La ghalib illa allah. In German: There is no victor but Allah. The Islamic creed is repeated endlessly on the walls of the Alhambra palaces in Granada. Inside the walls, gardens and water features exude a pleasant freshness. Outside, the city turns into a sweltering oven from June onwards. A few kilometres away, in the mountains, the water vapour paints ever new cloud arabesques in the sky. We are standing with our bikes on the edge of the Sierra Nevada road. A few hundred metres in altitude separate us from the highest point in Europe that can be ridden on a road bike. But it's not the clouds that inspire us to take a break. We gasp for air and peer towards our destination, the Pico de Veleta. Paco was right: it only gets exciting in the Sierra Nevada above 2,500 metres, where the thin air and icy winds suck the energy out of you. The higher you climb, the more snow covers the road, whose dilapidated surface is more reminiscent of the arabesques of the Alhambra than tarmac.
Nevertheless, you can feel elevated: "The pros don't ride that far up, they stop at the mountain saddle at 2,500 metres," says Paco, whose real name is Francisco and who comes from Granada.
These routes can be found below as PDF files and as GPS data for download:
- Tour 1: Prologue on the Purche
38 kilometres, 900 metres in altitude, maximum gradient of 16 per cent
- Tour 2: Alpine Alpujarra
98 kilometres, 2,100 metres in altitude, maximum gradient of 9 per cent
- Tour 3: Side trip to the Costa Tropical
138 kilometres, 2,300 metres in altitude, maximum gradient of 14 per cent
- Tour 4: High altitude rush on the Veleta
98 kilometres, 2,930 metres in altitude, maximum gradient of 16 per cent
