Turns out Spain is a pretty big country. On leaving Barcelona, our next must-visit destination was Granada, with some 900 or so kms to ride in between and no obvious route to follow to get there. After sticking to the coast for the first week, we decided to leave the Brits and the other Northern Europeans driving their motorhomes around the Spanish Costas and ride inland to Granada across El Altiplano, a huge and desolate inland plateau mostly over 1000m (England’s highest peak Scafell Pike is 978m to give some context).
For a couple of days we rode on fairly big but quiet roads with a good shoulder, before reaching a point where the main road turned into an autopista (not a motorway but near enough to rarely allow bikes). I’d seen this on the map, but read online that if bikes are not allowed on a particular autopista “a viable alternative must be provided”. Google seemed to think we could ride either on or close to the road. So we assumed that either we could ride it or there would be a service road alongside that we could use. And there was. But the Spanish really need to think about the word “viable” (maybe it was lost in translation). First we were on a small road that served farms just off the A92. It was paved but patched badly, but the worst thing was that it went like this /\/\/\/\ while the A92 went like this ———. Knackering. Sitting having lunch on a kerb at a petrol station we cursed the road and hoped it would improve in the afternoon. Instead it turned to gravel….
It’s difficult to describe the pain inside of riding on a road that goes up and down sharply, made of small stones at best, large stones at worse, and occasionally just a muddy track, when just your shoulder, the other side of a fence, is a flat, smooth road with a huge shoulder and hardly any traffic. Moral of the story…. Don’t trust Google to map you a bike route.
Despite the brain shaking and the snail paced progress, there were some good points. The scenery was immense. Deserts, mountains, emptiness as far as you could see, this could not have been more different from the built up coastal riding. At the end of the first day of gravel, we were trying to find a the seven bedroom house we had booked for the night (sometimes we need our own space) which was in the middle of nowhere and Google cranked our off-road adventure up a notch by sending us on what can only be described as a sheep track through a canyon. Several hours later than planned we found ourselves out of sight of the A92 riding through scenery that could have been the moon trying to find the damn house but it was an incredible place to be – proper desert, no cars (unsurprisingly), no sounds, the type of adventure that gravel roads should bring.
On arrival we were shown around each of the seven bedrooms, four bathrooms and three living rooms in our house for the night, the fire was lit, and as we cooked a slap up dinner of pasta and something I couldn’t quite rest as the feeling of being bounced around had set into my bones in the same way your body feels like it is swaying when you get off a long boat trip.
After a second day of bone shaking, which didn’t seem quite so bad as we were at least prepared for it, we suddenly dropped down into another canyon. This time the track was sand but orange rock surrounded us and we twisted around rock formations, past cave houses and through gorges for the last hour of the day as the sun set. Damn you Google for even suggesting this might be a road but the backdrop was incredible.
Finally we returned to the smooth, heavenly tarmac for the last day into Granada, excited at being able to ride over 10km/hr and not having to stop every five minutes for an ass break. Although the days were warm on the high ground, the temperature dropped with the sun and was below freezing overnight; my bike computer read 0 degrees at 8am that morning. But the stunning scenery again made up for any complaints as we skirted the northern edge of the Sierra Nevada, Spain’s highest mountain range, and the winding nature of the road meant that traffic remained light until we got close to the city.
With smooth tarmac under our wheels, jam sandwiches for fuel, snowy mountains over one shoulder and Granada, one of the few places on our European must-see list finally within our reach, the gravel tracks faded into an adventurous memory and Google was almost forgiven. Almost.
Thanks to Pascual in Albatera; Nacho and family in Velez-Rubio; Rudi in Benalua de Guadix; and the Sierra de Baza ranger who drew us a highly detailed map and spoke in very slow Spanish to try and help us stay on the best of the gravel tracks….
Brakes and Cakes 