Road bike tour Portugal: Four road bike tours in the Alentejo: Portugal's dreamy, secluded centre
Sven Bremer
· 14.12.2018
The Alentejo, Portugal's largest region, accounts for almost a third of the total area of the Portuguese mainland. However, the region is extremely sparsely populated, with just over 500,000 people living there. The land "Beyond the Tagus" borders the Algarve to the south, the border with Spain to the east, the Centro region to the north and the coastline stretches along the Atlantic Ocean to the west: over 150 kilometres from Odeceixe in the south to below Setubal and the Região de Lisboa. The Alentejo, characterised by vast plains, olive and cornfields and, above all, cork and holm oaks, was and still is the poorhouse of Portugal.
Lonely, lonelier, Alentejo. You could sum it up like this. One good reason to cycle there is the very little traffic. Sometimes cyclists don't encounter a single car for 20 to 30 kilometres. The area is predominantly undulating to hilly, nothing for ambitious climbers. The Serra de São Mamede (which rises to just over a thousand metres above sea level) on the Spanish border is a little more mountainous, with around 2,000 metres of elevation gain on a hundred-kilometre loop; on our routes, however, there are hardly any steep ramps to climb. As the road surface, with a few exceptions, is also of the finest quality, the Alentejo can be considered an exquisite pleasure cycling area for late spring.
