Bicorp is the village to head for, and it is worth the ride for the name alone. It is a small place in the Canal de Navarrés, the inland Valencian country where the hills fold into one another and nobody has ever made a postcard of them. This is also the country of the famous Cuevas de la Araña, the Spider Cave near Bicorp, where a painted figure on a rock face is shown gathering honey from a crevice with ropes or vines. Of all the Levantine paintings, that scene is probably the one most often reproduced, and it reminds you that the people who painted these walls were gatherers and hunters with a keen eye for small domestic tasks.
Abric de las Sabinas takes its name from the savin junipers that cling to this sort of dry limestone. The shelter lies in a landscape of gorges and ridges cut by little rivers heading towards the Júcar, with Quesa to the north-east and Navarrés to the east. If you have an eye for botany, the smell alone is worth stopping for: wild thyme, rosemary and pine resin warmed in the afternoon sun.
The riding is quiet, narrow and remarkably empty. Roads here connect villages of a few hundred people, and you can go several minutes without seeing another vehicle apart from a farm van or a cyclist training on the climbs. The corners are tight enough to keep you busy but rarely nasty, though the surface can be patchy where the road was patched after a storm. Take the afternoon light from the west if you can; it lights up the rock face and makes the scrub glow.
On practicalities, be sensible. Bicorp is tiny and Quesa not much bigger, so do not count on fuel in either. Navarrés, at nearly three thousand people, is the nearest place likely to have a pump and a few cafés, and Ayora, a little over twenty kilometres away, is the larger town for anything serious. Fill the tank before you leave the main road.
Walk the last stretch with respect. The shelter is old, fragile and not designed for visitors, and the best manners are the ones you would use in a church: quiet voices, no touching, nothing taken home.