Weather is the thing nobody mentions about the Maestrat, and it matters. At seven hundred metres or more above sea level, the plateau around Albocàsser has a climate quite unlike the coast thirty kilometres away. Summers are hot and dry, though evenings cool quickly. Winters can be properly cold, with frost, fog in the ravines and the occasional snowfall, and Penyagolosa, to the north-west, is often white. In spring, sea air pushes inland and brings low cloud, and the whole upland can vanish into mist for a morning. The best riding months are late April, May, and then September and October, when the air is clear.
La Saltadora is a ravine about six kilometres from Albocàsser, and Abric XII is one of the numbered painted shelters there. Its paintings belong to the Levantine tradition, protected by UNESCO as part of the rock art of the Mediterranean basin in Spain, and the ride includes another shelter at the Arenal de la Fonseca. The people who made these pictures lived through the great climate swings at the end of the last ice age, and the warming that followed, and you can easily imagine the hunters watching the weather as carefully as any modern farmer.
When fog or rain settles in, the roads here become more serious. Limestone dust turns to slick paste, gravel gathers in corners, and the narrow lanes through the terraces offer little room for error. In dry weather they are delightful, but consider a day with low cloud a day for the coast road. Wind is a regular factor, and on exposed crests it can blow hard enough to move a bike.
Albocàsser has fewer than fourteen hundred people and no promise of fuel, so fill up at Alcalà de Xivert, a town of about six thousand six hundred on the plain, before you climb. Les Coves de Vinromà, a little larger than Albocàsser, may help in an emergency. Bring a rain jacket even in sunshine, and a warm layer in spring and autumn, when the temperature at altitude can drop quickly after sunset.