a hollow on a very steep slope, covered with snow.

“He was glad to see us and very brave about his hip. We fixed him up as well as we could and winched him up to the helicopter. It’s amazing he survived six days and five freezing nights up there. But he did have the right gear, with a sleeping bag and a rug. If it had been colder or his fracture had been worse, he would not have survived.”

Mr Beck, who lives in Denmark Hill, southeast London, and is a charity worker with the homeless, said: “I was really disorientated when the rescuers came. I have no idea what day or what time of day it was.”

He was taken to the intensive care unit of the nearby Arriondas hospital on Sunday and was said to be out of danger yesterday.

“He is very luck to be alive,” another spokesman for the Civil Guard said. “The fact that he was fit, was wearing very good walking clothes and had a sleeping bag saved him, along with the good weather. Only two weeks ago he would have been snowed in and frozen.”

“It’s been a miracle,” Mr Beck’s mother, María, said. “He went for so many days without food. I am just full of praise with all my heart for the Civil Guard rescuers and all the staff at the hospital. When I first saw him he just said, ‘I’m sorry I didn’t show up on Friday, mother’. But at least I had an idea as to where he might have been.”

He had been walking on Mt Urriellu, popularly known as El Naranjo de Bulnes, which is a gigantic tooth of bare rock that rises to more than 2,500m and which got its name because it glows orange (naranjo) at sunset.

POTENT BREW

• Urine is 95 per cent water plus dissolved waste from the body and nutrients including sodium, potassium and folic acid
  
  
• It is virtually sterile and has been used throughout history as an antiseptic to treat wounds
  
  
• Urine therapy is particularly entrenched in Asia where millions of Chinese regularly drink their own
  
  
• In the animal kingdom, male porcupines use urine to soften the females’ quills before mating, and vultures urinate on their legs to keep cool or disinfect themselves

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