CURVESCOUT / MOTORCYCLE RIDE
Ordered leg totals agree within rounding. Stop distances are approximate sums of rounded legs. Stops, delays, approach and any separate return travel add time. Basis: producer-declared routed record.
Reading history stays on this device. My road watch requires a separate selection; opening it does not subscribe this ride.
Distance and riding time are measured on the routed road. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
A 103 km round trip from Salins-les-Bains - roughly 2 h 10 in the saddle. On the way it passes Saline Royale d'Arc-et-Senans, Fortifications of Vauban and back through Saline Royale d'Arc-et-Senans. It was put together for the scenery rather than the shortest line.
Salt built Salins-les-Bains, and the name gives it away. A salt spring, rich in brine, rises in this narrow valley in the Jura, and people have been boiling it for salt since Roman times or earlier. In the Middle Ages the saltworks were among the largest in the region, and the spring made the town and its lords rich. The Grande Saline, the great saltworks, is now a museum, and together with the Royal Saltworks at Arc-et-Senans, the neoclassical complex designed by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, it has been listed by UNESCO.
Read the complete Saline de Salins-les-Bains write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Saline de Salins-les-Bains is where the day begins. Next is Saline Royale d'Arc-et-Senans.
Claude-Nicolas Ledoux wanted to build an ideal city, and he started with a salt factory. The Saline Royale at Arc-et-Senans was built between 1775 and 1779 on the orders of Louis XV's administration, to boil brine into salt, and Ledoux designed it as a perfect half circle of buildings around the director's house, with the workers, the boiling halls and the management all arranged in a geometric order meant to express reason, hierarchy and efficiency. It never grew into the full circular city he imagined, but what was built is astonishing, and it was listed by UNESCO in 1982, later joined by the great saltworks at Salins-les-Bains.
Read the complete Saline Royale d'Arc-et-Senans write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Saline Royale d'Arc-et-Senans comes up about 16 km into the recorded legs. Next is Fortifications of Vauban.
Victor Hugo was born in Besançon in 1802, and so were the Lumière brothers, the pioneers of cinema, a generation later. The capital of Franche-Comté sits in a tight loop of the river Doubs, with the old town on the peninsula inside the loop and the citadel on a rock at the neck, closing the only side not protected by water. The citadel was built by Vauban, Louis XIV's great military engineer, after the French conquest of the region in the late seventeenth century, and it is one of the twelve groups of Fortifications of Vauban listed by UNESCO in 2008.
Read the complete Fortifications of Vauban write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 51 km into the recorded legs you reach Fortifications of Vauban. Next is back through Saline Royale d'Arc-et-Senans.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Saline Royale d'Arc-et-Senans write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Saline Royale d'Arc-et-Senans, late in the day. Next is Saline de Salins-les-Bains.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Saline de Salins-les-Bains write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Back at Saline de Salins-les-Bains. That is the ride.
Saline de Salins-les-Bains → Saline Royale d'Arc-et-Senans is 16 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Saline Royale d'Arc-et-Senans → Fortifications of Vauban is 35 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Fortifications of Vauban → back through Saline Royale d'Arc-et-Senans is 36 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Saline Royale d'Arc-et-Senans → Saline de Salins-les-Bains is 16 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.