Race Design Thread

[Libertine Seguros]

Stage 6: Reus - Valls, 154km

GPM:
Alt de La Mussara (cat.2) 13,2km @ 5,4%
Coll d’Alforja (cat.3) 5,0km @ 4,7%
Alt de L’Albiol (cat.2) 9,0km @ 6,1%
Alt de Mont-Ral (cat.2) 11,4km @ 5,3%
Alt de Lilla (cat.3) 5,4km @ 5,1%

A relatively short intermediate stage on day 6 for the riders, unlike any of the stages so far it’s not an easy opening before the climbing begins, instead the ascents are dispersed throughout the stage - however none of it is especially challenging in terms of gradients and so I anticipate this is likely to be a baroudeur’s type stage where the fight to get into the breakaway could be key as this is a stage which gives beaucoup opportunities to the escapees to make it count, with multiple platforms to attack that might not work too successfully against a whole péloton, but against a reduced group they could - and this is the kind of point in the race that the leaders might consider allowing the break to go and take the jersey, or some riders might have lost enough time by now to be allowed to take the stage, something akin to the 2010 Giro stage won by Matthew Lloyd at the same point in the race.

Reus

With a population of just over 100.000, Reus is a city of ancient provenance, known in Roman times and likely before - the most common theory around its name is that it refers to a Celtic term for a crossroads. It was a bastion of Republicanism in the Civil War and was extensively bombed by Franco’s regime, which led to the military being stationed here throughout the dictatorship. The arrival of a large workforce from Morocco along with the existence of an airport popular with low-cost carriers as an alternative entry point to Barcelona and to coastal resorts like Salou and Cambrils has led to its rapid expansion in the last 50 years. It is also world renowned as a centre for production of vermouth, and as the birthplace of iconic Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí - although little of his life’s work took place in Reus and none of his buildings are present in the city, a museum to him is one of the primary tourist attractions. It is one of the biggest cities in Spain without a pro football team, after CF Reus Deportiu went bankrupt and folded mid-season in La Liga-2 in 2019. Merging the remainder of the team with CF Reddis (named after the old Roman name of the city), they re-established themselves in the amateur ranks, but have yet to reclaim professional status. The Vuelta has only been here twice, in 1969 and 1979, and even the Volta a Catalunya hasn’t been here since Daryl Impey won in 2017 - although the women’s equivalent came through in 2025 with Elise Chabbey victorious.

As you can see from the map, the stage start and finish here are very close to one another, as we take a complex route looping around the Muntanyes de Prades range. In fact, the first half of the stage is a large circuit that almost brings us all the way back to the stage start, not dissimilar to in stage 3. We start climbing almost immediately from the start, with the cat.2 Alt de La Mussara, sometimes also called Coll de les Llebres (and going by this name in the one pro race it has been seen in, the 2022 Volta a Catalunya), cresting inside the first 20km. We will be seeing part of this climb again, too.

As you can see, not the toughest of ascents, but challenging enough from the gun, sustained for a good distance and with most of its toughest gradients in the first half, at least after it kicks up in Vilaplana. The upper plateau of the Sierra will provide the backdrop for the next 20k or so, so there is no respite after the climb either, before we have a long and gradual descent, broken up by the cat.3 Coll d’Alforja, which amounts to the fairly unthreatening, consistent first 5km of this profile, before we return to Vilaplana.

Muntanyes de Prades

This time around, we climb to the Font del Roure mirador before turning right toward L’Albiol, a small town in the mountains. This climb when it is used in amateur racing is known as the Alt de L’Albiol, and essentially consists of the same climb as La Mussara, from the roundabout at Vilaplana (ca. km2 on the above profile) to the junction for L’Albiol (ca. km11). The long descent takes us back onto the coastal plateau and over to the town of Alcover, just a town over from Valls, our finish town, but we’re not going there yet, instead we are taking on a solid uphill grind of the Alt de Mont-Ral, a relatively unthreatening climb yet one which does at least crest with a final 1500m over 7% that might allow for some action if this is being settled by the break, and if it isn’t then at least at 45km from home then it may well be that the sprinters say goodbye here, at least some of the less adept ones when it comes to climbing. This is more one for the likes of Mads Pedersen than the likes of Dylan Groenewegen, shall we say. A long and gradual descent then takes us to Vilaverd and Montblanc, and then we have our final climb of the day, a Volta a Catalunya classic finish, the Alt de Lilla and then descent into Valls.

The Alt de Lilla, however, is not very threatening. It averages just over 5%, never gets much above that, and is a wide open highway, meaning it barely even looks like a climb when they race it. Despite a long lay-off in the 80s and 90s, it has become a common sight in the Volta a Catalunya, appearing almost annually in the 2010s, and most of those stages ended in sprints, won by the likes of Simon Gerrans and Alejandro Valverde. Only two did not, with Valverde (a different occasion from the aforementioned) in 2015 and Wout Poels in 2016 finishing a few seconds ahead; Poels was allowed to settle it from the break, with the GC bunch coming in 30 seconds down, while 2015’s stage was much more disrupted and also featured crashes in the run-in. It also appeared once in La Vuelta, in 2023, but then the finish was further away, in Tarragona, so its presence was even more token, and Kaden Groves won the sprint on that occasion. However, while the sprint is still the most common outcome after the Alt de Lilla, most of those stages were relatively flat otherwise, few if any are as tough beforehand as my stage here, so it could be a bunch or an escapee group that arrives in Valls.

While Valls has never been a stage finish in La Vuelta before, it has been the finish of many Volta a Catalunya stages as mentioned, and also has hosted a couple of stage starts in the national race, a 2013 stage won by Warren Barguil and the Igualada stage in the 2019 edition, won by Nikias Arndt. It does, however, host an annual amateur race in the early season which includes this same finale, but after an easier route with two laps of a large circuit. This race is the Clàssica Xavier Tondó, inaugurated in 2012 after the untimely death of the local hero rider who fought for almost a decade on small squads in Spain and Portugal to earn a chance of a top tier berth, winning the Volta a Portugal in 2007 and earning his way eventually to Cervélo Test Team in 2010, where he finished top 10 in the Vuelta and won a stage of Paris-Nice, finally achieving his dream in 2011 signing for Movistar, only to then die in a freak accident when he was trapped between his car and a garage door in Pradollano while training. He did have the unusual distinction of winning his last ever race, the Vuelta a Castilla y León, but he never got to enjoy the success he’d fought so long for. I drew my own Memorial Xavier Tondó race in this thread all the way back in 2012, which was based not around Valls but Olot, where he had lived later in life and where the everyman sportive in tribute to the man took place, where I elaborated on his life and career, but Tondó was one of my favourite riders back then and his death was one of the ones that’s hit me hardest in the sport.

This is sort of a transitional stage, but a range of outcomes are possible depending on who fights their way into the break on the Alt de La Mussara, and how tight - if at all - the GC men want to keep the leash. Sepp Kuss might have won his Vuelta thanks to being allowed to escape in a stage at this point in the race, but that was a more conventional mountaintop finish; the stage that won Marco Giovannetti the 1990 race, however, was more like this, with the Puerto de las Palomas and a descent into Ubrique to finish, and the four or so minutes Giovannetti gained over the péloton was sufficient to hold the charge of Delgado later in the race away. So this one could be a banana skin.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Stage 7: Sabadell - Roses, 224km

GPM:
Coll de Sa Perafita (cat.3) 7,0km @ 3,9%
Alt de Sant Pere de Rodes (cat.2) 5,8km @ 7,9%
Alt de Puïg-Rom (cat.3) 2,0km @ 8,4%

Tough long stage as we head toward the second weekend here, but this is one where all the challenges are backloaded in the stage, with us completing over 160km before the real challenges begin. We start in Sabadell, a co-capital of the Vallès Occidental comarca, and a large city of just over 220.000 which is part of the extended Barcelona megalopolis, a city which rapidly expanded in the 20th Century, primarily due to textile production, which which it is indelibly linked. This saw a large number of modernist buildings constructed, and an eight-fold increase in the population; when the influx of domestic migrants from elsewhere in Spain slowed after the Civil War, migration from overseas took its place, and the city became a home of protest against Franco’s regime, both from a Catalanist and from an integrationist perspective.

Sabadell from a sporting point of view has always been overshadowed by its proximity to Barcelona. Its football team languishes in the third division (having last played in La Liga in the 1980s and largely alternating second and third division spells since), and was last seen in La Vuelta in 2003 when Erik Zabel won a sprint; it appeared in the 2023 Volta a Catalunya, but that was its first appearance in over 20 years. However, the city does have a number of prominent figures, such as MotoGP veteran Dani Pedrosa, who won three world titles in smaller-engined formulae, mountain-running legend Kilian Jornet, ex-F1 and Le Mans-winning racing driver Marc Genè and his touring car racing brother Jordi, and the World Cup-winning footballer Sérgio Busquets. For us, perhaps David de la Cruz is of more note, the veteran rider who has three 7th-placed finishes and a stage win (with accompanying stint in red) in his home Tour as well as a stage win at Paris-Nice to his name.

This long stage takes us up into the deepest northeastern corner of Spain, and an area I have yet to take my Vueltas, since, like the real race, I have tended to largely go direct to the Pyrenees, or westward, from Barcelona, or re-enter it in similar fashion. The Empordà area tends to be very seldom seen, even in the Volta a Catalunya, but we’re heading off there today to take advantage of the relatively out-of-the-way nature of it. And besides, it’s not that far from Girona, so some of the pros should at least be able to scout it, no? The first part of the stage takes us from an inland plateau between the Montseny and Cadiretes massifs, down to the Costa Brava coastline at Platja d’Aro S’Agaró, and then through some coastal towns and cities like Palamós and Palafrugell that serve as summer retreats for city-dwellers in Catalunya and serve as the gateway to the Empordà region. For several years this region had its own short stage race at the pro-am level (2.2 in modern parlance), with a few notable winners; later Vuelta a Colombia winner Giovanny Báez, Giro and Vuelta stage winner Francisco Ventoso and veteran Movistar and Cofidis domestique José Herrada being among its victors. We continue on through the region towards the race’s hometown of Empuriabrava, but instead of heading into there, we then do a loop around to the north of both that city and the stage finishing town of Roses.

The last 60km have three climbs crammed into them, the first two of which will be familiar from stage 2 of the 2025 Volta a Catalunya where they appeared mid-stage. The first is the Alto de Puïg Vidriera, which is a summit point slightly before the Coll de Sa Perafita that I have labelled slightly erroneously because the road is titled for the Coll. After a short plateau to the real Coll de Sa Perafita, we have this descent into El Port de la Selva before the main climb of the day, up to the Sant Pere de Rodes monastery - or at least the junction for the parking lot, because we need to continue riding on after this. The summit to this climb, just under 6km at just under 8%, comes at 29km from the line.

Sant Pere de Rodes monastery with the climb in the background

We could go straight to the finish from here, and it would be about 20km from the summit to the line in Roses, a city of 20.000 which serves as the finish for today. However, I have appended a short circuit - 8,5km in length, so a little on the short side admittedly - which takes us round to the south of the city and enabling us to climb up a short ascent; the city is on its own eponymous gulf, with hills climbing straight out of it, so this gives us the opportunity to utilise those hills for a tricky finale, including the short ascent to Puïg-Rom, a hill overlooking the city and the bay and which was fortified for its protection dating back to the Visigothic overrunning of the city, as this city dates back to Greek trading times. It was besieged four times during the wars following the French Revolution, and more recently was known for being the site of El Bulli, a restaurant run by the Adrià brothers and rated as the best in the world for four straight years in the 2000s. The Puïg-Rom climb from the south is a tough little one, we only ride as far as the pass enabling us to descend as well, and that means that we are riding the first 2km of this profile, with a max of 17% and around 500m over 10% in the middle. The summit comes at 4,3km from the line; we then descend this side and cross the town before looping around to the beachfront again with the last straight (well, main road, there are a couple of slight curves but nothing that will provide a technical test) lasting around 650m.

This should be an interesting stage, the GC guys will probably try to leave things late in view of the stages to come, but there is the possibility of making something happen in that last part of the stage, and having a short steep climb so close to the finish should hopefully mean that some action can be prised out of the group.

The city of Roses, with Puïg-Rom in the background

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Stage 8: Figueres - Estación de Esquí VallTer2000, 183km

GPM:
Coll de la Brossa (cat.1) 10,7km @ 6,6%
Coll de Coustouges (cat.2) 15,0km @ 3,1%
Coll d’Ares (cat.1) 13,0km @ 5,8%
Estación de Esquí VallTer2000 (cat.1) 12,1km @ 7,3%

Stage 8 sees our first real mountaintop finish, a border-hopping stage through the northern Catalan region that starts in Figueres, a city of around 50.000 inhabitants that serves as the capital of the Alt Empordà comarca. It has never hosted the Vuelta a España but has hosted the Volta a Catalunya a number of times - mostly in the 1940s, 50s and 60s, but then went without any professional racing for over half a century before this year’s Volta stage, the same one won by Ethan Vernon that featured the two climbs from stage 7 mentioned earlier (the Cinturó de l’Empordà did come through a few times from 2008-11 but was not a fully pro race). Figueres is better known to the wider world as the birthplace of iconic surrealist painter Salvador Dalí, to whom a theatre and museum in the city centre are dedicated. More recently it has been home to another motorcycle racing star, Maverick Viñales.

There are no fewer than four border crossings in this stage, with the stage twice crossing over into France before returning to Spain afterward, as we traverse the easternmost Pyrenean passes. The first is actually uncategorised, with the Col du Perthus being a mere 4,6km @ 3,5% with the final kilometre being at around 5,5% as the hardest part. Before any categorised climbs, we do pass through Céret, a small town which once played host to a successful clique of artists, with cubist pioneers Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque both living here for a period and others like Henri Matisse visiting; more recently, however, it has been well known as the home of superstar biathlete Martin Fourcade, a dominant force throughout the 2010s who arguably did a huge amount for women’s biathlon, purely by making men’s biathlon extremely dull and predictable thanks to his superiority. Thanks to reallocation of historic results after disqualifications, he currently stands at six Olympic gold medals (the last of which was handed to him for the Vancouver 2010 Mass Start after the retroactive disqualification of Evgeny Ustyugov) and one silver, 13 gold medals with 15 other minor metals in the World Championships, and seven consecutive World Cup overall titles from 2012 to 2018. He retired in 2020, winning his last ever race, and passing the torch to the next generation’s dominant force, Johannes Thingnes Bø. Nowadays, Fourcade has gone into sports administration and was a prominent figure in the Paris Olympic organisation, as well as now being a member of both the IOC and its Athletes’ Committee.

From here, we start our climbing. The first up is the Col de la Brousse (Coll de la Brossa in Catalan), an almost entirely unknown climb which is a solid cat.1 (over 10km at 6,6%) and most of the way up to the Pic de Fontfrède, a well known cyclotourist climb in the area, which is perfectly reasonable to ride mid-summer. It’s a fairly one-sided climb, with a very gradual drop afterward, before reaching Las Illas and then climbing the last 3,5km of the Coll de Manrella / Col de Manrell which I haven’t categorised - this does however consist of 3,5km @ 5,1%, and the last 1,4km of this, between the Coll del Figuer and the Monument a Lluis Companys at the Coll de Manrella, is sterrato - but perfectly rideable - and at times there has been a rock boundary at the border, but this has been removed at the time of writing. The Spanish side of the climb, however, is fully tarmacked, with shiny and wide asphalt that makes it a very straightforward, safe descent.

After returning to Spain, we loop around to climb the Coll de Coustouges, perhaps a bit of a reach at cat.2, a long, multi-stepped, low-average but endless set of drags, ascents, descents, and everything in between. Climbfinder records it as 14,7km @ 3,8% and Altigraphs records the same distance averaging 4,2% but I don’t understand how those work because they both seem to miscalculate the starting altitude, I run the exact same start and end altitudes across the distance and get a much lower gradient average - in the end I chose to categorise the last 15 kilometres of the climb from the Cyclingcols profile instead. Now back in France, it’s a descent and some uphill false flat to Prats de Mollo-Preste, and then we’re onto more serious climbing, with another cat.1 climb, the Coll d’Ares. Not to be confused with the Col des Ares, the Coll d’Ares or the Coll d’Ares. Quite. This one is 13km at 5,8% and serves as the border for our final crossing, cresting just over 40km from the line.

So, there are a lot of climbs with this name. The most well known to real life racing is the Col des Ares, a cat.3 climb in the central Pyrenees that has appeared regularly in the Tour de France in the 2000s and 2010s. Traceurs tend to refer more to the Coll d’Ares, a borderline cat.1/HC climb in northwestern Catalunya, near Lleida, and which PRC did a feature article on. There is also a Coll d’Ares in northern Comunitat Valenciana, which was used in the 1975 Volta a Catalunya. This one, however, appears once in Tour de France history, climbed from the opposite (easier) side, in a long stage from La Seu d’Urgell to Perpignan which was won by Jan Janssen.

After this, we arrive in Camprodon, after which point we just start heading our way to our MTF, at the VallTer2000 ski station. The road to VallTer2000 is actually the highest paved road in Catalunya (or at least the Spanish part of it, as if Andorra is counted, Port d’Envalira, Arcalis and Port de Cabús are all higher) and is a very solid cat.1 MTF, being 20+ kilometres at just over 5%, but with the crucial part from Setcases up to the summit being 12,1km @ 7,3%.

The VallTer2000 ski station has been used in the Volta a Catalunya on eight occasions; it was first introduced to bike racing in 1986, when Juan Fernández Martín won. It was also seen in 1992, when Tony Rominger won the stage and Miguel Indurain took the race leader’s jersey. After this it had a 20-year layoff, but after it was used as the final destination of the Marxa 100x100 Tondó, a cyclotourist route in tribute to Xavi Tondó, in which many professionals, especially Catalan pros, participated, it was brought back and became a regular ascent; it was used in 2013 and 2014 (Nairo Quintana and Tejay van Garderen the winners), and though bad weather resulted in its removal in 2018, it was then used in 2019, 2021, 2023 and 2024, with Adam Yates winning the first two, then Giulio Ciccone and Tadej Pogačar the latter pair. So although this isn’t the most decisive of climbs in terms of gaps being enough to break the race apart, the calibre of winners is pretty strong in all honesty - this would be its first appearance in the Vuelta, and it should give us our first ‘classic’ MTF to learn who has their climbing legs on point for the race without creating gaps so large that they negatively impact the rest of the race.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Stage 9: Olot - Estación de Esquí Tuixent-La Vansa, 132km

GPM:
Coll de Canes (cat.1) 12,5km @ 5,5%
Alt de Castellar de n’Hug (cat.2) 10,0km @ 4,3%
Coll de Pradell (cat.ESP) 15,0km @ 6,9%
Coll de Josa (cat.3) 7,0km @ 4,3%
Estación de Esquí Tuixent-La Vansa (cat.1) 11,2km @ 6,8%

The second Sunday of the race, the last day before the rest day, sees our mountains cranked up once more with a “classic” short mountain stage. We start in Olot - the latter-day hometown of Xavier Tondó, who has cropped up repeatedly in these Catalan stages - and an unusual city, home to just under 40.000 people, which serves as the gateway to the Garrotxa Natural Park, a landscape of mostly extinct volcanoes that dot the area including within the city limits themselves. Previously linked to Girona by a railroad that has since been made into a greenway and cycle route, the city is known for the landscape art of the eponymous Olot School, a circle of 19th Century artists based around the city, who are more classicist in style than the likes of Dalí and Miró that Catalan art is more typically associated with. Again, until 2025 it had never hosted the Vuelta, but it was the departure town for the Andorra-Pal stage won by Jay Vine. Otherwise it has only ever hosted the Volta a Catalunya and the Setmana Catalana; winners here include Fermín Trueba and Délio Rodríguez back in the 1940s, Laurent Jalabert in the 90s, and Alejandro Valverde and Nacer Bouhanni in a brief flurry of activity in the 2010s. VallTer2000 stages have passed through the city, but not stopped.

The unique landscape of Olot

The stage begins - as this type of short mountain stage ought to - with climbing straight from the bat, albeit a somewhat over-categorised 12,5km @ 5,5% up to the Coll de Canes. It has only been seen once in the Vuelta’s history, in the Arcalis stage of the 2005 edidtion, when it was a second category climb (the 2025 took the easier, parallel Coll de Santigosa). We make the same descent that they did that day, into Ripoll, but then when those two stages both continued north, we turn westward first, and then turn northwards in Gombrén in order to take another multi-stepped, gradual cat.2 ascent up to Castellar de n’Hug, a small mountain town where two of the southern sides of the multi-faced Coll de la Creueta converge. It hosted a stage finish in the 1983 Vuelta, won by Alberto Fernández, for whom it was his first Grand Tour stage (he would later win two Giro stages that same year) as well as two MTTs in the Setmana Catalana, but last appeared under a different name in the 2024 Volta a Catalunya. It amounts to this profile until the 10km to go mark and the junction marked “BV-4013 / Carretera de Gombrèn à Cal Ros”. The most notable parts of ascent are 4km @ 6,3% between the Coll de Merolla junction and the Coll del Pla de l’Espluga, and the final 3km @ 5,5%. Otherwise it’s a bunch of false flat, but there’s a lot of it. We then descend into Guardiola de Berguedà, and things get serious very quickly.

The Coll de Pradell is of course a traceur favourite and has appeared many a time over the years in proposals here and elsewhere, before it was finally unveiled to pro racing in the same 2024 Volta stage mentioned earlier - I have, however, already used that Santuari de Queralt finish way back in my 5th Vuelta design, which also saw me utilising the Coll de Pradell, though that time I used the popular Fumanyà-Pradell double-summit option. The same option was taken by OlavEH in a Vuelta design in 2021 seen here, which then follows the same route as my stage from that point on (I did mention I had a near identical finish as a Volta a Catalunya queen stage planned at the time that was scrapped, this is the stage that eventually came out of some redrawing as a result). I chose to take a different side of Pradell to keep mixing things up and also because when they used the climb from Vallcebre in the Volta, it was 60km from home but nevertheless had a significant impact, not least dropping the man who had barracked for its introduction to racing, Sepp Kuss. The ascent to Vallcebre would be a perfectly acceptable cat.2, and the 5,5km @ 11% that close the climb - much of which on hormigón - that just takes this up a notch from most climbs here. It even does its best to ape a true legend.

While 60km remained at the summit of Pradell in the Volta, only 41 remain here, as we don’t need to take the long descent back into the Berguedà valley. Instead we press on with only a short descent, and then it’s back to gradual climbing as we cross the Coll de Josa, which has popped up in the Volta a Catalunya a few times as part of a long, multi-stepped incline across the Pedraforca range, as a lead-in to the Port del Cantò-Port Ainé double in 2013 and en route to a descent finish in La Seu d’Urgell in 2008 and 2010 - the latter being an interesting stage where Óscar Pereiro attacked early on Pedraforca (they split the Coll de Josa into two from a categorisation point of view) only to then be dropped by locals Joaquím Rodríguez and Xavier Tondó, who would then ride away to take the 1-2 in both the stage and subsequent GC. You can see, however, that we skip all the Alt de Pedraforca side of things and only join the course at the junction for Coll de Pradell at about 9km from the end of the climb, so with most of the rest being false flat until the final 2,5km at 7,2%, this is very much cat.3 only for what we ascend, and then it’s a two-stepped, 11km at 4,5% or so, descent into Tuixent while the Pedraforca looks on menacingly.

Arriving in Tuixent, we could continue on the the Coll de la Traba and descend into La Seu d’Urgell, but no need for that. We can turn left, on the other hand, and climb up the Coll de Port. This takes us over toward the Port del Comte ski area and Sant Llorenç de Morunys. This has not been seen in cycling since Levi Leipheimer of all people won a stage in the ski station in 2004 - it was marked as a climb in the 2009 Tour de France, but that was actually the Coll de Boix, the second summit in the double climb of Serra-Seca, and nowhere near the actual ski area, so heaven knows why they called it Port del Comte. Anyway… we’re not actually going to Port del Comte, despite its proximity. That’s because there’s an extension to the Coll de Port climb up to the nordic ski station Tuixent-La Vansa, as per OlavEH’s stage linked above - and it’s a very solid climb. It also has a more gradual side via Sant Llorenç, but this is the ‘main’ side, if you like, 11km at just under 7% after an initial first step and flat, with the last 3,2km, after the Coll de Port junction, being at over 8%.

It’s a small ski station but it’s administered by the Port del Comte ski area, which hopefully means it’s viable. It’s a solid enough climb on its own to allow for action, but it’s not threatening enough to dissuade action on the Coll de Pradell earlier, especially not in a 130km stage, I would hope. Especially with a rest day to follow. As far as I can see it has never seen pro racing, but this would most definitely be a good way to introduce it.

 

[Samu Cuenca]

As sure as the sun rising in the East and night following day, I will go back to the well and make more Vueltas. Even as Spanish cycling discovers more and more of what the country has to offer, it still lags way behind the opportunities the country presents, and I keep finding new and intriguing (for me at least) ideas as well as seeking ways to crowbar in places or ideas that I’ve had for a long time. I don’t set out to keep making more and more Vueltas, but it just kind of happens, things come together and areas long left behind in my ideas need bringing back, or I’m hit by a piece of inspiration and want to build around it, or I’m investigating an area for another race and something that I couldn’t fit into that idea is left over and reused, etc. etc.. I’ve posted 11 Vuelta on this thread (this will be the 12th) plus have had a couple of other either near-completed or partially-completed routes that have then been abandoned, cannibalised or simply are awaiting my finding a way to hang them fully together into a cohesive whole because something is missing from it in my opinion, or there’s a transfer necessity or awkward route pacing that I don’t like and want to improve before I’ll be happy to post.

The self-imposed no-repetitions rule is making things increasingly challenging too, of course. Not for areas like Asturias, País Vasco or Andalucía where I still have myriad options (or there are climbs that I’ve used that have multiple sides allowing me more flexibility for the future), but certainly in the Sistema Central and in Aragón things are getting a little more challenging. But there’s still a lot out there, especially when you consider that, not bound by the realia of actual pro cycling, I can be a bit more experimental. After all, I’ve had an edition with the final five stages in the Canaries, a Grand Départ in Morocco (and one in Melilla), and now it’s time for us to - for the first time since my second Vuelta which was posted a decade ago - investigate the Balearic Islands, as I’m going to start the race in non-contiguous Spain for the first time since that Melilla route.

I’ve also tried to be a bit more brief, because these descriptions had swollen during the pandemic to the point where they were a much heavier undertaking than the design itself and while that was fine during the pandemic era, it’s now an impediment, so although the first couple of stages feature extensive descriptions of that kind, the rest of the race should give you a better idea of what to expect going forward - it’s not brief, but we’re not deep-diving into history and culture of every small town we go into anymore, or delivering eight-paragraph hagiography dedicated to revolutionaries, politicians and local riders, just giving a nod to them.

Stage 1: Ciutadella de Menorca - Santuário de la Virgen del Toro, 152km

GPM:
Alt de Sa Roca (cat.3) 2,1km @ 6,8%
Santuário de la Virgen del Toro (cat.3) 3,1km @ 9,1%

The Vuelta has been less keen than the Tour or the Giro to use overseas starts (having one in Portugal in the 90s before the modern era; since then we have had 2009 in the Netherlands, 2017 in Nîmes, 2022 in the Netherlands again (the Utrecht start had been planned for 2020 and had to be postponed) and then in 2024, when Lisbon again was the host, while 2025 will start in Italy to continue this increasing trend. On two other occasions, however, “overseas” starts have been more literal - being in parts of Spain requiring travel by sea; Tenerife hosted the Gran Partida in 1988, and Palma de Mallorca in 1986. That Gran Partida is the only time Las Canarias have been included in the race at all, but Mallorca has cropped up more regularly, thanks to its well-established role within cycling as a favourite training ground of many pros and also hosting the season-opening Trofeo Mallorca series of one-day races, which have long served as an early February tune-up for riders at all levels after their introduction in 1992. A collection of the great and good of cycling past and present can be found among the winners’ list of the various one-day races, where teams will frequently nominate around 12 riders and then choose their lineup according to parcours, fitness, training aims and indeed injuries on the road. The likes of Erik Zabel, Óscar Freire, Philippe Gilbert, André Greipel, John Degenkolb, Peter van Petegem, Robbie McEwen, Laurent Jalabert, Mario Cipollini, Alejandro Valverde, Paolo Bettini, Fabian Cancellara, Michał Kwiatkowski, Rui Costa and Luís León Sánchez have all won races among these events, but perhaps none were more popular than António Colóm, a local to Bunyola on Mallorca, who won two editions of the Trofeo Sollér and one of the Trofeo Deia before having his career quietly erased for doping offences.

That 1986 Vuelta départ saw a prologue and a road stage both starting and finishing in Palma de Mallorca, with Thierry Marie winning the former and Marc Gomez the latter. 1991 saw the riders return, with them completing stage 6 in Valencia before being shunted onto a ferry to do a road stage around Palma de Mallorca and an ITT in Cala d’Or before returning to the mainland. Jesper Skibby won the road stage and, because it was 1991, eventual GC winner Melcior Mauri won the chrono. 1998 was the last time the race headed over, with the second weekend spent on Mallorca with a road stage which was flat in the first half then bumpy in the second and was won by Fabrizio Guidi, then an ITT won - just like in 1991 - by the eventual GC winner, this time Abraham Olano.

One thing that is clear, however, is that cycling in the Balearic Islands to all intents and purposes means cycling in Mallorca. Pretty much every cyclist from the islands to reach any level of prominence has come from the largest of the islands. There is, however, but one exception: veteran endurance track specialist turned road rouleur [img=[URL]https://men.gsstatic.es/sfAttachPlugin/getCachedContent/id/2423103/width/425/height/284/crop/1]Albert[/URL] Torres[/img], who hails from Menorca. After a successful junior career largely on the boards and in time trials, he won a world title in the Madison alongside neighbouring Mallorcan David Muntaner, before establishing in 2015 the partnership that has largely carried Spanish track cycling for the last decade, with Sebastián Mora, a pairing that has carried them to three European championships. Alone, he has also added two European titles in the omnium, and two silver medals in the Worlds, one in the scratch and one in the points race. His road career has largely been secondary as a result; after going pro with Team Ecuador, one of those odd overseas-registered but Spanish-based teams that include some development riders from the registration state padded out by ex-amateurs from Spain, he followed his running buddy to Team Raleigh-GAC in 2016, before a stint with Inteja in the Dominican Republic. Movistar signed him in 2020, however, having priced themselves out of most of their existing domestique corps in their determination to sign Mikel Landa, and already having Mora on the books made him an easy target. However, while Mora has since moved on, Torres has carved out a new niche on the road with Movistar, doing four Giri and a Tour for the outfit, who he rides for to this day. He will therefore be the only rider who can potentially have a homecoming at our first stage, since I’m breaking with tradition and opening the race in Menorca.

Founded by the Carthaginians in the 4th Century and the birthplace of the aforementioned Albert Torres, Ciutadella de Menorca is where we depart from on our first stage and home of the Gran Salida. With a population of only around 30.000 it is about the smallest such host in the history of the race, but given the race tends to kick off in August this would be the height of the holiday season and, as you will all no doubt be aware, the Spanish islands tend to swell significantly in population during the summer months as holidaymakers in search of sun, especially from the UK and Germany, tend to flock en masse to these locations which have become massive tourist hubs. Ciutadella is marginally bigger than the other major city on the island, Mahón (or Maó in the native dialect) and so gets the nod as the starting point.

The Balearic Islands were settled early, as there are many stone megaliths and structures predating the Punic Wars to be seen in Menorca, but after the Roman conquest of Spain it became a haven for pirates who would attack vessels trading between the then-provinces of Italia and Hispania, now the peninsulas that we know as Italy and Iberia respectively, and a refuge for persecuted Jews. The Romans took over the islands as a result, and the former Carthaginian cities became populated by their people. While they lost it briefly to the Vandals, they retook it as a Byzantine possession until the Umayyad Caliphate conquered Iberia, at which point the island became part of the new Caliphate of Córdoba, under the name Manurqa (منورقة). Madînat al-Jazira, or the great city, became the name of Ciutadella during this era, but it was “liberated” during the Reconquista on January 17th, 1287, which is commemorated as the de facto national day of the island as a result. It was a possession of the Kingdom of Mallorca, before being incorporated into Aragón and then eventually Spain - though its strategic location for Mediterranean trade still made it attractive to outsiders and it was repeatedly ransacked or besieged, including by Ottoman Turks in the 16th Century who sold the entire population of the city into slavery, and more enduringly in the 18th Century by Great Britain, who seized it in 1708, formally acquired it in 1713, and then ruled it - save for a seven year window from 1756 to 1763 where the French captured the island - until 1782, when France and Spain took advantage of Britain being otherwise indisposed fighting the US War of Independence to unite their forces and restore the island to the Spanish crown. The Brits briefly retook the island at the end of the century once their business in North America was over, but in 1802 the Spaniards laid the final rest to the British claims. In fact, the British even helped conduct a peaceful transfer of power on the island during the Guerra Civíl, as Menorca had remained staunchly Republican in opposition to the other Balearic islands, and had become a place of refuge for fleeing anti-Franco figures, many of whom were evacuated by the Britons as a result. The other remaining vestige of British rule is that the capital of the island was relocated to Mahón during British control, although the religious seat remains in Ciutadella as do many historical civic institutions.

Menorca from above

This is neither a long nor a complex stage, and the first part of it is just a 45km or so traversing of the island, linking the island’s two major cities, Ciutadella and Mahón via the central municipality of Alaior. Once we arrive in Mahón, we have a 35km or so loop around to the south, close to the island’s only commercial airport, and down towards the coastal jewel of Binibeca Vell, which looks like a pristine, fairytale, bridal-white perfectly-preserved Mediterranean coastal village of the traditional style, but is instead a facsimile thereof, a 1960s planned town constructed to imitate this style and controversial with many for its inauthenticity and transparent tourist cash grab, lending it a similar reputation to the Vittoriano in Rome or the Skopje 2000 project. We then loop back towards the east and then northwards to return to Mahón via coastal towns like Son Ganxo and Es Castell, which come to life with tourists at neighbouring resorts like Punta Prima. This takes us on the eastern extremity of the island past Castell Sant Felip, iconic of the British time in command of the island, and then along the estuary back to Mahón for our first intermediate sprint.

Officially the capital of the island, Mahón is the birthplace of the founder of toxicology as a forensic science, Mathieu Orfila, and the prolific writer of Catalan-language texts Juan Ramis, whose works were largely composed during the British occupation. Named for the Carthaginian military figure Mago Barca, a brother to Hannibal, who legend suggested fled here during the Punic Wars, it has a similar history to its rival on the west coast, but is better known for its port. Again, the Ottomans sacked it taking inhabitants back as slaves in the 16th Century, and the British captured the island by taking it, using its port as a pretext to move the capital eastward - after all, the Britons ruled most of their colonies via the seas in those days - and remnants of British-era fortifications and amenities can be seen not just in the surrounding area but on nearby islands as well - much of its historic centre was, however, bombed by Franco’s nationalist forces during the Civil War, with support from the Italians, especially after the other Balearic Islands became nationalist strongholds and Menorca remained the last Republican holdout.

After this we head for the north of the island before entering a circuit of just over 20 kilometres which is around the town of Es Mercadal and Monte Toro, the highest point on the island, around which the business end of today’s stage will centre. We take a little under three laps of the circuit (as we enter it at the base of the climb on the circuit, and leave it close to El Mercadal), and on the second lap we give out some points to both of the minor classifications, as we categorise the Alt de Sa Roca climb on the second pass - around 37km from the line - as well as holding our second intermediate sprint in Es Mercadal - around 25km from home. The Alt de Sa Roca is a fairly simple puncheur ascent of just over 2km at just under 7%, and a max gradient of 16%, so a reasonable challenge for a first climb of the race, with 400m averaging 12% in the middle of it and another ramp of 200m at 13% near the summit. It is, however, not that long and although it’s not a super wide road, it’s not super challenging either, so given the long-standing tradition of weird mountain categorisation and the legend of the “Spanish flat” in the sport, I thought I’d only categorise one ascent given that the race tends to keep the categorised climbing early on in the race fairly minimal. This climb is crested at 58km, 37km (with points) and 16km from the line so there are chances to attack it, but realistically given the finish it’s not likely the decisive move is made here unless there is a miscalculation behind.

Es Mercadal, with Monte Toro overlooking it

Derived from the Latin mercatum, Es Mercadal was derived from, as you might expect, a marketplace, and as a central Menorcan, inland town of some repute and with a position equidistant from Ciutadella and Mahón it maintains this role for many of the island’s central communities to this day. The route from Sa Roca to Es Mercadal is essentially a sauntering downhill that consists of a couple of uphill false flats broken up with short downhills mostly on two-way country roads. Es Mercadal itself lies at the base of the last of these, so I have moved the intermediate sprint some way through the town to try to make this a bit safer, although thankfully it’s not a stage ending sprint so the pace shouldn’t be so wild. On the third time through the town, however, we hang a right on to the Me-13 and climb up to the Cim del Toro, the summit of Monte Toro, so that we will finish the stage at the ceiling of the island. And that entails a climb which is also a cat.3 ascent, but is somewhat tougher than Sa Roca.

Monte Toro from altimetrias.net

Yes, Grand Tours that begin with an uphill finish are pretty few in number. But we have had a few, and given the nature of a) the Vuelta and b) the geography of the Balearics, I think that this is not an unreasonable idea, as the small size of the island means it’s hardly forcing the spectators up to some highly obscure, out-of-the-way location, and besides the main road through the island will be clear once the riders have completed the first 40km or so, and the rest of the route will be clear more or less until they’ve completed the first 80km or so, and anywhere on the circuit bar the climb will see the riders three times, anywhere on the climb will give a view down to the countryside that should enable fans to get the gist of what’s going on beneath them too. Uphill finishes have been used to commence the 2008 Tour de France (on the Côte de Cadoudal in Plumelec), the 2011 Tour de France (on Mont des Alouettes in the Vendée), the 2021 Tour de France (in Landerneau in Brétagne) and the 2022 Giro d’Italia (in Viségrad, Hungary) while the stage, despite its uphill finish that should generate time gaps, is considerably easier than the Bilbao start in the 2023 Tour, the Torino start in the 2024 Giro, or the Rimini finish to stage 1 in the 2024 Tour. The 2020 Vuelta is a bit of an anomaly with stage 1 finishing on Arrate, but that was meant to be stage 4 in the original plans. This finish is perhaps most akin in terms of characteristics as a climb, to the 2019 Giro’s first stage finish, the San Luca climb in Bologna, however that was as part of an ITT. The first kilometre is at a fairly manageable 6,5% kind of level before it ramps up to Mur de Huy style, with 2km at over 10% to finish, which should give us a puncheur type - potentially a GC type, Primož Roglič style - in the first red jersey of the race. It’s a well paved, comfortably passable road with a sizeable car park at the summit, owing to the mountain’s status as the highest point on the island, giving a beautiful scenic view down to the rest of the island and across the sea to Mallorca and the Spanish mainland. This should be an explosive start to the race.

Final climb, the scope of the task slowly coming into view

I remember you having mentioned that you had a Vuelta with a Balearic start in the pipeline, so it's great to finally see it completed.

Just out of curiosity, I was actually looking at the route options for a one-day on Menorca just the other week. I landed on a start in Maó followed by multiple laps of San Roca before a finish on Monte Toro after about 150 km in order to match the length of the Mallorcan races. I did try to find some other climbs, but I they all seemed to be too short or shallow.

 

[Netserk]

I had expected the order of stages 2-4 to be: ITT, mountains, finish in Palma after rolling terrain.

Instead you gave us a worthless flat sprint stage on a Sunday??

 

[Libertine Seguros]

I remember you having mentioned that you had a Vuelta with a Balearic start in the pipeline, so it's great to finally see it completed.

Just out of curiosity, I was actually looking at the route options for a one-day on Menorca just the other week. I landed on a start in Maó followed by multiple laps of San Roca before a finish on Monte Toro after about 150 km in order to match the length of the Mallorcan races. I did try to find some other climbs, but I they all seemed to be too short or shallow.

Yea, the race has been completed for a while, the mess and boredom that was the real Vuelta led me to revisit a bunch more previously abandoned or adjusted Vuelta ideas and need to clear the backlog a little.

I had expected the order of stages 2-4 to be: ITT, mountains, finish in Palma after rolling terrain.

Instead you gave us a worthless flat sprint stage on a Sunday??

Yea, the idea was more to do with the logistics than anything else, what with the fast ferries from Ciutadella to Port d'Alcúdia.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Stage 10: Huesca - Logroño, 215km

First day after the rest day and it’s a long, flat transitional stage, the first chance for the sprinters since stage 5, or at least for most sprinters since there’s the possibility of some surviving stage 6 if it’s raced tamely. This is very much an old school Vuelta stage, where back in the day we’d have seen a lone Andalucía-Caja Sur rider gain 12 minutes on the péloton and then explode spectacularly as the bunch starts to reel him in. Of course that doesn’t happen nowadays, the break never gets that kind of distance, and it’s hard for teams as small as that to earn a spot now, but this is likely to be a long drag of a stage for the audience as much as the riders. I’ve included Huesca a few times before, often with this kind of usage, as a transitional flat stage between the Cordillera Cantabrica and the Pyrenees of Aragón and Catalunya. Previous descriptions:

From Vuelta #5:

The city of Huesca, with its iconic cathedral and double-lining of city walls, is one of the more famous towns in the north eastern corner of Spain outside of Catalunya. Its convenient location at the foot of the Pyrenées has led it to be a popular starting point for mountain stages in the Vuelta, with three of its last four appearances on the Vuelta route (in the real world) being at the beginning of a stage finishing with a summit finish. In 1999, we went to Pla de Beret; in 2004, the stage took us across the border to Cauterets for a finish at Cam Basque. In 2007 we went to that iconic 90s-early 00s Vuelta summit, Cerler. However, the last time the Vuelta set off from Huesca it was in 2012, going in the other direction, in the flat stage to Motorland Aragón referenced earlier.

From Vuelta #7:

The stage begins after a reasonably large transfer from the mountains to the northernmost provincial capital in Aragón, Huesca. With around 50.000 inhabitants, it's one of the smaller provincial capitals in the country, a measure of the comparatively sparsely populated and mountainous region; it is perhaps best known to a modern audience as the site of particularly brutal fighting during the Spanish Civil War, and because an optimistic prediction by a Republican general turned "having coffee in Huesca" into a running (at least partially gallows humour-influenced) joke in Spain, subsequently popularized among a worldwide audience when referenced by George Orwell; in my first Vuelta I had a stage which passed briefly through Aragón; just the mention of the Comunidad was enough to remind craig1985 of Orwell's reference to the joke.

Since those posts, it has cropped up a couple more times; a sprint stage start in the 2019 Vuelta a Aragón, a stage start in an intermediate stage in the 2020 Vuelta to Sabiñánigo, a stage start in the 2024 Vuelta Feminina that ended on Fuerte Rapitán at Jacá and was won by Demi Vollering, and anomalously a stage finish in the 2025 Vuelta won by Femke Gerritse in a bunch gallop. The city is also home of the Huesca La Magia-Renault amateur team, for whom a few pros got their starts, perhaps most prominently at present Roger Adrià, but also Euskaltel’s Jordi López and Kern Pharma’s Kiko Galván; and sort-of lost prospect Fernando Barceló, a jewel in the Fundación Contador who climbed with Nairo Quintana and a thermonuclear Raúl Alarcón in the 2017 Vuelta a Asturias and turned pro with Cofidis, but saw his career derailed by a cardiac issue that has meant that while he’s been able to carve out a decent niche, he’s never become the rider he was once projected to be.

The stage is fairly straightforward, riding through the north Aragonese plains via cities like Ejea de los Caballeros, and taking a brief detour - the only one of the entire race - into Navarre, for an intermediate sprint in the city of Tudela, in that small protrusion of Navarre into the boundary between La Rioja and Aragón. The last 90km or so are through La Rioja, however, and take us through cities like Calahorra, which has hosted a couple of Vuelta stage starts in recent memory, both times transitional stages to Burgos, on our way to Logroño, the capital of the region.

Logroño is a long-time host of the Vuelta, of course, having first been seen in 1941 and having been seen a few times on the way into and out of the Basque region during the El Correo-El Pueblo Vasco days. It became especially common, strangely, in the late 70s and early 80s, largely as it was one of the closest spots to the cycling-mad Basque region without needing to take security risk. Winners in the city include the likes of Bernard Hinault and Gerben Karstens. In recent times we have seen some rather characterless sprint stages here, including a couple of very tedious circuit races in the 2010s. It has also appeared in a huge number of editions (as you might expect) of the Vuelta a La Rioja, both as a stage race and a one-day race, but also the Circuito del Norte in the early days of Spanish cycling, and a few editions of the Vuelta al País Vasco in the 1970s. The most recent Vuelta stage into the city was an ITT in 2017, but we are going to go with the same finish as those dull sprint circuits in the early 2010s - not because they were ideal, but because it was a pretty comfortable and safe finish and the stage is not expected to give us anything but a sprint.

I’ve also used Logroño a number of times in the past, due to its convenience as a provincial capital and an accessible distance from many climbs and cycling-supportive areas in Euskadi, Cantabria and Burgos as well as as a transitional spot en route between mountain ranges. I used it in my last Vuelta, as the start of a stage to Jacá that ended on Fuerte Rapitán leading into the Pyrenees. This time it’s the finish of a stage heading out of the mountains, so should be a pretty quiet stage on this occasion.

 

[Samu Cuenca]

Yea, the race has been completed for a while, the mess and boredom that was the real Vuelta led me to revisit a bunch more previously abandoned or adjusted Vuelta ideas and need to clear the backlog a little.

Well I still haven't finished the write up for the last stage of my Fraustro Tour I started 18 months ago, so I won't be pointing any fingers.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Stage 11: Miranda de Ebro - Torrelavega, 167km

GPM:
Puerto de Estacas de Trueba (cat.3) 11,6km @ 3,0%
Puerto de la Braguía (cat.3) 6,1km @ 5,9%
Alto de La Capía (cat.3) 3,0km @ 9,3%

The race transitions northwestwards on stage 11, moving through Burgos province and into Cantabria with a hilly stage that could be for the breakaway but could have a bit of GC action in its closing phases. We start in Miranda de Ebro, a city of 35.000 which has been a common host for cycling, being in Burgos but at its border with the Basque Country and La Rioja. I posted a fairly lengthy description of the city in a 2016 Vuelta post, and the city has not hosted any pro racing since, so it remains current and therefore rather than rewrite it all I shall reproduce it here:

Settled in Roman times, the city of Miranda de Ebro is, as its name suggests, on the Ebro river and is the second largest city in the Provincia de Burgos, after Burgos itself, with a little under 40.000 inhabitants. Although the city has a long history, it came to prominence in the 19th century, where it became an important railroad connection from Madrid to the northern cities; its proximity to the borders with both the resource-rich País Vasco (in fact, in the original provincial divisions of Spain the town - as it was then - was located within Álava, and by extension what we would now call the Basque Country) and La Rioja placed it in an ideal position to help ferry products and resources to the capital. The city also has a darker side, hosting a nationalist concentration camp in and following the Spanish Civil War, the last of these to close, lasting all the way until 1947 before being abandoned.

The location between the province of Burgos, which has held the Vuelta's prime warm-up race since the move of the main event to September, and the Basque-Navarrese hub, has led to a long history with cycling in the city. In the early days of the Vuelta, the linking solely of larger cities meant that Miranda was only ever seen in transit, although the many stages that linked cities like Santander, Burgos, Bilbao, Vitória-Gasteiz and Logroño would often pass through. The presence of so many big cities in a cycling-rich environment hosting several stages every year in the Vuelta meant that the call for another stage town in the region was limited, but when Miranda did finally step forward and get itself a stage finish, it was an interesting medium mountain stage with Alisas, Los Tornos and finally Orduña, and the first man to win in the town was a little-heralded breakaway arti... oh, who am I kidding. It was 1973, so obviously it was Eddy Merckx.

Agustín Tamames was the next to win into the town the following year, in a short, sharp stage over Urkiola, Aiurdin and Orduña, with a similar stage being used in 1975 and being won by Hennie Kuiper. In 1977, the town was back, even hosting the race's grand finale, with a short stage from Durango after a MTF on the Urkiola the previous day, and therefore it served as the venue where Freddy Maertens broke the Vuelta's age-old stage wins record set by Delio Rodríguez back in the race's infancy. 1978's race saw a short one-climb stage where Jean-Philippe Vandenbrande became the first rider to win in the city without being a GT winner or World Champion; it was the biggest win of the Belgian's career.

After this, however, the city fell off the race's map. The reasoning is sound; while Miranda de Ebro is not in the Basque Country, the proximity of the city to it would make it a natural target; not only that but the main reason the city had become a regular host in the 1970s was that its relative proximity to classic climbs like the Puerto de Orduña and the Puerto de Herrera made it an attractive racing proposition; with those climbs now out of the question for the race, the reason for finishing a stage in comparatively small Miranda or Haro when you could finish in Burgos or Logroño instead was limited. And unlike Euskal Herria, the Vuelta has never gone back to Miranda other than, like in the early days, to pass through. The city has, however, hosted the Vuelta a Burgos almost annually, especially with the puncheur finish at San Juan del Monte, nestled in the nearby hills, which has served as an interesting way to break the field up with some small time gaps in years past.

The first half of the stage is basically flat transitional roads through Burgos province, heading through towns like Medina de Pomar and Espinosa de los Monteros which are common stop-offs for the Vuelta a Burgos; Espinosa is the gateway to multiple tough mountain passes through its access to the Trueba valley, albeit with the exception of Picón Blanco these are all from their easier sides, due to being on an elevated plateau. We are taking, however, probably the easiest of all of these easier sides, the barely-more-than-false-flat northern side of Estacas de Trueba, which only hits 5% for the last 1500m before a fairly long and drawn out descent; climbing it the other way it’s probably a cat.1 climb, this side is a cat.3 - I may have over-categorised Coustouges and Castellar de n’Hug to make this worthy of cat.2 but I’ve been stingy on this occasion. At the bottom of this descent we have - surprisingly enough, for the first time in all of my Vuelta routes - the first ascent of La Braguía, a common climb since its introduction to La Vuelta in 2006. This combination of climbs has been used twice in recent memory, in the 2013 Vuelta stage to Peña Cabarga and the 2014 stage to Parque Cabárceno.

Both of those stages followed the climb immediately with the Alto del Caracol, a cat.2 climb which I haven’t used since the very early days of this thread, and which is relatively out of favour with traceurs owing to the Alto de La Estranguada being nearby for use as an alternative. Here, however, no following climbs just yet - we’re on a longer flat stretch as we’re finishing further west than those stages did, and so there is a further 20km until the road ramps up again. Well, not really, as that is broken up by 830m at 12% on the way into Rasillo, but that is uncategorised, and we don’t see any sustained climbing until we reach Puente Riesgo and we reach the ascent of La Capía. La Capía is arguably another of those climbs that railxmig, long before their ban, dubbed “Kardashians” - climbs that are popular with traceurs more for their obscurity to real life than that they are particularly unique or special, and that become a cause célèbre of the fans in their absence. While I understand the concept, at the same time a lot of these climbs are not expected to be instant Zoncolan-killers, but rather it’s a focusing on superior alternatives to what is being used, and given most non-MTF races in western Cantabria have tended to either have flat finishes or use a well-established core of climbs (albeit including the otherwise mediocre Collado de Hoz, which has thanks to 2012 become crucial to the legacy and mythology of Alberto Contador in the same way as Oropa is a massively overstated climb thanks to the iconography of Pantani or how the Taaienberg has become synonymous with Tom Boonen), so La Capía’s tough gradients being close to a sizeable population centre and yet it going unknown to cycling mean many pine for its discovery.

APM guys scouting the climb

We climb that profile as far as the junction marked as a turning back to Puente Viesgo - but I’ve put the GPM at the top of the steep part to Santa María del Monte, however that’s more simply because it made the maths easier to calculate since all the profiles go beyond this point than anything else. Cresting at 14,1km from the finish, this should be close enough that action can be tempted, and with 3km at 9%, but more crucially 900m at a leg-stinging 15% in the middle of the climb with a maximum of 22%, this is something akin to those final climbs in the Clásica San Sebastián, so should hopefully give a bit of a chance to escape and settle this in smaller groups. The descent starts with a steep stretch but after that it should be fairly benign; we also have a slight sting in the tail in the form of a short and relatively unthreatening uncategorised climb after this, the 3,2km @ 4,7% of the frustratingly difficult-to-google and possibly ironically-named Alto de La Montaña, a summit just 200m above sea level and cresting 4,8km from the line. No tough gradients here - it’s all single figures - but if La Capía breaks things down to small groups then it could give a platform to break them. If the breakaway gets the chance to settle this, then they will have multiple opportunities to make it count before we arrive in Torrelavega.

Torrelavega is the capital of the Valle de Besaya and with over 50.000 inhabitants it is the second largest city in Cantabria. An important industrial hub for España Verde, it was originally an agricultural trading centre, and despite its prominence in industry it still remains most famous domestically for its livestock market and as the gateway to the UNESCO-inscribed heritage sites of the Cuevas de Altamira with their prehistoric cave paintings. The city also has a decent amount of cycling heritage; it is not a common Vuelta host, but it has had periods - especially in the 1970s - of providing stage finishes (Eddy Merckx being the biggest name to win here, largely because it’s hard to find a bigger name in the sport, of course), and it was last seen in 2018 when Rohan Dennis won an ITT here - that being the first visit for the Vuelta in 17 years too. It had its own one-day race back in the 1950s, however, and during the pro-am run of the Circuito Montañés it was an almost annual fixture on the route, being a springboard to the pro level for the likes of José Ángel Gómez Marchante, Dave Bruylandts, Pavel Brutt, Luís Ángel Maté and Ángel Madrazo - as well as Alexei Sivakov, Pavel’s father.

It is, however, perhaps of more repute as a hometown of a few major figures in cycling history, which I elaborated upon in an early Race Design Thread post here - three time World Champion, three time Milano-Sanremo winner and eleven-time Grand Tour stage winner Óscar Freire being born in the city, as well as it being home to the Trueba brothers, José, Vicente and Fermín all being star climbers in the 1930s and 40s - Vicente in particular being notable as his amazing performances in the climbs despite being rendered a GC irrelevance due to deficiencies on the flat and on descents due to his small size on the tough roads of the time led to him being dubbed “La Pulga de Torrelavega”, or “the flea” in English, and inspired Henri Desgrange to create a competition to reward the riders that reached the summits of the mountains first even if they were not in overall contention, meaning that Vicente Trueba is the inspiration behind the entire concept of the King of the Mountains in professional cycling, and with this being the main competition that the Spaniards were competitive in overseas thanks to the sport’s hubs in Spain being largely mountainous areas in the north, this swiftly led to the GPM acquiring a status second only to the GC win in Spain. Many decades later, the city also gave us another climber who was nicknamed after an animal, but far from being a small animal known for rapid movements, he was instead named for a marauding, heavy-set beast - this man being El Bisonte de la Pesa, Juan José Cobo.

Juanjo Cobo is a hard figure to truly get to grips with. The man won the 2011 Vuelta and took stages of the 2008 Tour and the 2009 and 2011 Vueltas; he won the 2007 Vuelta al País Vasco in dominant fashion, and he managed top 10s of Liège-Bastogne-Liège and Lombardia. His was the last wildcard podium of a Grand Tour until Tom Pidcock in the 2025 Vuelta. Yet in 2010 he was incapable of finishing the easiest of races, and he had never come close to the performance level he showed in August-September 2011 - he also podiumed Burgos before the Vuelta to show his form - before or since. His 2008 Tour stage was acquired after the doping-related disqualification of teammate Piepoli, and he himself was withdrawn when the team quit en masse after team leader Riccardo Riccò tested positive too. Cobo was well-known to be psychologically fragile, having admitted to having contemplated suicide at one point, and having planned retirement to retrain as an electrician after his disastrous 2010 season before Geox came calling. He was only able to produce when he was riding for Matxín and Gianetti, with Saunier Duval and with Geox; away from them he struggled, and both stints with Abarcá were disastrous. How much of it was Matxín and Gianetti man-managing him and how much was due to the incredibly suspicious nature of their teams at the time is something that, in all honesty, I don’t think we know even today, a few years after the UCI were able to pick up irregularities in his biological passport and strip him of his results from 2009 to 2011, leading him to lose his Vuelta title and stage wins. Given the results taken, my suspicion is that he rode clean in his disastrous 2010 season, but even so, his emotional state that year and his psychological struggles mean that the performances he displayed there were far lower than we could expect from an even moderately talented clean rider; Cobo’s junior records suggest he was at least that, so I’ve always maintained that, dirty though 2011 Vuelta Cobo may have been, there is a lot more to the difference between 2010 and 2011 Cobo than a simple “clean/dirty” dichotomy. Juanjo never gave the impression of enjoying professional cycling, and never seemed to be all that upset about losing his cycling achievements, almost like it was a weight off his shoulders to make a clean break from that part of his life. I hope he’s happier today.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Stage 12: Llanes - Mieres del Camino, 158km

GPM:
Alto de La Cruz (cat.3) 4,3km @ 7,0%
Alto de La Colladiella (cat.2) 8.9km @ 6,7%
Alto de’l Cau (cat.2) 3,3km @ 10,8%
Alto de Cueña (cat.2) 3,5km @ 9,9%
Alto de Couxial (cat.3) 2,6km @ 9,1%

Stage 12 is somewhat between hilly and medium-mountain, relatively short but potentially very slippery, with the return of the old friend of the Vuelta, rampas inhumanas. Well, we’re in Asturias, the home region of Angliru, Gamoniteiro, Les Praeres, Cuitu Negru and Ermita de Alba, so it would be rude not to, no? We may not be using any of those ascents, nor are we using a summit finish, but there’s more than enough to enable some significant gaps to be generated in these five ascents today.

We start in the eastern Asturian coastal city of Llanes. It stretches across around 30km of coastline, but the main urban area has a little over 10.000 people in it, usually used as a springboard for inland tourists to visit the secluded and prestigious beaches of eastern Asturias, a particularly well-renowned one being the somewhat unusual Playa de Gulpiyuri, a sinkhole several metres inland where the sea has broken through under the rock to flood the sinkhole and erode only the inland side of it to generate a rather unique beach. I have used it as a stage start in two previous Vueltas - including the very first, when it was the start of a mountain stage finishing at the very gradual Fuente del Chivo. The other was an intermediate stage to Tineo over the Alto de Bustellán. It has appeared in cycling dozens of times over the years - however it has never hosted a Vuelta stage, as these have typically used Cangas de Onis, inland from here, after Mirador del Fito, or after a Lagos de Covadonga summit finish, instead. It has appeared over 30 times in the Vuelta a Asturias, however, as well as occasionally in the Vuelta a los Valles Mineros, a second stage race in Asturias, similar to how the Euskal Bizikleta ran alongside the Vuelta al País Vasco or the Setmana Catalana ran alongside the Volta a Catalunya. Stages finishing here typically use the cat.2 Alto de Tornería as the lead-in, which has given us strong winners such as Abraham Olano, Lale Cubino, Federico Echave, Luís León Sánchez and Stefano Garzelli over the years. It did go without racing for fifteen years after 2010, but as the Vuelta a Asturias has successfully expanded back up to four days - almost up to its former glories - after some lean years as a two- or three-day race, the city came back onto the menu this season, with Steff Cras beating Marc Soler in a two-up sprint.

The first part of the stage is as flat as you can get in Asturias (not a lot is very flat in Asturias), heading along the coast to Ribadesella and then inland to Arriondas, at the base of the descent from Mirador del Fito. We then continue to ride along the plateau that lies between the coastal mountains and the inland sierras, past Nava, the base of Les Praeres, and on to Lieres just after the halfway stage. Well, distance-wise. It’s probably less than halfway time-wise, because we have five climbs crammed into the second half of the stage.

The first of these is the fairly straightforward Alto de la Cruz, often called “Cruz de Lieres” after the town at its base to differentiate it from other climbs with the same name. It is a fairly ordinary climb, starting easily and then having 3,3km at 8,4% with a max of 14%. Weirdly, the only time it has been seen in the Vuelta it was hugely over-categorised as first category, back in 1976 - look at this stage profile and remember that Mirador del Fito is already a fairly generous climb to grant cat.1 status to. However, it allows us to access the Nalón valley, descending into El Entrego and then on to San Martín del Rey Aurelio, where we start to climb a Vuelta standard, La Colladiella.

With the final 5km at almost 9%, this one was introduced surprisingly late, in 2000, but has been seen eight times since, six of which have been in La Vuelta. In fact, we’ve seen it five times in the last two years, as it is common as a warm-up climb for bigger MTFs; it was seen in the Angliru stage of 2023, twice in the Cuitu Negru stage in 2024 and in the Cotobello stage of the women’s Vuelta in 2025. But no appearance has ever been as dramatic as when it was the penultimate climb in the mythical, heroic 2005 Puerto de Pajáres stage, when Liberty Seguros pulled off a masterclass and Roberto Heras took his life into his hands with a borderline reckless descent of La Colladiella to ride across to the domestiques he had waiting in the valley - I wrote this post about the legend of this stage back in 2017 in a “best stages” thread:

The Puerto de Pajáres is a Vuelta classic, back from before the days of mountaintop finishes, but since the establishment of a ski station above it, it was a common stop-off in the race during an era of relative repetition as a number of classic mountains established their mythos. Ironic, then, that Pajáres' most memorable stage came with the decisive moment of the stage already having taken place by the base. A day earlier, Heras, placed 2nd on GC, had thrown everything bar the kitchen sink at race leader Denis Menchov, but the Russian remained iron man, and clung to a 47" gap on the GC. Rabobank's reserves were depleted, but with a 40km time trial to come and some relatively tame stages in the Sierra de Madrid, it would take something audacious to wrest control of the race from Menchov unless it was done on the ensuing stage to Pajáres.

In the end, we got something audacious, on the ensuing stage to Pajáres.

First, Liberty Seguros put Ángel Vicioso and Joseba Beloki in the break of the day. Then Michele Scarponi got into a counter-attack which joined forces with the front group. When a further large group was formed on the Alto de La Collaona, Marcos Serrano marked it. When the leaders hit La Colladiella, a climb which is borderline cat.1/cat.2, the break had five minutes, when Heras attacked, disintegrating the heavily reduced péloton and isolating Menchov along with other heads of state. A further attack near the summit gave him daylight, and then he decided to try to kill himself in pursuit of the Vuelta, descending like a man possessed; at the base of the descent he found his domestiques waiting by their bikes, then Team Time Trialling their way to the front; Menchov by contrast was suffering alone in the valley. Once Serrano and Vicioso had pulled Heras to the front, Beloki and then finally Scarponi took over, setting hellacious pace at the front and shelling numerous contenders as the rain began to tumble. When Boots finally exploded, Heras dropped everybody for good, with only escapees Samuel Sánchez and Javier Pascual within two minutes of him; Menchov lost over 5 minutes, finished alone and despondent, and the course of the Vuelta was changed - forever, for it was after this race that Heras was unceremoniously removed from top level cycling forever, and the lid began to come off the bubbling pot that would become Operación Puerto.

We are, however, not doing Heras’ descent, because we are actually going to cut right to the double summit with La Mozqueta and descending down into Ciaño on this route. The ‘normal’ thing to do from here to get to Mieres del Camino, our stage town, would be to descend down to Ciaño and cut left over the cat.3 Santo Emiliano; we are going to innovate here, however, and take a left sooner, in La Nueva (at 3,5km on that profile), and take the first of three alternative routes that have a crest above Santo Emiliano and enable us to descend down through that pass. Otoñes is one option, La Teyera is another, but we are taking the shorter but steeper Alto de’l Cau, or Alto del Cabo, which is a Mende-alike, just over 3km and averaging almost 11%.

39x28altimetrias.com's images and profiles of El Cau

We descend into Santo Emiliano and then down to Mieres where we could finish, but there’s a 23km loop appended here that gives us a couple more climbs. There are a lot of lesser-known climbs out of Mieres, but we are taking one which is long-forgotten, the Alto de Cueña. This is occasionally seen in traceur plans, but usually as part of the Alto de La Cabaña or the Alto de Rozomayor; it however was used as an MTF in the Vuelta a los Valles Mineros back in 1972. 39x28 has a whole history along with a gallery. The 2021 Vuelta a Asturias also used this climb, from another side, and we descend through this side which gets pretty steep but as the gallery shows, is perfectly open and ridable. The climb is 3,5km at 9,9%, with the steepest part right at the bottom, ramping straight up to 17%, and cresting 18,1km from the line. After a short flat stretch, we then hit our final climb, the Alto de Couxial.

This one is slightly shorter than the preceding two, and only just over 9%, much more consistent than the previous two, but the climb is still steep enough for sure to allow for potential gaps to be created. I can’t see that this climb has ever been seen in racing, which seems odd as it is so well-located to be close to many other ascents, but the fact Mieres hasn’t hosted a pro race since the end of the Vuelta a los Valles Mineros in the 90s is probably the main reason for that. With 38.000 inhabitants it’s a fairly sizeable town, but it used to house nearly twice that figure during its mining heyday. It hasn’t hosted the Vuelta since 1963, and it hosted the national championships in 1974, but apart from that it’s been only the the one race that has come into town. It’s time for that to change. The climb crests just 6,4km from the line, and most of that is the descent, five of which are this profile before a short flat run into the finish in the town, nestled in the valleys.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Stage 13: León - Valladolid, 160km

The third stage without a single categorised climb to define it, the Friday stage leading in to the penultimate weekend is a relatively short transitional one along the meseta, after a transfer up and over Pajáres and to León, the capital of the eponymous historic province. It’s a common host for transitional stages over the years, or also mountain stages descending down into Asturias, although it hasn’t been seen in the real life race since 2006. For a long time though, especially in the late 70s and early 80s when it was almost annual, it was a regular host. With around 200.000 people, it’s one of the largest cities in Castilla y León, and traces its history back to a Roman encampment, and, following the Reconquista, one of the most important kingdoms of medieval Spain. In recent times its importance has waned and its regional language is regarded as critically endangered, but it is the hometown of former Spanish Prime Minister José Luís Rodríguez Zapatero.

This is a fairly featureless stage that simply traverses the meseta, but travelling in a southeasterly direction - this does mean that the chances for crosswinds are increased as there are frequent southwesterly winds in this region. The stage passes through a couple of notable towns - Medina de Rioseco, which was once despite its small size a global hub for the trading of silver brought from the New World by colonists and conquistadores, as well as later being the setting for a major battle in the Peninsular War, where the Spaniards suffered a heavy defeat at the hands of the French, and Mayorga, the birthplace of 16th Century cleric San Toribio Alfonso de Mogrovejo. Before long, however, we will be in Valladolid, our finishing city, for 1,75 laps of a 14km circuit which is inspired by, but not matching, that from the women’s GP Ciudad de Valladolid, part of the old World Cup, a precursor to the World Tour. This race was a re-imagining of the earlier (2002-2006) GP Castilla y León, and which held just two editions in 2010 and 2011, with Charlotte Becker and Marianne Vos the winners. Its timing, however, was very poor; coming directly after Operación Puerto when sponsors were withdrawing from Spanish cycling, after Joane Somarriba retired and Maribel Moreno tested positive for doping removing the two top Spanish talents from the available talent, and the financial crisis made race organisation difficult. It was a perfect storm of negative factors.

The Vuelta would come into town the following year, but then it would be off the menu until recently; it has hosted two ITTs in the last three editions of the race, however, with Fillippo Gonna winning both. Even the Vuelta a Castilla y León hasn’t been back since 2013, although that having gone from being a very strong 2.1 to a very precarious race that alternates one-day and stage race editions probably precludes closing down part of a large city. There is the possibility that it might play a more significant role in the near future, however, if local boy Iván Romeo continues his rise. It is a fair way from major hills and mountains, so stages here are almost always going to be transitional, but there’s always a need for that type of stage somewhere in a Grand Tour. The circuit includes a 700m at 7% repecho, but it isn’t going to be enough to stop the sprint unless the bunch absolutely drops the ball.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Stage 14: Medina de Rioseco - Bola del Mundo, 189km

GPM:
Alto del León (cat.3) 5,7km @ 4,9%
Puerto de Navacerrada (cat.1) 18,4km @ 5,3%
Fuente de la Reina (cat.3) 4,2km @ 7,5%
Bola del Mundo (cat.ESP) 10,8km @ 8,8%

The penultimate weekend starts in perhaps somewhat surprising manner; a mountaintop finish is probably not unexpected, but Bola del Mundo on stage 14 is unusual, seeing as the Vuelta has historically only used that climb on the penultimate day due to its proximity to Madrid. The stage starts in Medina del Campo, a former Berber settlement that became a major walled city and free trade hub in Castile. Its trade fairs in the 15th and 16th Century brought it prestige, and the Treaty of Medina del Campo in 1489 indirectly led to the creation of the Church of England, as this was the treaty that led to Princess Catherine of Aragon being bequeathed to the son of English king Henry VII. It has only hosted two stages of the Vuelta, an ITT in 1989 won in the leader’s jersey by Pedro Delgado, and a stage start in 2015 in an intermediate stage to Ávila via Paramera, won from the break by Alexis Gougeard.

Rather like stages 7 and 12, the first part of the stage is very flat, and then business picks up in the second half of the stage. The first 100km of the stage are on the meseta, with very little by way of challenging terrain, heading through towns like Arévalo, best known for the works of “El Mancebo de Arévalo”, or the “Young man of Arévalo”, a Morisco crypto-Muslim whose true identity is unknown, but who travelled around Spain in the 16th Century, meeting various secretive Muslim communities during the forced conversions (everywhere but the coastal lands he was forbidden from) and was the most prolific writer on Islam in post-Reconquista Spain, as well as one of our foremost sources of Aljamiado manuscripts, an adaptation of medieval Spanish as spoken by the Morisco community and written with the Arabic alphabet - similar to Judezmo in Hebrew alphabet, or the Arebica script in the Balkans.

After the first 100km, the road starts to turn uphill for the first time. I have elected this time around not to categorise the ascent in Los Ángeles de San Rafael, but in all honesty it’s probably actually harder than the first climb I have categorised. It has largely been cat.3 when climbed in the Vuelta, but is sometimes uncategorised. It was uncategorised this year, but that was from the other side which is easier (and was categorised in 2002, 3 and 4 anyway), The side we’re using was last seen in 2005, when it was cat.3, and in 1997, when José María Jiménez won a stage finish there. It is followed by the easy side of possibly the most common climb ever in the Vuelta, the Alto del León / Puerto de Guadarrama.

After this, we descend down into the Comunidad de Madrid, toward Collado Villalba and then Becerril de la Sierra, where we start the climb up to the legendary Puerto de Navacerrada. This is a little over 18km at 5,3% on average, but the last 11km or so are at just over 6% - a reasonable cat.1 ascent, but one which has ascended to myth in the Vuelta simply due to the proximity to Madrid making it the core of most years’ denouements through the Unipublic era, at least until they started doing long transfers and non-Madrid finishes in the 2010s. You all know this one by now, it’s nothing new.

There’s 39,8km remaining at the summit of Navacerrada, and we then descend the north face of the climb, on the Segovia side. Much like we did in my 4th Vuelta many years ago, however, rather than continuing on to La Granja de San Ildefonso like 2009 or Destilerías DYC like in so many classic 80s and early 90s mountain stages, we hang a left at the Fuente la Cantina parking area and head onto some forest roads enabling us to incorporate a little-known (other than traceurs, who have come up with a few ideas incorporating it) ascent to Fuente de la Reina. This is a tricky, steepening ascent which is somewhere between a stingy cat.3 and a generous cat.2. I’ve included it twice in previous Vuelta routes, giving it a cat.2 in a road stage in Vuelta #4 and cat.3 in an ITT in Vuelta #6. In the years since I posted that the Vuelta has become a little stingier with GPMs (although still somewhat over-generous and unpredictable where rampas inhumanas are involved, with things like Cumbre del Sol and Les Praeres being over-categorised for sure, while things like Mirador del Fito, La Colladiella and El Cordal get cat.1 just for historical purposes I swear) so I’ve gone with cat.3 this time. Nevertheless that last couple of kilometres average over 10% and end at 28km from the line, before which we have a narrow road with a slight downhill false flat for a few kilometres before a short, sharp descent into Valsaín. The only part that might need work is right at the very summit and not on descent, so it should be ridable already as it is, if not then it’s only a very small amount of work needed to get it up to scratch.

You will see that it is at the 57 minute mark that we see the only potentially difficult part

This descent takes us to La Pradera del Navalhorno, from whence we start to climb once more, taking the opposite side of Navacerrada, and in this we therefore ascend a side of Bola del Mundo that has never been raced before, since every stage so far has climbed Navacerrada south en route to Bola del Mundo, which we are now reversing. When we get to the junction for Fuente de la Reina it will have been 21,7km since we left the descent, so there shouldn’t be any problem of riders coming the other way. The Vuelta has had many years of climbing the same climbs from multiple sides in the Sierra de Guadarrama, often with tighter loops than this - I mean, the loops used in the three Bola del Mundo summits so far have been of a similar length without a climb in the middle, so this should be fine. Frustratingly, because there hasn’t been a climb of Bola del Mundo from the north before, finding a detailed profile is tough, and this one from Alejandro San Vicente is the only one I’ve been able to locate:

I decided to trim down the categorised part to the part where the ramps really start, near where we turned to Fuente de la Reina, which makes the climb just under 11km at just under 9%. This consists of 7km at 7,5% up to Navacerrada (another climb given cat.1 for historical reasons) and then, of course, the 3,2km @ 12,1% extension on the torrid hormigón of Bola del Mundo. There had been talk of introducing the climb for a while before it was finally unveiled, and publicity shots showing Alberto Contador and his training buddy Jesús Hernández investigating the climb long preceded its introduction to La Vuelta. The original stage there was iconic, but in reality not super special; the fear of the final 3km meant that Ezequiel Mosquera didn’t dare attack Vincenzo Nibali until the concrete began, and while he did throw everything he had at the Italian and come up short, nobody else was close enough to make any move of consequence. Likewise in 2012, it was a good stage but not a spectacular one, and the fact it was won from the break took a bit of lustre off - and then the climb had a surprisingly long lay-off considering it is right on the doorstep of Madrid, perfectly placed for a stage 20 MTF, and it has Guillén’s beloved rampas inhumanas. It has never failed to deliver at least some spectacle, due to the difficulty meaning gaps are pretty much inevitable; it just has yet to deliver complete fireworks and I think the fact the final 3km are so much harder than the rest, and that it has only ever come on stage 20, plays into that - you’re never going to get something like Finestre 2005 or 2025 on a stage where the last 3km are the only truly brutal ones, so moving the stage earlier in the race is my solution. I’ve had this route up my sleeve for quite a while, some time before the 2025 Vuelta was announced, let alone completed, but even so - I still have the opportunity to use the ‘classic’ side (as much as an ascent used three times can be considered so) in a future Vuelta, but this should be a good penultimate weekend stage, as riders can’t hide and conserve energy on the concrete slopes, and the climbing on the Sunday is a whole different kind for a whole different type of rider. There might not be more than 20-30 minutes of action here even if I’ve tried to incentivise a bit more, but at least there is more or less a guarantee of it, even if it is only that length of time.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Stage 15: El Tiemblo - Arenas de San Pedro, 207km

GPM:
Puerto de Mijáres (cat.1) 22,0km @ 5,1%
Alto de La Erilla (cat.2) 17,6km @ 4,3%
Puerto de Serranillos (cat.2) 9,9km @ 4,4%
Alto de La Centenera (cat.1) 15,8km @ 5,3%

Yes, while stage 14 was all about the steep stuff, stage 15 is all about long, drawn out tempo climbs as we head into the Sierra de Gredos and utilise a bit of innovation mixed in with some Vuelta classics. This area has commonly been part of mid-final-week transitional stages, sometimes for the breakaway and sometimes featuring iconic, historic legacy rides like Bernard Hinault’s flight over Peña Negra and Serranillos in 1983, or Frank Vandenbroucke’s refusal to be denied victory in Ávila over Mijáres and Navalmoral in 1999. This range is pretty historic, but it has found it increasingly difficult to be particularly decisive in recent years, as the long and gradual climbs are becoming too easy to pull domestique ranks on and ride tempo with the concentration of so many talents into a few teams at the top who can pace these climbs with multiple riders remaining. That’s why we need it to come after legs are already tired, and copious enough in number / in a stage long enough for cumulative fatigue to set in, and that was my aim here. The stage starts in El Tiemblo, a town of around 5.000 which is known for the Iron Age Toros de Guisando sculptures, and which hosted the national championships back in 1970. In both 1996 and 1999 it hosted the start of a tough 46,5km ITT over the Puerto de Paramera (long but gradual) to Ávila, so it makes sense as a viable stage start.

We briefly traverse into Comunidad de Madrid, but we’re soon back in Castilla y León, with an even briefer diversion into Castilla-La Mancha, due to the odd boundary of Ávila province snaking around just south of the Sierra de Gredos and the CL-501 crossing these provincial borders frequently. Shortly before the start of the first climb of the day, however, we step back into Ávila province for good. The first climb is a Vuelta classic, the long (over 20km) but gradual and almost metronomically consistent Puerto de Mijáres. This one won’t see massive action, over 100km from the finish, but it’s as Vuelta as it gets - long and sinuous winding… the vegetation, the skies… the dark, dark grey of the pristine tarmac, the searing heat and the tempo grinding. This is what old Vueltas were about. And yet… it’s really not as old as it seems, first being introduced in 1994 and only appearing seven times - it seems more common because it went through a phase in the late 2000s of appearing every other year, and also because it appended so well to the classic Ávila stage that it felt natural - it’s just that most historic Vuelta stages to Ávila were in fact coming from the west and so Serranillos was a more common ascent in the same role. Nevertheless, Mijáres since its introduction has felt like part of the furniture for a reason.

The descent from here into Burgohondo takes us directly to our next climb, the Alto de La Erilla via Los Agüilones. The latter is a popular traceur climb to be appended to a classic Ávila stage to offer a different type of climbing, somewhat more steep, than the straightforward Mijáres-Navalmoral duo, but it does offer this as an extension. Agüilones (profile here) was introduced to the Vuelta in 2019, under the name of the Alto del Navatalgordo, as an early-stage climb in the Plataforma de Gredos stage at the end of the race - but that stage also shows how the route from there to Hoyocasero is about 15km of flat-to-false flat. There is an alternative to its north that passes over a higher summit, known as the Alto de La Erilla (not to be confused with the nearby Las Erillas, that is west of Navalsauz), or less commonly, Alto de Nubecillo, adding much more climbing with just 2km of additional distance. This is the standard highway route, but appending the steeper first few kilometres of Agüilones, we get this profile. It might just about scrape a cat.1, but I’ve played safe with cat.2 given how far from the finish it is. The descent is occasionally steep but perfectly fine.

We then hang a left in Hoyocasero to descend back toward the base of Agüilones, stopping short however in Navarrevisca to turn right and climb the easier northern side of the Puerto de Serranillos, a climb I included in my very first Vuelta design but haven’t touched since (other than from this side in my Memorial José María Jiménez one-day mountain race). That amounts to the last 10km of this profile - a straightforward cat.2 that crests 72km from home and is our penultimate climb of the day to give points, but not our penultimate or even antepenultimate climb overall. And the next 25km are a long and fast descent at a steady 5% to bring us towards the endgame.

More classic Vuelta content

At 50k to go we enter a circuit around Arenas de San Pedro, our stage host. To get there, we need to go over the Alto de La Parra, which crests at 45,9km from the line the first time and 4,3km from the line the second - it’s 2,9km @ 6,1%, so I’ve left it uncategorised, but it could be given cat.3 if you were feeling less stingy than me. After crossing through Arenas the first time, we have 41,6km remaining, and the main part of that is a loop up and down the Puerto de La Centenera, a long-time Wishlist item for traceurs that made its Vuelta debut as the first climb of the day in the 2021 El Barraco stage. In fact it bears a bit of a resemblance to my Memorial Chava Jiménez race, which featured the same combo of La Centenera, Pedro Bernardo and Mijáres. Like many of the Sierra de Gredos climbs it has a relatively meagre average gradient, but it does have the benefit of the second half of the climb at least having some double digit gradients - and the last 6,5km average 7% - so there is the opportunity to make some separation given we’ve been grinding up- and downhill all day.

This climb crests at 25,4km from the line, and the majority of the rest of this is a long descent that just takes us back to the base of La Parra, so we have multiple platforms to work from. Apart from the start of the Gredos stage in the 2019 Vuelta, it isn’t really known to pro races, but as with nearly 7.000 inhabitants it is the largest town actively within the mountain range, it has been popular with traceurs. With its gothic castle now a national heritage monument, and in the relatively unique position as a city south of the Sistema Central but still in Castilla y León (and in the often Vuelta-supportive province of Ávila), it could potentially be an area of exploration for Unipublic.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Stage 16: Talavera de la Reina - Molinos de Consuegra, 197km

GPM:
Alto Risco de las Paradas (cat.3) 9,1km @ 4,3%
Puerto del Robledillo (cat.3) 9,5km @ 4,7%

After the second rest day we are back underway in the famous pottery town of Talavera, as we’re travelling through Castilla-La Mancha in a transitional stage that is intended kind of for the more resilient sprinters; this is a stage that gives the options for baroudeurs in case the péloton doesn’t feel up to the chase on this, but if it does, then this is one more for the Mads Pedersen types than the 2025 equivalent of, like, Andrea Guardini or Ivan Quaranta.

I wrote about Talavera before, so I’ll quote myself rather than rewrite it all.

The stage begins in Talavera de la Reina, a historic city fabled for its pottery which was renamed Talavera del Tajo under Franco before its royal name was restored. Its most famous son in the modern péloton is veteran climber David Arroyo, winner of a Vuelta stage and of course the man who nearly stole that Giro. I'll link you to the legendary Mortirolo stage - part 1 is here, from which you can link to the other parts - because let's face it, you can't watch that stage enough. Arroyo's descent of the Mortirolo and subsequent heartbreak on Aprica is one of the most compelling and breathtaking stories the sport has given us in recent years. Anyway, this won't be a stage for him.

Talavera has featured in a few recent Vueltas, typically as a transitional city on the way from the Sierra Nevada to the finishing stages around the Sierra de Madrid in week 3; in both 2007 and 2009 it hosted the finish of a flat stage from Ciudad Real (so the reverse of today's stage). The 2007 stage was in fact almost identical to this one run backwards and was won in the sprint by Daniele Bennati, whereas 2009's was longer and due to a miscalculation Anthony Roux just held off the bunch by a bike length from the charging Greipel in a fantastic finish. Both years saw the city serve as the départ for the following day's stage to Ávila (won by José Luís Pérez and Philip Deignan respectively); in addition, a further sprint stage from Almadén followed in 2011, and was won by Marcel Kittel while the following stage was the exciting and beautifully designed San Lorenzo de El Escorial stage won by Purito. The city also hosted the national road race in 2008, which was won by Alejandro Valverde in a two up sprint against Óscar Sevilla after Caisse d'Épargne did a number on Babyface, sparing us the potential horror that would have been a Rock Racing Spanish National champion's outfit!

The stage starts in very familiar fashion - going between these cities in La Mancha and using the Risco de las Paradas climb is pretty standard fare for these transitional stages between ranges south of Madrid - but where typically you would see the route continue to head southeast toward Ciudad Real, instead here we start to alternate our sides of this low range, so we will throw in a second climb, the Puerto del Robledillo, which is another of the bigger climbs of the area around Toledo and Talavera. These climbs can’t really be used in more dramatic fashion due to the lack of sizable towns nearby, and indeed here we are no fewer than 95km from the finish.

Perhaps of more interest to those riders hoping to foil the sprinters will be the uncategorised Puerto de Marjaliza, the stats of which do not look to be particularly threatening, but the fact the last 1500m average over 8% make this a lot more feasible as a platform to attack from. This is 38km from home, we could have put a finish at Los Yébenes which is less than 10km from here, but the role of this stage is to be more or less a flat stage; and after we pass through Los Yébenes, most of the last 40km of this stage are absolutely straight as an arrow, and side-on to the prevailing wind to encourage potential echelon action.

After this, we get to our finishing town of Consuegra, which with over 10.000 inhabitants is one of the bigger cities in the area. For many centuries its main claim to fame was an 11th Century battle where Diego, son of El Cid, was killed, until in 1976 when it hit headlines as the only municipality to see the majority vote against Ley 1/1977, the reforms that restored democracy and constitutional monarchy at the end of the Franco regime - and even this was protested by locals accusing the town’s leadership of electoral fraud. It has earned some surprising popularity as a tourist destination in recent decades despite being way away from most touristic paths, partly for its reconstructed Islamic-era fortress, the Castillo de La Muela, and also for its perfectly preserved windmills, which have become an icon of La Mancha, preserved to a wider audience beyond Spain’s borders due to their famous usage by Cervantes in Don Quixote and the Consuegra windmills in particular have now been enshrined as national cultural monuments.

Molinos de Consuegra with El Castillo de la Muela in the background

As you can see, both of these cultural landmarks are on a small hill which serves as the Hausberg of Consuegra, and so this gives us a slightly uphill finish to the stage. In fact, it’s a legitimate climb, 1750m averaging 6,2%. However, with no gradients averaging double figures, a significant easing in the last 750m, and that this is a pretty easy stage until that point, with few technical turns or opportunities to get out of sight in that final climb, I don’t see this as being one where the puncheurs will distance the field. They may become favourites in the final sprint, but they shouldn’t be opening up significant time gaps.

I see this one as being similar to finishes like Cap Fisterra in the 2013 Vuelta (60+ riders coming to the finish either at +st or +6” due to a gap being left), the Lyon climb used in the 2011 Dauphiné (15 riders at +st and 70 more at +7”), Mont-des-Alouettes from the 2011 Tour (Gilbert and Evans gaining a few seconds, then 70+ riders at +6”, but that was also impacted heavily by crashes admittedly), or maybe the Côte de Cadoudal in Plumelec, but not when in the circuit from the GP Morbihan or the GP Plumelec, more like in the 2008 Tour (Valverde won by a second, then 12 riders at +1” and a whole bunch more at +7” again due to a gap being left). It’s not a climb that will open up significant gaps - but bearing in mind we have been potentially riding up to 40k of crosswind before it, the possibilities are at least there.

Last 100m or so kicking back up

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Stage 17: Valdepeñas - El Yelmo-Sierra de Cazorla, 238km

GPM:
Collado de los Yesos (cat.2) 9,5km @ 5,3%
Puerto de Onsares (cat.3) 5,1km @ 5,2%
Puerto del Navalperal (cat.1) 14,8km @ 4,3%
Alto del Campillo (cat.1) 12,0km @ 6,3%
El Yelmo-Sierra de Cazorla (cat.ESP) 15,7km @ 6,7%

This is a very unconventional “etapa reina” for the Vuelta, a UCI-baiting length almost hitting the maximum allowed for a stage and including a series of climbs, not a single one of which has ever been used by the Vuelta before - and have only recently been discovered by the Ruta del Sol. Annoyingly for originality, this stage is older than the usage of the region by the local short stage race but real life has pre-empted me, however simultaneously seeing real life races going out and discovering what they have at their disposal is something we ought never be unhappy about.

Home to 30.000 people, Valdepeñas is one of the main cities of the Campo de Calatrava region and located just around the corner from the pre-Roman Iberian settlement known locally as “Cerro de las Cabezas”. Its main claim to fame is through the Napoleonic Wars, when a number of guerrilleros (and, in Juana Galán, a notable guerrillera) originated in the city. However, it has entered into something of a decline after the Civil War and is heavily dependent on viticulture. Helpfully, wineries and wine regions have a decent history of hosting races, so I think this will be a more than viable stage host.

This is a very long stage, and goes through an unusual part of the country for a queen stage. In that respect I was somewhat inspired by the similar 2009 Giro queen stage to Monte Petrano, with a touch of the 2010 Vuelta Cotobello stage with a sequence of partially connected but relatively distant-from-one-another cat.1 climbs and no true monsters but fatigue and endurance being a major factor.

The first 65km of the stage are pretty much totally flat as we head eastwards before turning south out of Castilla-La Mancha and into Andalucía as the road turns slightly downhill until we reach Puente de Genave, where we hang a left and head into the Sierra de Cazorla, which we will snake around for the remainder of the stage. From here we could go straight to the sequence of the last three climbs, and this wouldn’t be an unreasonable stage in and of itself; it would trim 43km off the distance taking us below 200km and excise the first two ascents, but instead we have a little lollipop-shaped loop that enables us to add in the cat.2 Collado de los Yesos (seemingly relatively gradual, but last 6,5km at 7%) and then the cat.3 Puerto Onsares (from the junction for Bienservida at the 2km mark) - neither are particularly tough, they appear steeper on the profile because it’s such a long stage. Both climbs were used - the latter as the finish in fact - in the 2021 Ruta del Sol in a stage won by Miguel Ángel López, and again in a well-designed 2023 stage - although they were early in the stage and it is worth noting that that stage climbed a different, easier side of los Yesos.

We return back through Torres de Albánchez to rejoin our earlier route, including the first false flat but bypassing the second uncategorised climb in that profile, to take on the Puerto del Navalperal. This was climbed (again using an unconventional name) from the opposite, easier side in the 2021 stage, and from the same side as us in the 2023 one. This climb is a lot like El Purche, being a bit of flat, a steep stretch, and then a flat and slight uphill to a secondary final summit that means the true gradients are hidden somewhat. The first summit - which is a reasonable place to put the GPM in all honesty - is called the Alto del Tambor, and this climb would be 10,3km @ 5,8%, but once you excise the first 2km of false flat, it’s 8,3km @ 6,7% - but opens up with a little over 2km at 9%. It’s a borderline cat.1/cat.2, but as I overcategorised a couple of cat.2s earlier in the race, I’ll follow suit. I mean, the real Vuelta gives cat.1 to climbs like Cordal, La Colladiella and even La Collaona at times. There’s still 73km remaining at the summit, so it’s not going to be the most active climb ever, but it should start some attrition at least.

La Cumbre de Navalperal

After the long descent into Cortijos Nuevos, it’s time for us to employ a not uncommon device in cycling: that of a climb where we go part of the way up one side, then descend another adjoining part before climbing all the way up via that same side. It is most often used when there is one climb with a dead end at the summit but with multiple routes that converge at a pass beneath the summit. Possibly the best example of this in top level cycling would be Passo Lanciano being used before Blockhaus (it doesn’t have to be done this way as Lanciano has many, many sides, but the Giro Donne stage in 2024 is a perfect example). It is also fairly well-known to Spanish racing, often with intermediate climbs between the two ascents of the same climb, such as traditional stages to Arrate with Ixua, then San Miguel, then Usartza; the 2008 Vuelta Andorra stage with the La Rabassa pass before going all the way up to the ski station; or the old (pre-Picón Blanco) Vuelta a Burgos stages to Lagunas de Neila, climbing over Puerto del Collado to Pasil de Rozavientos from the north, then descending into Quintanar and doing it all again but going to the summit the second time. I’ve used this device a couple of times myself - Cuchu Puercu preceding Cobertoria, Collado Bermejo preceding the EVA13 summit - and there are other climbs where it would be possible (Col de Trabaou before Luz Ardiden, or Venta Luisa before Cálar Alto, for example; Sierra Nevada is a favourite for this too); often in ranges with high amounts of choice it is not necessary but here it is our best way to generate some severe climbing chained together as we climb the mighty summit that towers over this part of the Sierra de Cazorla, El Yelmo.

The highest paved road in this mountain range, the road up to El Yelmo is a borderline cat.1/HC ascent. The Coeficiente APM suggests it should just about shade it (the PRC guys like to use 240 as the cutoff, I think that’s a little low personally, and prefer to use more around 270-275 or so as a guide, though the Coeficiente APM can only be a guide as it has no means by which to adjust for surface or altitude and focuses more specifically on gradient), I’ve awarded it for the second pass but for the first, when we stop off at the Alto del Campillo, that is just a cat.1. 12km at a little over 6% makes it something akin to the Passo Tonale, and the extension from the pass to the summit, after an initial false flat kilometre, jumps up past 9% for the final 3km - tough enough to be a challenge, but easy enough that it doesn’t necessarily make the climb one like Bola del Mundo or Cuitu Negru, where the extension to the summit renders the climb before that irrelevant due to riders not daring to push on there due to the fear of the gradients to come. There’s also a pretty useful kilometre at 9,5% early on that will hopefully help out in encouraging action.

The first time we crest Campillo, 37km remain, and then we have a 20km or so sinuous, twisty descent which resembles all but the last 3,6km of this profile. A final intermediate sprint in Cortijos Nuevos again, and then we are on our way to the summit. This may still be a race which comes down to a final climb shootout, and the following stage is a significant part of that - but that’s why it’s nearly 240km of multi-climb attrition, patterned after that Monte Petrano stage in the 2009 Giro. The GPM-hunters will have to work hard in the break, and the domestiques will hopefully be shed quickly as the race goes on. And then it’s a tough, tough grind to the line after riders already have 225km of pain in their legs.

APM members climbing El Yelmo

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Stage 18: Puebla de Don Fadrique - Sierra de Carrascoy, 178km

GPM:
Collado Bermejo (cat.1) 21,0km @ 4,6%
Sierra de Carrascoy (cat.ESP) 9,5km @ 9,1%

The final mountain stage of the race is a somewhat unusual and unexpected one, utilising Murcia of all places as the region to host it. And yea, I’m a little concerned its steepness may impact the racing the previous day so it runs a bit counter to my usual principles - which is why to compensate for that, I made the previous stage almost 240km in duration to encourage fatigue.

Puebla de Don Fadrique is a small town on the southern edge of the Sierra de Cazorla which has some nearby pre-Roman remains as its main attraction, as well as the La Sagra observatory. Its main claim to fame is as the hometown of the priest Fortunato Arias, executed by the the Republican army during the Guerra Civíl and beatified by Pope Benedict XVI. It has only hosted one race, a stage start in the 2015 Vuelta most famous for Peter Sagan being inexplicably and inexcusably hit by a race vehicle, then taking out his frustrations by spitting at the medical car, because… reasons. The first part of the stage is similar to that one, a long and gradual drop in altitude without ever really being what you’d call a descent, except for a short stretch from Vélez-Blanco to Vélez-Rubio. We are heading somewhat further south than they did that day, however; the real race approached Murcia from the north via Caravaca de la Cruz, whereas I wanted to get down onto the plateau sooner so that we can step up into the Sierra de Espuña.

After an intermediate sprint in Lorca, we head for perhaps the one famous significant climb in the Murcia province, the Collado Bermejo. I’ve used this before, but almost always from Alhama de Murcia. In my 7th Vuelta, the one that started in Melilla, it included an early MTF climbing over the Collado once, and then looping around and going all the way up to Morrón de Espuña. The Totana side is often broken up into two parts by Unipublic, but I’m doing it all as one categorised climb; this side also has a longer flat stretch, but it’s closer to the start so there is a longer sustained climb from the last respite to the summit. The climb has only been seen twice in the Vuelta, in 2009 and 2017, but it is a regular in the Vuelta a Murcia, both the old stage race and the current one-day version.

The climb crests 43km from the finish, but it’s not likely to see too much action given the characteristics of the final climb. This is, however, a completely different type of climb from the final one. I’ve put some bonus seconds at the sprint in Alhama de Murcia to try to tempt some earlier moves, but I still don’t expect any. Realistically, this stage is all about the final climb, which is an as-yet-unseen-in-racing beast of a climb up to the Sierra de Carrascoy.

Pictures from ziklo.es

This one is unholy. Absolutely unholy. And, bizarrely, actually pretty consistent - it has some horrific average gradients, but seldom gets that much above the averages of each stretch. The good news is… those average gradients are steep enough that it’s absolutely going to create time gaps. The first 6km of the climb average 11,9%; the fifth and sixth kilometres average 13,5% between them. Ultimately, the 7,5km from the base of the ascent to the Alto de los Filos are 7,5km at 11% (which puts it in the same kind of ballpark as the hardest side of Acebo, and more severe than things like Los Machucos), after which we have that classic Vuelta-ism that you’ll be familiar with from Angliru, Arrate, Xorret del Catí, Pla de Beret, Lagos de Covadonga and others… the flattening out before the finish. There’s a slight downhill lip and a flat kilometre, but then we have 600m at 8% to finish up as a final ramp to the line.

Now for the bad news: this one needs a lick of tarmac. Like, more than a bit. I’ve shown climbs before that have seen their road qualities decaying to the point where there would need to be work undertaken to make them passable, and this one is the same. This is probably the reason the Vuelta hasn’t come here, in all honesty, as this would otherwise be absolutely perfect for Javier Guillén. After all, those other examples that I gave - the Alto de Abantos and the Alto de Redondal - were at least known from previous racing, whereas this is a hidden gem. At the moment, it’s fully paved, but some sections are considered to be so degraded that they aren’t really suitable for a pure road bike. But if there was a will, you know there would be a way, because, well, just look at those gradients. Murcia may be a little light on the elite talent at the moment, seeing as its time at the forefront of Spanish cycling, as the home region of Alejandro Valverde, Luís León Sánchez, José Joaquín Rojas and Fran Pérez, somewhat eroded; at present its biggest names would be Rubén Fernández, a former winner of the Tour de l’Avenir who has never quite lived up to that apparent potential, and veteran baroudeur António Soto. Valverde obviously has his team that he is using to try to hunt down talent in the region, but maybe we’ll need a specialist climber from Murcia to emerge and we’ll see this one paved. A lot of pure goat tracks in Spain have been paved for the specific purpose of bringing racing in… and you just know Guillén would want to use this one.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Stage 19: Murcia - Chinchilla de Montearagón, 163km

GPM:
Puerto de Ricote (cat.3) 5,5km @ 5,7%

As we head toward the end of the race, we’re jumping back up onto the meseta from the south, setting off from the city of Murcia, a common host of the race and capital of the eponymous region. I’ve used Murcia a number of times in the past, and paid some homage to its history in the Vuelta as well, such as in this old stage from 2016:

After a nice rest day, the riders are ready to set off from where they finished last, in the seventh largest city in the country, Murcia, capital of its own autonomous community. It has a long and storied history in the Vuelta a España, as it was one of the hosts of the very first Vuelta, back in 1935, when Salvador Cardona, the first Spaniard to win a stage of the Tour de France (a 360km multi-mountain odyssey from Bayonne to Luchon in 1929, thus beginning a tradition lasting some sixty years of light Spanish riders focusing all of their energies on being strongest in the mountain stages), took a 260km stage from Valencia into the city. Délio Rodríguez won the subsequent stages in 1941 and 1942, his brother Emilio took the stage into the city in 1947, as well as being a key part in the GC wins of Bernardo Ruíz and António Suárez. Nowadays it's best known, of course, as the hometown of one of cycling's most successful and divisive figures of the modern era, a man who goes by many names - El Imbatido, Bala Verde, Don Alejandro, Piti, Ally Vally, call him what you like, nobody can doubt that Alejandro Valverde is one of the most prominent riders of the last 15 years, and is still going strong now at 36.

With over half a million in the extended urban area, Murcia is the 7th largest city in Spain, but often one that most overseas would overlook when remembering or considering the country’s iconic cities. It dates itself back to the Emirate of Cordoba and its name is derived from that given to it by the Islamic leaders, although the name is still assumed to be Latin in origin. It was also one of the longer-lasting strongholds of Islam in Spain, with the Almohades capturing and holding the city and even after Castile made the region a protectorate and encouraged Christian migration to the city to ensure its loyalty, it endured a number of Islamic-led uprisings and incursions from the neighbouring Muslim-ruled Granada kingdom.

The early part of the stage is the only part with a categorised climb in it, the cat.3 Puerto de Ricote, and an intermediate sprint in Cieza, which bearing in mind it’s the hometown of José Joaquín Rojas, should probably give maximum points to the rider finishing 4th. Then it’s about 80 kilometres of slowly, slowly climbing up from the coastal plains to the higher plateau of La Mancha once more. In previous routes - and in the real life race - the typical destination of this kind of stage is Albacete, but that would be too predictable. Instead, this time, I’ve detoured off the main road a little way south of Albacete to a smaller city, Chinchilla de Montearagón, which at one point, for eleven years in the 19th Century, was somewhat bizarrely the provincial capital over its much larger neighbour. Nowadays it lives on primarily as a commuter town for said neighbour, but it is known for its scenic castle. It’s about as stereotypical a fortified hilltop town as you can find.

For the sake of a safe sprint, the stage finish is actually slightly before the town, on a straight, wide flat area within the urban area but beneath the old town, on the Avenida de Levante. We cross the line with 20,2km remaining and have two laps of a 10,1km circuit around the town which has no categorised climbs but some bumpy terrain and even some cobbles. The stretch up to the finishing line is 2,6km at 3,4% so this is one for the more powerful sprinter; after a sweeping 180º left we continue to ascend for another 400m before a short descent as we head to the northwest of the city, before we take a sharp left and climb up into the old town. It’s still hardly threatening - about a kilometre at just over 5% and not the steepest or most technical route we could take, but I didn’t want it to be - with the summit at Plaza La Mancha. We then sweep down out of town and take a trapezium-shaped loop to the southeast of the town with very few corners to allow the sprinters to come back into it if they so wish. This will take up the final 6,8km of the circuit.

I view this stage as being somewhat akin to a stage like the 2008 Segovia stage with its two laps of the city with the low gradient cobbled climb, although that stage was much tougher than this one in the initial lead-in, including Navacerrada and Navafría. The original design had an extra lap (though you then have to put up with the hideous 2006-7 era stage profiles with the x-axis based on projections of time taken rather than distance covered, which resulted in descents seeming super steep and climbs being flattened out compared to more standard profile formats; these were fixed and corrected to a much better style before the race took place) which perhaps even better reflects this - but rather than put the finish in the town, I have put it in place to better suit the sprinters.

Plaza La Mancha, at the top of the climb into Chinchilla de Montearagón

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Stage 20: Socuéllamos - Quintanar de la Orden, 43,2km (ITT)

No climbing today, as we’re going very old school and a style which used to be the default but has fallen way out of favour almost across the board among race designers: the final weekend and the final expected GC test being the race of truth, as man and machine team together to wage war on their common enemy: the clock. Yes, it’s a time trial, and it’s also an absolute power test, absolutely pan-flat and grinding through the countryside of La Mancha in a relative cycling backwater, a region that is occasionally passed through but seldom stopped in by pro racing.

Socuéllamos, Provincia de Ciudad Real, is a 13th Century city of 12.000 which is well known for wine production and has a long history of superstitious piety of the kind that anybody that has read Doña Perfecta will recognise. It has never hosted professional bike racing that I can find, but it is the hometown of veteran rider José Vicente Toribio, who rode for the Andalucía-Caja Sur team back in the early 2010s, most notably winning a Volta a Portugal stage, and was among the many riders who found themselves without a ride in the wake of the collapse of the Spanish cycling infrastructure in that era following the financial crisis. Turning 27 at the end of 2012 and unwilling to return to the amateur market, he became one of the first Spanish riders to turn to the Asia Tour, heading to Japan to race with Team Ukyo and then Matrix-Powertag, carving out a niche for himself - he remains active out there to this day, turning 40 later this year.

There’s not a great deal to be said about the course here - this is truly for the rodadores to maximise their gains and recover some of their losses against the lightweight specialist climbers. The main intermediate point is the city of Pedro Muñoz, a former abandoned town re-settled in the 16th Century that has grown into an economic centre for this part of La Mancha. Despite sharing its name with a prominent Spanish cyclist, it is more associated with a different prominent Spanish cyclist, this being José Luís Laguía, who spent most of the 1980s with Reynolds where he would win four Vuelta stages and a record five GPMs at the race, with a highest GC finish of 5th, as well as winning the national championships, the Vuelta al País Vasco, the Vuelta a Burgos, and the Clásica a los Puertos. He would seldom race outside of Spain, and his heyday was in the early 80s; after this he would move around a bit, often reuniting with Pedro Delgado, before bouncing around in the early 90s until retirement in 1992.

We finish by returning to the Provincia de Toledo to finish in Quintanar de la Orden, a city of just over 11.000 inhabitants which has a rather chequered religious past; it is believed to have originally been settled by Mozarabs, but its name derives from the Order of Santiago. It also has one of the best attested crypto-Jewish communities following the expulsion of the Sephardim, with numerous cited sources in the late 16th Century; during this time there is also evidence of a sizeable Morisco population, making it a somewhat unexpected island melting pot in a sea of mostly pious Christian plains towns in the southern meseta.

Is this the most brutal time trial ever? Of course not, not even close. It’s not even that long, 43km is longer than is fairly typical nowadays but isn’t on a par with times of yore. This is a Vuelta design with less time trialling than some I’ve put in - just 62km - but that does feel more in tune with the vogue of cycling nowadays while maintaining at least some balance, considering the mountain stages haven’t been as brutal in this one as some I’ve designed in the past; even the queen stage is long but the climbing isn’t on a par with some of the Sierra Nevada beasts I’ve unleashed in the past, or the Canarian queen stages I’ve used a couple of times. I’ve tried however to then minimise the ‘nothing stages’, but as a result of the climbs not being as completely overpowered to time gaps as some stages and designs in the past, I think the short-to-mid ITT in Mallorca and then a longer pure power test - of the kind that while I say it’s not over-long, it is still atypically long for cycling in 2025 - to finish the GC battle is a good balance.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Stage 21: Madrid - Madrid, 81km

GPM:
Cerro de Garabitas (cat.3) 2,2km @ 3,3%

Yes, would you look at that, it’s a GPM in the last stage of the race! It’s not a flat parade stage! However… it probably is, if we’re 100% honest with ourselves. This is an incredibly short stage (just 81km, and even allowing for some of the celebratory parading that these final stages often entail, they should be done inside of two hours) that constitutes 10 laps of a short city centre circuit, and the “climb” here averages barely 3% and doesn’t really get much steeper than that either.

I have 39x28 to thank for the blurb on this stage, obviously while the webpage is more than a little dated in its design and some of the climbs mapped are beyond unusable for road cycling, it is one of the many sites which has been an indispensable resource for the traceur community over the years, especially in Spain, but when mapping this climb, they went into a bit of history and tradition, as it was the 500th climb to be published on the site.

Cerro de Garabitas is located in the heart of the Casa de Campo, the largest public park in Madrid, and which was once a royal hunting ground. Created in the 16th Century, it was opened as a public park in 1931, and in 2010 it was declared Bien de Interés Cultural by the officials of the Comunidad de Madrid. Five times the size of New York’s Central Park, it is one of the largest city centre green spaces in the world, includes an amusement park, a zoo, a teleférico connecting it to the Parque del Oeste, and Madrid Arena, which hosted the Madrid Open for a short period, and was part of Madrid’s failed bid to host the 2012 Olympics. It also hosted the time trial for the 2005 UCI Road World Championships in Madrid, a fact which created much amusement at the time owing to the park’s continued association with drugs and prostitution at the time; the World Championships and Olympic bids have contributed to cleaning up the Casa del Campo in this regard, and though the problem persists, the scale is a lot lower today than at its zenith.

But that 2005 Time Trial was not what I intended to refer to with my finishing the race here. I mean, that race was won by Mick Freaking Rogers, after all. Rather, it was an earlier race that I was aping - the 1963 and 1964 editions of the Vuelta a España. This was deep into the El Correo-El Pueblo Vasco era of the race, and the Vuelta at this time traditionally finished in Bilbao. For some reasons lost to time, however, for two years in the 1960s they relocated it to the capital, and in those two seasons, rather than the finish we may be familiar with today, they had an 87km circuit race in the Casa de Campo. 39x28 discusses the stages in their profile of the climb. The circuit looks to be more or less identical to mine yet 600m longer, which I assume is due to some reprofiling of the paths in the park. That link also includes some brief archival footage of the Vuelta back in the 60s! The only other time that the park has featured in the Vuelta was in 2004, when Madrid prepared for the 2005 World Championships by including a 28km ITT on the last stage that included a lap of the following year’s Worlds loop before climbing up the Cuesta de San Vicente to finish on the finish that we nowadays know from the sprint circuit. Because it was the final week of the 2004 Vuelta and he was setting Geiger counters into overdrive, Santiago Pérez won that time trial, but could not take the time he needed from Roberto Heras. We aren’t likely to have GC drama on the last stage here. We probably aren’t going to have drama at all. But at least the circuit has enough up and down that there is some platform to work with.

And that was my (12th) Vuelta. Still maintaining the no-repeated-mountaintops rule, we took in some areas that have been off-piste for me (the Balearic Islands have been unused since my second Vuelta over a decade ago; the Empordà region hasn’t been used at all; the Sierra de Cazorla has barely been dipped into) and we both innovated and resurrected long-forgotten features of the Vuelta, as well as dipping into the vaults of other races as well as still leaving plenty of options open for the future.