Andalusia: the Sierra de Grazalema and the dunes at Punta Paloma

Two days that end at the edge of Africa. The Sierra de Grazalema is an hour inland from the Cádiz coast — cork oak forest, gravel tracks, white hill villages and the wettest weather in Spain — and from there the road runs south until it stops at Punta Paloma, where the dunes come over the tarmac and Morocco is sitting on the horizon.

Grazalema: oak woods and gravel

The Sierra de Grazalema is a natural park, which in practice means the roads inside it are narrow, the surface is often unsealed, and there is nobody on them. You ride under cork and holm oak with the light coming down in pieces, across open ridges, and back into the trees. The tracks are hard-packed and easy, with enough loose gravel on the bends to keep the pace honest.

It is also, improbably for Andalusia, the rainiest place in Spain. The sierra catches everything coming off the Atlantic, which is why it is green when the country either side of it is not.

The white villages

The villages here sit high, for the defensive reasons that mattered a thousand years ago, and most of them still carry the ruin of the castle that explains the position. Every one is reached by a climb, and every climb has a view from the top: lime-washed walls, terracotta roofs stacked down the slope, and a square where the whole village is outside at nine in the evening.

Riding between them is the point. The distances are short, the roads that link them are old and narrow, and you stop far more often than you planned.

The reservoirs

The road between the sierra and the coast runs past reservoirs that are a colour you do not expect inland — pale, mineral turquoise, with bare trees standing in the shallows where the water level has dropped and a white village on the ridge above, castle and all. They are worth a stop even when you are not making good time, which by that point in the day you will not be.

Down to Punta Paloma

Punta Paloma sits just west of Tarifa, at the point where the Atlantic becomes the Mediterranean. A dune the size of a hill comes down to the road, the wind blows hard enough that the place is full of kitesurfers, and the sand gets into everything you own.

Riding on it is a short, sandy, undignified business and entirely worth doing. Drop the pressures, keep the revs up, and expect to pick the bike up at least once. On a clear afternoon the Rif mountains sit across the strait, close enough to pick out individual slopes — fourteen kilometres of water and you are looking at another continent.

When to come

Spring and autumn. Inland Andalusia in July and August routinely passes forty degrees and turns a good day into an endurance exercise. The coast at Tarifa stays cooler because the wind never stops, which is a blessing on the bike and less so in a tent.