Ávila Walls and Mountain Roads
A 230 km loop
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Why this ride
Scenery first, traffic last, with checkpoints that make sense on a bike. 230 km round from Madrid - plan on about 4 h 11 of riding. The highest point is about 1,350 m. Long stretches are under trees.
Roadbook
- Madrid
start
Madrid sits higher than any other capital in the European Union, around six hundred and fifty metres above the sea, on a dry plateau with the Sierra de Guadarrama as a blue-white wall to the north. That height explains the light, which is hard and clear, and the winters, which can be sharp, and the habit of the place, which is to stay up very late. The city was a modest town until 1561, when Philip II moved his court here, more or less because it was in the middle of Spain, and it has been the capital ever since. Everything grand about the centre, the palace, the Plaza Mayor and the Prado, grew out of that decision.
The Royal Palace, on the western edge of the old town, is a vast block of white stone and granite begun in the 1730s on the site of a burned fortress, and the square in front looks across a gardened slope toward the Casa de Campo, a former royal hunting ground that is now an enormous park. Walk a few minutes east and the Plaza Mayor, with its red arcades, is the place for a coffee and a bocadillo de calamares, the fried squid sandwich that is the city's cheerful signature. The Retiro park and the Prado museum lie farther along, and a day in them is a good use of a rest day.
Riding out of the capital is easier than it looks. The M-30 ring road and the radial motorways are fast and well signed, and the traffic, though thick, moves. Low-emission zones restrict older vehicles in the centre, so check the current rules and do not assume a bike is exempt. Once past the northern suburbs the land rises toward the sierra and the roads begin to bend, through holm oak and granite boulders, with mountain passes like Navacerrada and Cotos within an hour or so. Weekends are crowded with other riders, so weekdays or early starts help.
Fuel is no concern in a city of three million, and the centre has bars on every corner. Madrileños eat late, with lunch around two and dinner after nine, and the best cheap breakfast is chocolate con churros, thick hot chocolate with fried dough, at one of the old churrerías. In summer the afternoon heat is fierce, and the streets are empty between three and six, then fill again as the shadows lengthen. The smell of the city is hot pavement, coffee and, after a thunderstorm, wet dust.
- Ávila
food
Ávila announces itself from a long way off, a tawny line of granite wall on a bare plateau with the snowy edge of the Sierra de Gredos behind it. At roughly eleven hundred metres it is the highest provincial capital in Spain, and you feel that in the air: bright, thin, and cold enough in winter that frost on the approach roads is a real hazard even when the sun is out.
The walls are the point. Built from the end of the eleventh century as the Christian kingdoms pushed south, they run for about two and a half kilometres with eighty-odd towers and a handful of gates, and they are among the best-preserved medieval defences in Europe. You can walk part of the circuit on top. For the photograph everyone wants, ride out across the river Adaja to the viewpoint known as Los Cuatro Postes, where the whole city lines up in the evening light like a stage set.
Ávila was also home to Teresa, the sixteenth-century mystic, reformer and writer, and the town sells her in sweet form: yemas, little sugared egg-yolk confections that are worth buying even if you are not sweet-toothed. The savoury answer is chuletón, an enormous cut of local beef, usually shared and served very rare, which makes a lunch that you will need a siesta to survive.
For the riding, you are on the meseta, high, open and windy, with long straight roads through cereal fields and scattered holm oaks. The fun starts to the south, where the road climbs into the Gredos and the corners tighten, the surface mostly good and traffic light outside August. Mornings can be chilly even in summer, so keep a layer in the top box.
Practically, this is a proper city of fifty-odd thousand, so fuel, cash machines and parking by the walls are all easy. Park outside the gates and walk in; the old streets inside are cobbled, narrow and sometimes closed to vehicles. Give yourself an hour for the walls and another for a long, slow lunch.
- Madrid finish