WORDS & PHOTOGRAPHY CHIPPS
One blazing sun, two very different worlds on Spain’s Costa Blanca.
As I look around at the hotel breakfast buffet, there are two distinctly different groups here. One group looking more serious than they should for people on holiday, mostly older and queuing for the bacon and ‘eggs your way’ counter. They all seem to have a slightly worried, unsatisfied look to them and I’m not sure why – they’re on holiday in Spain when it’s currently chucking it down in the UK. They’ll likely have a bus trip to a castle planned for later, and perhaps a walk on the beach or a sit around the pool if the temperatures pick up.
The other group, tanned, relaxed and chatty, bowls piled with yoghurt and fruit, wear cycling gear or unironic tracksuits. After breakfast, they’ll be heading in the exact opposite direction to the first group. This lot are here to ride as hard and far as possible in the time available, only returning to the hotel as the sun sets with a few new climbs and descents ticked off. By coincidence, they’ll see the castle on the hill too, only they won’t need a bus trip to get there, as it’s ‘only’ 27km into the morning ride.
Costa to Costa
The Costa Blanca has long held a draw for European cyclists, especially in the winter months when the stable, sunny temperatures are at (complete) odds with those in Belgium, or Norway, or Britain. Riders – amateur and professional – come here for a few weeks to kickstart their season, to welcome ’cross season, or just to ride their bikes without dissolving in a cold, grey, towpath paste.
The Costa Blanca has had the same draw for the British immigrant and holidaying crowd, also lured by the easy climate, the whitewashed villages, the citrus groves, the cheap booze, fags and Benidorm. Oh, Benidorm…
Taking the Jet2Holidays coach from Alicante to our hotel in Altea, just north of town, the first half dozen stops are in Benidorm. ‘Who’s staying in the Imperial Palace?’ – a couple of leisure-suited passengers alight. Who’s staying at the Hotel Presidente? The Villa Del Mar? The Poseidon Playa? (yes, really…). We’ll see the same folks a week later, only more sunburned, speed-smoking their final cheap cig before mounting the steps of the coach…
The other, other, sort of rider
It’s easy to see why road cyclists like the area. It’s usually dry, usually sunny too, and the endless inland roads are quiet, with beautiful tarmac and courteous drivers. But what if your passion lies off the pristine blacktop? Everywhere there are glimpses of off-road potential, with bright white rocky tracks leading away from the crooks of road hairpins. Some just lead to a house, or a farm, or a field of olive trees, but some go further and ease into the old routes between villages, offering the challenge of naturally evolved trails that were built without mountain bikes in mind. The kind of trail that wasn’t built to flatter you with berms and easy rollers, but the deconstructed kind that doesn’t mind throwing in a few rocky steps, or a 30% slope if the terrain calls for it. Hey, it was good enough for the donkeys it was built for. These are the trails that I’m here for. And, luckily, I know just the guy to show me: José, or José Miguel Molina Lopez, is an Altea resident who has worked locally as a mountain bike guide for years. But not just any mountain biking: he’s one of the rare breed of Spanish enduro trail riders.
Benidorm
Even within Spanish mountain biking, there are two, broad, schools of riding. By far the most popular are the ‘dirt roadies’ for want of a better phrase. They love testing themselves against the hilly terrain, but usually fighting gravity rather than working with it. They ride carbon hardtails, they run semi-slicks and they’re very, very fast. On the climbs, anyway. When the trail tops out and the descent beckons, they can often be found heading back down the fire road they came up on, workout done for the day.
Then there is the other lot. Instantly recognisable by the trail riders’ uniform of baggies, kneepads and a can-ride-that attitude, they are far less common to find in Spain, so when you do come across them, it’s worth asking to tag along as they’ll have knowledge of trails that other riders wouldn’t even think about riding. José Miguel is just one of those riders.
Changing world, new riders, new pressures
José has been guiding in the area for seven years and had previously hosted the standard foreign holiday ‘Shuttle van up, descend all morning’ approach, but he’s found that in the last five years more and more riders are turning up on, or renting, ebikes and are happy to skip most of the shuttling in favour of simply riding up. This has expanded his scope, as riders no longer just expect a ‘best of’ of the finest downhill trails. Not all great descents can be shuttled up in a van, even if you do know all of the good access tracks. Rather, now, riders might get a van to the bottom of a riding area and the rest of the day is on them (or motor power) to move around. This way, the day feels like more of a journey, rather than a sawtooth series of descents and shuttle uplifts.
So, with that in mind, I’ve asked José to link together some of his favourite trails with one caveat: I want to start among the urban sprawl of Benidorm and simply ride in the opposite direction.
This doesn’t faze him one bit – since 2017, he’s been running trips here that climb away from the coast, backs to the sea, only turning to face the concrete towers when it’s time to have a celebratory, haughty, stop for a picnic lunch, legs dangling off a centuries-old olive terrace, looking towards the high rises and the pitch ’n’ putts and the all-you-can-eat-breakfasts while munching on fresh tortillas, bread and local cheeses. And then, when lunch is over, turning away from the sea again and descending into the olive groves and ancient village paths, to only reappear on the coast after a white-knuckle descent through the hills, ready to take advantage of the many seafront cafés.
Who’s here?
Riding with us today are a couple of local mountain bike celebs: Roxy and Benny, who together run Roxybike Coaching, an in-person and online skills coaching service, based on some very plain, weight and motion principles. “It’s just physics,” reckons Benny, but given how solidly planted on the bikes both of them are, whatever the terrain, it seems to be something that works massively well. Joining them is Cristina Barrajón, a top-level road racer on her first ‘proper’ mountain bike ride. She’s retired from the pro life and has dabbled in gravel, but has come along keen to expand her riding experiences. And adding to the media mêlée is Fritz – a German photographer who lives in the Surrey Hills and seems to spend as much time in the sun as he can.
Secrets in the open
We’re all riding ebikes today. Once we start, there’ll be no shuttles and we’re on a long loop below the gaze of Puig Campana (say ‘Push Campana’), the 1,400m hulking peak that looms over Benidorm. We start near the tellingly named ‘Urbanizacion Montecasino’ and ‘Urbanizacion Convent de Les Monges’, their tiled roofs and ‘swimming pool per house’ layout, modern caricatures of the traditional villages just a few kilometres inland.
We climb sociably – ebikes make conversational climbing a given as everyone rides together, regardless of fitness – and soon we’re leaving all traces of urbanisation behind. Unless, that is, we look behind, where the concrete towers of Benidorm sit heavy in the warm January haze.
The urbanizacions make way for pine forests and stark, limestone tracks as we gain our initial height, the short-sleeve heat a bit of a shock to northern European arms used to wet and chill at this time of year. We’ll soon be rolling sleeves back down again as we start our first feint towards the coast, down brush-lined singletrack. For a while, we can see no sign of the British/Swedish/Russian sunshine-seekers’ enclave that can’t be more than five miles away. All we can see is the scrubby hills, the blue sky and the white trails, but as we round the corner, the seaside towers, once again, become visible.
We’re not too bothered, though, concentrating on keeping tyres in contact with the rough, exposed earth and bare limestone.
Old trails
The word ‘limestone’ can sometimes impart panic into a British mountain biker, mostly because we’re used to limestone being as slippery as ice when wet, or green, or wet and green. With 320 days of sunshine a year, that’s never really an issue in the Costa Blanca and dry limestone offers great grip, though abrasive bails if you happen to fall on it. As José puts it at the start of the ride: “We seem to be lucky with the weather today. Just like the other 319 days a year…”
Although José mostly runs week-long tours of the area, he sometimes takes on one-day trips. One day, we had an English guy come out with us who had been staying with his in-laws (and wife and child) in Benidorm for a couple of weeks. On his one day of ‘you can do what you want on Tuesday’, he called José up and got a custom, one-day, best-of ebike tour of the region that briefly sated his need to get out on a bike and to ride in the hills he could see from his condo windows…
Our descents turn to climbs again and, even with epower, we struggle to keep a line on the rough, disintegrated trail surface. Although there are some bespoke mountain bike trails here, most are walking trails, old olive grove terraces or ways between villages. Don’t expect groomed trails and, unless you relish a challenge, never ask José if there’s anything steeper or more technical, as he’ll call your bluff and throw you into more steep and loose stuff than you might want to handle. We briefly lose Cristina to one of the descents, but she recovers with an agile stuntwoman roll, ready to take on the next section.
Always trust the locals
I’m always a big fan of hiring a local guide. I’ve been here before where José has ridden into an apparently shut up village and found the one restaurant still open, but only to those who knew to go round to the back door to find a lunch sitting packed with locals.
Our next trail is a Costa Brava mix of loose rock and slippery off-camber slopes. We chase each other, swapping places as a rider bobbles on a rock step-up, or slides out on a corner. We don’t really notice as our trails start getting more and more overlooked by whitewashed houses and our trails get more limited in scope. Before we’re really aware, our tyres are back on tarmac and we close in on the finish of the ride.
What we need now, is a just reward of a slap-up lunch. If only we knew a local… José finds us a beachfront café and magically manages to find the only parking space on the seafront. José and Roxy leave the scene while behind them the parking police impound a car that was parked a metre behind the trailer. “it’s OK, I know the Chief of Police,” José deadpans…
Our lunch passes pleasantly over conspiratorial talks of Brexit, Covid and electric shifting, while out of the window we watch the silverhairs parading down the seafront, completely unaware of the miles and miles of ancient ways into the hills, literally a short walk away.
There’s an irony that the sunburned, straw donkey-carrying British tourists who flock to the Costa Blanca help to subsidise this access to Spanish sun for the more active minority of us. If it was just out of season cyclists, the planes simply wouldn’t run. If the airlines and the hotels didn’t have the sedentary masses to keep the lights on, us cyclists wouldn’t be able to limpet onto the run to the sunshine.
So, I say, long live the glittering towers of Benidorm. You carry on; we’ll just ignore the draw of the all-you-can-eat-English buffet and continue to head into those empty, limestone hills that rise from the sea.
Thanks to José and crew at www.costablancaenduroland.com and Roxy and Benny from roxybike.podia.com, and to Guijarro Alfaz in Albir for the loan of the ebike.