The cycling route that has revived the 'Spanish Lapland': "There are towns where they had never seen a tourist"

Beamud, in Cuenca, 38 inhabitants.

Alobras, in Teruel, 62 inhabitants.

Los Santos, in Valencia, 102 inhabitants.

Tordellego, in Guadalajara, 50 inhabitants.

Let's say that in any of the four towns, in the so-called Spanish Lapland, a very sparsely populated territory, with one of the lowest population densities in Europe, a tourist appears from the United States, Canada, South Korea or Germany and with his high-end gravel bike asks for a place to eat and another to sleep.

Three years ago, the answer was almost always uncertain, the neighbors astonished by the appearance of a tourist.

Now in most cases the offer is clear: hotels, pensions and inns in the area have already become accustomed to welcoming cyclists.

What happened?

The creation of

that in 2020 was chosen cycling route of the year by the subscribers of the American website

and that has not stopped growing since then.

With a single promoter,

without companies behind, without public subsidies and without even marking, each year a thousand highly specialized tourists visit the heart of emptied Spain.

Pastor himself explains: «I am from a town in Guadalajara, Sigüenza, and for years I have been working in Teruel as a civil servant.

I have been in this area all my life and, like many other residents, I was already tired of billionaire projects that took public money and then never really attracted travellers.

I had done several bike routes around the world and I thought of proposing something simple here: a route through GPS with a simple website, one of the free ones, Wordpress, and a guide in pdf.

And it worked », he explains.

«In the summer of 2019, I don't know how, one of the editors of

fell on my website, he came to do the route, I met him and, after a week, I published my guide on the web.

It was an explosion.

People and more people began to be interested, especially Americans, and before the pandemic even professionals like

and

came .

Then, with the confinement, the popularity of the route rose among Spanish cyclists and now I would say that there is a balance between nationals and foreigners”, analyzes the creator of

, telecommunications inspector and amateur cyclist.

680 kilometers

In various sections of the route you can chain up to 60 or 70 kilometers without seeing anyone and one of its attractions are the stars, thanks to the absence of light pollution.

Starting and ending in Teruel, there are several versions -one of them even on asphalt-, but the main one consists of 680 kilometers with 12,910 meters of difference in altitude.

The source of the Tagus, the Serranía de Cuenca, the Sierra de Javalambre, the Sierra de Gúdar...

«It is a dynamic route, that is why there are no indications and only the track and the GPS are used.

I did it once complete and whenever I have days off I review parts to improve the path, incorporate indications...», Pastor points out that, given the independent nature of the project, he does not keep an exact count of the tourists he attracts: he supposes that they are around a thousand a year, by those who contact him through the web, but they could be more.

«In 2020, the year of the pandemic, a restaurant told me that 80% of its turnover had come from the public of

, a hostel also told me about 50% of its visitors... There are areas of the tour where they had never seen a single tourist, or hikers, or bikers, or anything, and now suddenly they see Americans with strange bikes," explains Pastor, who at first had to act as a mediator between the hosts and the foreign cyclists and who now he fears that there will be a boom: «Sometimes I get scared because I don't expect it to grow too much either.

It is not a question now of massifying some area based on cyclists.

Nor is it a matter of losing the flavor of the route.

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