MOTORCYCLE TRAVEL IN Spain

Riding the A-397 by motorcycle, the road between Ronda and San Pedro de Alcántara, means tackling 45 kilometers with 365 curves —eight per kilometer— while the pavement drops nearly 700 meters from Ronda's 723 meters above sea level down to almost sea level.

The road cuts straight through Sierra de las Nieves National Park, declared Spain's 16th national park in 2021 and home to the pinsapo, a relict Spanish fir forest that has survived since the Tertiary era in only a handful of places on Earth.

Local press calls it one of the most dangerous roads in Málaga province: around 15,000 vehicles cross it daily, including trucks and tour buses, sharing the tarmac with riders chasing its curves.

Riding the N-260 by motorcycle, known as the Transpirenaica or the Pyrenean Axis, means crossing over 400 kilometers of curves from Portbou, on the Girona coast, to Sabiñánigo, in the Huesca Pyrenees.

The road splits into three main sections —from the French border to Ripoll, from Puigcerdà to El Pont de Suert, and from there to Sabiñánigo— and strings together mountain passes like Port del Cantó at 1,725 meters and Puerto de Cotefablo at 1,425.

Specialist motorcycling outlets call it, again and again, one of the best motorcycle roads in Europe: light traffic, constant technical curves, and scenery that shifts every few kilometers, from the green of the Catalan Pyrenees to the stone tones of the Aragonese Pyrenees.

Riding down the Sa Calobra road by motorcycle is barely 13 kilometers, but it packs in 26 bends —twelve of them 180 degrees or sharper— down to the Nus de sa Corbata, a 360-degree turn where the road literally passes underneath itself.

Engineer Antonio Parietti built it by hand, with no machinery, in 1932, moving over 30,000 cubic meters of rock to carve the route into the cliffs of the Serra de Tramuntana.

Spanish press names it one of the country's most dangerous roads: a narrow track with no center line along much of it, serious accidents recorded every year, shared with cyclists who have trained here for decades.

Crossing the Desfiladero de la Hermida by motorcycle —the mandatory road to Fuente De— means riding 22 kilometers through the only vehicle corridor between the Cantabrian coast and the Liébana valley, boxed in by limestone walls over 600 meters high that the Deva River has carved over millennia.

This gorge leads into Spain's oldest national park: declared in 1918 as the Montaña de Covadonga National Park at the urging of Pedro Pidal, after a trip he took to Yellowstone, known today as Picos de Europa.

At Fuente De, at 1,094 meters, the cable car —Europe's longest single-span line— climbs 753 meters in just 3 minutes 40 seconds to the Mirador del Cable, at 1,823 meters: a perfect finish to the ride before heading back through the same curves.

Riding the Route of the White Villages by motorcycle, through Ronda, Grazalema, Zahara de la Sierra and Arcos de la Frontera, covers around 300 kilometers over two days, making it the only route in all of Andalusia officially declared of tourist interest.

The climb toward Puerto de las Palomas, already inside the Sierra de Grazalema —a Biosphere Reserve since 1977 and a Natural Park since 1985— delivers one of the highest viewpoints in Cádiz province, in one of the rainiest areas in Spain.

Halfway along, the Venta Puerto de Gáliz has worked for generations as the unofficial meeting point for riders from across Andalusia, the spot where everyone stops for breakfast before continuing on to Ubrique or Arcos.

Riding up toward Pico Veleta by motorcycle means taking on Europe's highest paved road, a route that starts in Granada, at 750 meters, and once climbed all the way to the summit itself, at 3,398 meters.

The road opened in 1935, but since 1999 motorized traffic has been stopped at a barrier around 2,500 meters, near Hoya de la Mora — the final kilometers to the top were left to hikers, cyclists and park vehicles because of the environmental damage the traffic was causing.

Even so, the roughly 45 kilometers still open to motorcycles climb around 1,750 meters of elevation, passing the Pradollano ski resort and leaving the forest behind for the almost bare high-mountain landscape at the top of the Iberian Peninsula.

The Teide road by motorcycle, the TF-21, links La Orotava with Granadilla de Abona over 82.6 kilometers that climb from the subtropical coast up to Spain's highest volcano.

Teide reaches 3,715 meters —the highest peak in all of Spanish territory and on any land rising from the Atlantic— and its national park, declared in 1954, is the country's third oldest and Spain's most visited, drawing more than 4 million people a year.

From kilometer 31.5 the road enters the national park, declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2007, and the scenery shifts all at once: from humid laurel forest to an ochre-and-red volcanic desert that looks like another planet.

Riding the Ruta de la Plata by motorcycle, from Seville to Gijón, covers 810 kilometers along the path of a Roman road that once connected Emerita Augusta (Mérida) with Asturica Augusta (Astorga), used for centuries by legions, merchants and migrating shepherds.

Despite the name (which translates as 'silver route'), the road has nothing to do with silver: most historians trace it to the Arabic 'al-balat', meaning paved or cobbled road.

Today the N-630 follows that same line nearly end to end, south to north, through Mérida, Cáceres, Salamanca, Zamora, León and Astorga before climbing into Asturias — a multi-day crossing built for the rider who wants to cut through Spain's entire historic spine, more than for tight technical curves.

Riding the Flysch Route by motorcycle, the coastal road linking Zumaia, Deba and Mutriku, means skirting 90 square kilometers of cliffs where the rock preserves, layer upon layer, 60 million years of geological history almost without interruption.

UNESCO declared the area a Global Geopark in November 2015, largely because the cliffs at Zumaia let you read, with the naked eye, the boundary between the Cretaceous and Paleogene periods — the geological marker of the mass extinction that wiped out most dinosaurs 66 million years ago.

Unlike other routes on this list, it isn't a mountain pass but a relatively short, easygoing coastal road, ideal for combining with other Basque Country routes on the same trip.

Climbing to the Bielsa tunnel by motorcycle, from Aínsa, means riding through the Valle de Pineta and the Cinca River canyon before crossing, under the Pyrenees, the international tunnel that has connected Spain with the French Aure valley since October 1976.

The tunnel runs 3,070 meters long —1,298 on Spanish soil— and was built because, at the head of the valley, the river itself had narrowed the passage so much that no conventional mountain road could be traced through it.

The area sits inside Ordesa y Monte Perdido National Park, declared in 1918 as the Valle de Ordesa National Park —the same year as Picos de Europa— and expanded in 1982 to include Monte Perdido, at 3,348 meters, Europe's third-highest limestone massif, recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1997.