Caroline Barrett
Editorial assistant
I’ve done plenty of touring on motorcycles, including in the UK and on the Continent. But I haven’t been as far south or as high as the Sierra Nevada in Spain. The roads, scenery and weather make me look forward to the spring already.
FILTERING THROUGH THE traffic on the Granada ring road, I can tell Weeble’s wondering what on earth I’m playing at. When I look in my mirrors, he’s hanging back, body language practically one huge question mark: why on Earth are we here? Spain is, after all, packed with amazing riding and it’s perfectly possible to spend your time exploring the country without going near any big cities after leaving Málaga, Bilbao or Santander if you’ve flown in to pick up a hire bike or sailed across from Blighty.
Yet here we are, picking our way past commuters on the busy four-lane gyratory in rush hour. I spot the exit we need, put my indicator on and then wave my hand regally toward the horizon. Rising above the city and visible from the motorway are mountains. That’s what we’re doing here.
I have to confess that I’m an alpaholic – I’m addicted to riding up mountains. I may have started small (tried a bit of Snowdonia in sixth form, dabbled with the Peaks at university) but it wasn’t long before I was on the hard stuff — charging across Europe to get high. I was mainlining mountains from Austria in the east to Galicia in the west whenever I got the chance. The Alps, the Auvergne, the Dolomites, the Picos, the Pyrenees; if there was a chance of a hairpin and a 1-in-3, I was ready to give it a go.
The trouble, as any addict will tell you, is that after a while it becomes harder and harder to get really high. I began chasing numbers, deciding where to go based on altitude alone. Soon passes weren’t enough and I had to move on to dead-end roads, collecting Europe’s highest highways like a train-spotter collecting engine numbers — and always frustrated by the one I hadn’t seen. Especially as the one that kept getting away sat at the top of the list: the Veleta, the road to the summit of the Sierra Nevada in southern Spain, at more than 3000m.
If some of that sounds familiar — because mountain-fever is a common malady among touring riders, even those not suffering from full-blown alpaholism — there is good news. It’s easy to get out here to experience the big one. You can ride out from the north-coast ports and get back within a week (if you use a bit of motorway) or you can do the fly-ride thing
from Málaga. And it is worth the trip, even if, like Weeble, you question it as you pick your way round the Granada ring road.
True, as the A395 peels away from the city it’s nothing special to start with. Pretty straight, running alongside the Rio Genil at the foot of the mountains. But then it starts to climb — which is, after all, the point of the exercise. But it doesn’t do it subtly. Oh no. After a few miles of the kind of modest incline that wouldn’t trouble a pensioner on a pushbike, it suddenly wakes up and kicks, shooting upward in two steep, broad, endless hairpins that arc through deep cuttings carved into the mountainside.
Then as the road climbs, the view opens tantalisingly — just a glimpse out across a rumpled brown landscape — before the road dives into another cutting. There’s a little traffic snagged behind a lumbering lorry puffing up the slope. The road widens to offer a third ascending lane and four or five cars edge forward, moving over as Weeble and I hurry upwards.
The road keeps climbing, back to a single ascending lane, in broad swoops — the kind of turns you can imagine hammering through at a thoroughly, thrillingly naughty speed… if you’re not following a Guardia Civil traffic car. Which we are now. I shrug and see Weeble nodding in the mirrors: what can we do? But then he gestures with a wide-flung arm: look at the view. I put the indicator on and we pull in, letting the policeman carry on up the hill.
The view is spectacular. The sky is blamelessly blue, the road curving gently to the right with a vast panorama to the one side, rumpled grey-brown hills framing a deep blue lake (the Canales reservoir on the Rio Genil). Weeble grabs a camera and sets off to climb to a viewpoint above the road, while I do the first of many U-turns and head back down the hill, to get ready to ride past the camera, collecting our first picture of the day.
When Weeble’s finished working his magic, we move on. Literally onwards and upwards. The next stretch of road is balanced on the edge of the mountain, a low strip of Armco the only thing separating traffic from a huge drop and the view out to the distant hills. The corners are tighter and closer together — it’s fantastic riding.
So naturally we stop for another picture and this time, once Weeble returns from where he was crouching behind the Armco, he has a quizzical expression. “There was some textile kit behind the barrier,” he explains. “Clearly had been taken off someone with scissors.” Ah. Paramedics. That’s sobering. Better not get carried away,
then — we don’t want to get carried away…
I’ve been here before so know what to expect. We climb up past the petrol station (surely Spain’s most scenic Repsol) and a café — I ignore Weeble’s gesture. The road keeps climbing in broad sweeps as if painted onto the side of the mountain by a really understanding artist. There are fairly long straights linked by 90° turns, broad sweepers, even a fast kink that could almost have been a spare chicane left over from building one of Spain’s Motogp tracks…
Except there’s not a GP track in the world with views like this. I thought we could see for miles when we first stopped. Oh no – from up here it’s clear that was nothing. We’re now several hundred meters higher and the view stretches an unimaginable distance, a mind-boggling sea of sharp-ridged hills giving way to a distant white horizon of plains beneath a sky so achingly blue, it’s perfect.
There’s very little traffic now — two or three other bikes, one hardy cyclist, and a handful of cars spread out over the four or five-mile climb. Several cars are covered in disruptive-pattern wraps: prototypes of some sort, here for testing.
Just as the ski town of Sierra Nevada comes into view ahead, we turn left, tracking the A395 higher up the mountain. Eventually we rattle up to an area of small wooden cafés beside the road — flanked by no-entry signs (on my last visit I ignored them, to find a checkpoint with a manned barrier across the road around the next corner). This is as high as we can go.
We stop, order coffees, drink in the ludicrously expansive views and thin air and strike up a conversation with a guy from one of the car firms: they come here because they can set off from Motril on the Mediterranean and within three hours, go from sea-level to more than 2500m. We can see the summit of the mountain from here, topped by observatories — it’s only staff that are allowed to the very top. The lucky swine…
Refreshed and refuelled, we head down. After the first enormous anti-clockwise 270° corner we turn off onto the A4025 — the back road down the mountain. If the main A395 was quiet, this is deserted. True, it’s slightly narrower, the surface slightly bumpier and polished in places, but it’s still better than the average British B-road. And the views might just be the biggest we’ve seen so far. Better still, it’s a concentrated bust of mountainriding perfection with tight corners, sweeping corners, a cascade of hairpins through a stand of scrubby pines… everything you’d want from the best roads in the Alps, crammed into five miles before it rejoins the A395.
We stop for another coffee — my alpaholism driving me to drink. “Now I see what we’re doing here,” says Weeble. We’re not here to tick off the highest road (or the seventh highest, if you judge it by the bit you can ride). We’re here because it’s one of the finest mountain roads in Europe.
“It’s close to the perfect touring destination,” my notebook says – but I was high when I wrote that. More than 2500m high…
“One of the finest mountain roads in Europe”