During my first visit to Spain 30-years ago, I declared I wanted to retire there. Nothing’s happened to reduce that desire, except Brexit has made it a near-impossible dream.
Touring Spain | Two weeks exploring the race-track smooth roads on a hired bike, finding winding road after winding road joining achingly-beautiful medieval towns surrounded by olive groves and fruit trees continually reminded me of my love of Spain…
Spain has it all – beautiful weather, beautiful roads, beautiful food, beautiful wines and beautiful women. Why wouldn’t you want to live here? The language barriers, the heat, the prices and the ridiculous numbers of tourists could be reasons, but I reckon I could learn enough of the language to get by, I’d travel to cooler parts of Europe in the summer to get away from the heat and tourists, winning Lotto should solve the money problem…
Read Nigel’s previous travel features here...
While I may not be able to live here (at least partly due to Brexit: my father was born in the UK, so I believe I could get a British passport and prior to Brexit that was the only requirement) I can visit, and every time I do I wonder why more Australians don’t come here to ride.
Kirrily and I chose Salou as our base, a couple of weeks during the shoulder season in a discounted AirBnB 90 minutes south-west from Barcelona. However, of all the towns we visited on this trip, I liked Salou the least: it’s a giant beach resort, these days just a place for tourists to come for a beach holiday, drink too much and think they’ve experienced Spain. The difference between the coast and up into the hills just a 30 minute ride away is incredible – the small towns may like the tourist dollars, but they aren’t beholden to them in the same way a place like Salou is.
Not everywhere in the coast is so tainted – not far from Salou is Tarragona, an older, larger settlement which dates back to Roman times – the ancient amphitheatre is an excellent example of their history and well worth a visit.
It was in Tarragona where we discovered the traditional Spanish restaurants serving fixed-price three course lunches with vino tinto con gas (red wine topped with lightly sparkling mineral water)… something I would have considered an abomination in Australia I’ll now take back with me and drink, much to the wine snobs’ disgust (it’s a great way to make cheap wine taste fine and not be too alcoholic with lunch).
I didn’t indulge in the lunchtime wine when riding though, staying on the right hand side of the road, following calimoto or Google maps across roads I’d never ridden and being careful of my speed because crashing 10,000 miles from home doesn’t appeal in the slightest were more important factors.
We wanted one for a week or so and booking one through riderly.com was the easiest way to find an affordable machine with a top box – we’d brought our own riding gear, so we didn’t need to hire that, but it’s an option if you’d rather not travel with a huge load of helmets and jackets.
While a big bike with lots of power is a Good Thing, we didn’t need anything like that, so a 47hp 525 Chinese-built adventure bike of a brand you’ve never heard of was fine. With the Aussie dollar about to be renamed the south-east Asian peso and not worth a lot more than half a Euro, being careful with the coin was called for, so a bike big enough for two and small enough to be cheap was fine.
What we did love was the wriggly bits on the maps. They are everywhere. We rode up to Montserrat from Barcelona after switching out the first bike for a replacement unit when I contacted the hire company to say the tyres wouldn’t last and they were fine with the exchange, so we took the opportunity to ride up to Monserrat, where there’s a big monastery and a great view… and an awesome road to ride.
We took the long way back to Salou, staying up in the hills on roads which varied from tight switchback-filled sinuous mountains roads to faster, more flowing byways… but these were the places we saw lots of mobile speed cameras, which Spain has lots and lots of… and it turns out Catalonia, the region we were in, has the most.
Another reason not to hire that big, fast bike. Enjoy the ride…
Many of the regional roads which wind through the hills behind the coast offer incredible views and great riding – with little or no traffic. You can easily spend a ridiculous amount of time just riding the wriggly bits on your phone or GPS maps (you’ll need something to navigate by), stopping occasionally for food, fuel and photographs.
Spain has had protests about tourists and the relatively brief amount of time we spent in Sitges and Barcelona highlighted this for me – it was a Sunday in early April and yet there seemed to be people everywhere – and this is shoulder season. The peak must be insufferable.
The best times of year for a motorcycle ride look like being May and September, when the temperatures are mild and the rainfall isn’t extreme.
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