The Catalonia region in northeast Spain offers the perfect combination of warm climate, great food, relaxed culture and, of course, amazing riding. Join us as we showcase eight great road cycling routes in Catalonia’s eight separate regions, and this is just a taster – there are thousands of options for riding in Catalonia. For more information go to catalunya.com
• Road riding in Catalonia: Terres de Lleida
• Road riding in Catalonia: Costa Daurada
• Road riding in Catalonia: Terres de l’Ebre
• Road riding in Catalonia: Pyrenees – Val d’Aran
• Road riding in Catalonia: Pyrenees of Catalonia
• Road riding in Catalonia: Costa Barcelona
• Road riding in Catalonia: Landscapes of Barcelona
Take a look at the people wandering around Girona and you may notice that some of them stand out from the crowd. Among the locals and the tourists here to see the city’s famous fortified walls, Gothic churches and bustling shopping streets, there are two groups that are here to indulge rather specific passions.
One group is the Game of Thrones fans. Many of the scenes from the fantasy series were shot in Girona’s old town, and gaggles of GOTies can be found milling around the city’s dramatic cathedral, or as they might better know it, the Great Sept of Baelor.
The other group is cyclists. Wherever you go you’ll see people in bars and cafes with tell-tale tanlines and casquettes artfully perched on heads. Girona is such a cycling-friendly city that its residents have included the likes of Mark Cavendish, David Millar, Tao Geoghegan-Hart, the Yates brothers and a certain Lance Armstrong. They were drawn here by the mixture of culture, climate and the seemingly inexhaustible supply of near-perfect training roads. And it’s a sample of those roads that we’ll be exploring on our ride today.
The route starts in central Girona and heads out into the Costa Brava in a loop that will take us along the coast and back via some testing climbs. The first 25km heading south serves as a gentle warm-up for the legs before we arrive at the town of Llagostera, after which the roads get narrower and we meet our first real climb of the day. The Alt de Sant Grau is 8.5km up a forested hillside at a modest 5%, but the effort required is enough to see all conversation die away for the duration of the ascent.
Once we tip over the top and pass the pretty chapel of Sant Grau d’Ardenya, we emerge from the trees and views open up of the panoramic road curving ahead of us, through a jumble of green hills to the ocean beyond. So begins a glorious, twisting descent to the Mediterranean.
The journey northeast affords incredible views over the coast, but requires negotiating a series of sharp rises and drops that drains our energy, so we take a tactical coffee break in the beachfront resort of S’Agaro Bay, just outside Sant Feliu de Guixols. As we sip, we discover that this bay is apparently a favourite holidaying spot for the rich and famous, having played host to the likes of Sean Connery, Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro and Lady Gaga.
We don’t spot any movie stars, but over the course of a caffeine-fuelled 60km jaunt further along the coast, we do play the game of ‘spot
the pro rider’. On any given day on these roads, there will likely be a number of pros to see, either relaxing in sea-front cafes or grimly pushing out the watts on the climbs.
Talking of which, the climbs seem to get bigger and harder as we travel north, with 15% hits that punish our quads. The views over the coast are a decent reward, as is a lunch stop after 90km at the seaside town of Calella de Palafrugell – the only problem being that having dropped down to coast to eat, we now need to climb back out with laden stomachs.
From here it’s another 20km of lumpy riding to Sa Riera, where we turn back inland for the final test of the day: Els Angels. It’s one of the most popular climbs in the region, being within easy reach of Girona, testing but not brutal, picturesque and with a church at the summit, Santuari dels Àngels, which was where surrealist artist Salvador Dalí was married in 1958.
Els Angels begins from the pretty village of Monells, 134km into our ride. For the first 4km it eases us in with 4% gradients, before tilting up to 6% average for the following 6km, with a few 12% stings along the way. It’s not a killer, but with a couple of thousand metres of climbing our legs already, we treat it with respect.
From the sanctuary at the top we can look out across the forested hills of the Costa Brava – the ‘Wild Coast’ – to the sea in the distance. While in the other direction we can see the white dots that make up our final destination of Girona. Better still, we can see it’s downhill all the way.