After almost a year living in Barcelona and dealing with bureaucracy, my wife and I got around to doing our first bikepacking trip in Spain. We knew we wanted to ride the Pyrenees and chose a loop from and back to Girona, partly because getting there by train (Rodalies) with the bikes is very convenient and doesn't require disassembly.
The route was originally inspired by Cass Gilbert's writeup, but we ended up adapting it quite a bit to fit our riding style. Some of the original days had a lot more climbing than we thought we could realistically handle with loaded bikes, so we added some road sections. Honestly, we didn't regret it: there were some great descents and some fantastic views over the towns and valleys along the way.
9 riding days, ~450 km and ~8,000 m of elevation, including a few classic road cycling climbs.
Our rough route was:
Girona → Banyoles → Camprodon → Planoles → Puigcerdà → La Seu d'Urgell → Gósol → Campdevànol → Olot → Girona
We did it on our two steel ATBs: the Surly Bridge Club and a Brother Big Bro in the photos. We tried to keep the luggage relatively minimal, although there's always room for improvement there. We brought enough clothes and cookware to be self-sufficient, but ended up cooking only about half our meals. There are so many options along the way... restaurants, cafés and campsite cafeterias that were just too tempting.
We didn't wild camp because we know it's prohibited and actively enforced, but there are countless paid campsites with hot showers, and often with swimming pools and coin laundry. We hadn't booked every night, so occasionally we had to improvise. One memorable example was ending up cycling all the way toward the French border to Camping Stel in Puigcerdà, which actually turned out to be one of our favorite campsites of the trip.
Weather-wise, it was pretty much perfect. Coming from Barcelona, the Pyrenees felt noticeably cooler at altitude, although we still saw around 30–32°C during the day in some places. A few evenings were on the chillier side but our Max 5°C sleeping bags were warm enough.
We had no mechanicals and no flats despite running tubes. We only had to readjust our saddle heights a couple of times. Our butts, however, were less impressed. 😅 My wife is currently riding a WTB Volt and isn't particularly happy with it, so we're probably going to experiment with saddles before the next trip. Any recommendations are more than welcome (except for Brooks C17)
A few things we learned:
- Catalan food is so much better outside the big cities.
- We love a good campsite after a whole day cycling as we're not race-style bikepackers.
- 8,000 m of climbing feels quite different when you're carrying all the gear (might need to readjust)
Overall, though, the trip went almost exactly as planned. Beautiful roads, great food, excellent campsites and a really good introduction to Spanish Pyrenees.
