Ibi is the first thing to understand here, because the town sits so close that the rock shelter feels like its back garden. Ibi is a place that makes toys, and has done for generations; the whole Hoya de Castalla and the neighbouring town of Onil grew a tinplate-and-plastic industry that once filled children's bedrooms across Spain. Before the factories, Ibi was known for something colder: snow and ice gathered from the high ground of the Sierra de Mariola and stored in pits for the summer. A town that lives on cold in a region that bakes is a good story to carry up the hill.
The shelter itself belongs to the Mediterranean rock art of the Iberian peninsula, the painted tradition in red and black that UNESCO listed in 1998 and that clings to rock overhangs all down the eastern side of Spain. The figures are small, lively and mostly pared down to a few strokes. Do not expect a cave mouth with a ticket office. These are shallow abrigos under limestone ledges, reached by track or path from where the tarmac stops, and the bike stays behind.
The riding is the Valencian interior at its most civil. From Ibi the road runs north into dry hills of pine, carob and almond, with the long wall of Mariola on one side and Alcoy's valley ahead. Corners are tidy, gradients modest, and the surface good enough that you spend more time looking at terraces than at the tarmac. Spring is the season to come: the slopes go green and the almond blossom has only just gone. In July the same hills are bleached and the middle of the day is for the shade of a bar in town.
Fuel and food are easy because you are close to real towns. Ibi, at about twenty-four thousand people, has pumps and a proper choice of lunch, and Alcoy, under nine kilometres away, has much more. Water is the thing to carry if you plan any walking, because the shelters are dry places and there is no tap at the end of the path.
One thing worth knowing before you go is that these painted sites are fragile and some are fenced. Look, photograph without flash, never touch the rock and never wet the paint to see it better, which people have done to their lasting regret. The quiet is part of it: a ledge, a view across scrub, and an archer a few thousand years older than any town you rode through.