Europe’s best road
The N-260 in the Spanish Pyrenees
A GREAT ROAD IS art writ large in tarmac and, as is all art, its merit is personal. You can measure a road’s length but you can’t measure its appeal. Your best might not be mine but we can agree both are pretty good. So when, just over a year ago, I sat staring at a map looking for a good route to get across the Pyrenees from west to east, one in particular sprang out — partly because it’s the same road number, which is convenient when it comes to describing the route and following road signs, and partly because it looked like it might do all the things you want a Pyrenean road to do — squiggle and meander, wobble and weave like a drunk signature for 340 miles along the Spanish side of the mountain range.
In reality, it’s even better.
From Sabiñánigo, the N-260 wastes no time in its campaign to reach the Med, diving headlong into the mountains with a dazzlingly ornate sliver of pristine tarmac clinging to the hillsides like a contour line.
Great towering forests flash past, interspersed with cutesy villages and the scent of hot coffee and freshly baked bread. Blind bends heap up like discarded string, as fast as bike and brain can untangle them. It’s a delirious, heady challenge; the perfect petrolheaded puzzle.
But there’s so much more to come. The N-260 turns south to warmer air, dropping out of the hills and tracing a river — and now it changes gear, shifting to grand, sweeping arcs racing along a broad valley, landscape drier and sandier, testing a different set of road-reading skills. But the mountains are never far away, brooding along the roadside and looking for an excuse to reel you back in. And before long, the road shrinks back to a narrow ribbon, threading between vertiginous walls of rock like a bootlace trapped under a brick. The change of pace is disorientating but welcome; the N-260 isn’t an incomprehensible blizzard of tedious first-gear hairpins — that’s not my riding thing. It has variety and character; a vast, sprawling saga of riding.
As the first day of riding comes to a close — it’s only been 200 miles, but it can easily take seven hours to complete — the N-260 has one of its finest moments; the 30 miles between Sort and Ribera d’urgellet is a hilarious, brain-melting mish-mash of corners, infinitely complex and fiendishly demanding, and precisely what you need at the close of an already testing day to guarantee a full night’s sleep.
The next day, the N-260 greets you with rapid riding along wide, open roads, spearing around the course of a river with an accompanying shift to more arid, olive, Mediterranean hues. Ah, so that’s it for the hills? Nope — the N-260 wrong-foots again, heading for altitude in a final fling with the mountains, ducking and darting through deciduous woodlands and close-cropped conifers. And then the road changes again, making proper progress to the east and twisting gently through hillside farms and villages before giving way to the A26 motorway — although the N-260 clings on alongside, if you want to keep off the big stuff. Either way, for a while the N-260 briefly becomes a route, not a road, getting you where you need to be — Portbou, a tiny town on the coast near the French border. But it has one last treat in store, as the temperature climbs and the flora morphs to scrubby roadside shrubs and tall palms. The coastal blip to Portbou is the N-260’s last hurrah, slithering down to the glittering blue of the Med like an eel trying to reach water. Time to reflect on the N-260; it may not be your best road in Europe, but it’s mine. So far...
‘It’s a delirious, heady challenge, the ultimate puzzle’