Touring Manresa,Vic,Cardona (was Lleida-Huesca-Zaragoza)?

SteveA-OH

Greetings,

We'll be flying into Barcelona in early June. We tentatively are planning to:

Hire a car (one way) at Barcelona and drive to Lleida.
Leave the car there and ride from LLeida to Huesca and then to Zaragoza.
Hire a car again (one way) and drive back to Barcelona

We plan to ride about 45-50 km a day for 5 days. Staying in small hotels, casas rurales, etc.

Does anyone here have any comments on this route or general area?
We haven't been to Spain before and are going inland to get away from the tourist/holidaymaker crowds and congestion.

Any help is certainly appreciated.

Thanks,
Steven/Linda

hdow

Hi

One way car hires can be a great way to do linear routes.

My one main concern is that the proposed route is not that interesting cycling wise. It's a bit flat with not a lot to look at. I've driven across it & was not inspired to return

For five days you could consider taking the train from Barcelona down to Tortosa & then across to Teruel where there is an Avis car hire office. This would be about the same distance but is hillier, very quiet & very pretty. Lots of small hotels etc to stay in. Its a route I've done & is one of the best out of many completed in Spain.

If you dont fancy using the train then how about care hire to either Castello (head north west then west to Teruel) or Valencia (north west to Ademuz or as far as Albarracin then to Teruel). Both routes also highly recommended.

The above itineries visit small town & villages on what are quiet roads. They are hilly though.

As a general rule the Michelin Orange maps are pretty good. When planning your route seek out the roads marked with a green shaddow - they are usualy the most scenic. Avoid the National routes as these ar motor magnets & are generally very unpleasant cyclyng - doubly so if they link big towns or cities. They are marked on Michelin maps in red - an appropriate warning colour. There are exceptions such as the one into Ademuz - we cycled for 45 minutes along it before the first vehicle turned up.

Hope this helps

megilleland

If I were you I would hire a car at the airport for the 5 days even though you may not use it for a few days. Looking at the Europcar website you can get a reasonable sized car from £150 if you pay up front on the internet. I have used Europcar several times and found them to be efficient and the vehicles clean and reliable.

Regarding your route I would use the car to get to a ride, do the ride and drive to your overnight accommodation in a sizeable town, and repeat each day. You can arrive quite late for accommodation and meals and you will have the opportunity to see the Spanish doing what they like best - socialising in bars.

Plan your trip to arrive on Wednesday, as Thursday to Saturday are the best nights for entertainment. A tour based on a night in Pont de Suert (Val de Boi - Romanesque churches with wall paintings), Barbastro (Town and wine production), Ainsa (Town, Castle and Vellos River Gorge), Torla (Ordesa National Park) and Jaca (Town, Fortress and Cathedral). E-mail me for further information.

SteveA-OH

Some alternative suggestions were posted. I will look into these. Knowing very little about the area (other than what can be garnered mailnly from non-cycling books) it is nice to talk with a few cycling folks who have been there.

A couple points/questions. We will be using a tandem - and from what I can tell Spanish trains and tandems don't work together well? Rolling terrain is great (and interesting) but we don't (mainly my wife early in our season) want the combination of steep grades for long distances.

Another question - does it get too warm as one goes south of Barcelona in early June?

If you have any links to any route (general - not turn-by-turn) resources in any of the area that you are thinking of - would you please point me to those. I do have the Catalonia/Aragon Michelin Orange map as well as (3) provincial 1:200000 maps (Lleida, Huesca and Zaragoza provinces).

Thanks all ...
Steve

hdow

Steve

Have a look at:

http://uk.geocities.com/cycleshaw/maestrazgo.html

Lots of useful info. Inspired my first visit

Yours

Harry D

Conal_b

A strong wind called "El Cierzo" tends to blow from west to east along the Ebro valley. Zaragoza suffers from it particulary. Also the Ebro valley is the hottest part of Spain outside Andalucia (though it is dry heat). The temperatures will easily get to over 35 C in June. Once the temperatures get close to 40 C thunderstorms have a habit of developing.

The area between Zaragoza and Llerida is known as 'Los Monegros' and is a pretty harsh desert (think of the front line in Homage to Catalonia). You can tell when you've gone from Catalunya into Aragon here becuase the landscape turns from green to brown almost instantly (have a look at the satellite pictures on google maps). Further south, there are wetlands and nature/bird reserves along the Ebro but not much else!

Personally, I'd stay in Catalunya, or as other posters say go north towards the Pyrenees or south towards 'El Maeztrago' and Teruel.

SteveA-OH

Based on good information, from all of you folks, we've changed our planned route. We'll get a taxi from Barcelona to the East side of Manresa. We'll the make a big 5-day loop counter-clockwise to the North of Manresa. We'll stay one night at the Vic-Sau parador - pasing through Tona and then heading southeast from there and looping back to the parador (which is about 14km to the NE of Vic). Then we'll head west-northwest from Vic and then kind of continue in a counterclockwise loop back to Manresa - where we'll get a taxi back to Barcelona (amazingly the taxi-fare costs less than one-way car rentals). Thanks again for all of the suggestions.

Steve

megilleland

You could catch a cercanias from Barcelona Sants to Manresa. The journey takes 1hr 20min and costs 4.35 euros one way. The trains have good access and they will carry bikes betweeen 10am to 3pm weekdays and Saturdays and all day on Sundays. Barcelona Sants has passenger lifts on all platforms.

There may be new trains operating on this line to replace the older versions, but both have space to carry bikes.
Interior view of old train.
Interior view of new train.

SteveA-OH

Thanks for the train suggestion.

We had some concerns about that:

We have a tandem and four panniers. Is this a lot to get onto the train (not as far as being difficult for us - but as being allowable)?

I have a map of the Barcelona train network - but can bicycles be easily taken on the train from the airport to the Sants station?

If we are very sure that the trains will be hassle-free we'd do them for sure. After being awake for many hours, after out flight from the US, and in a large city where we only speak very little of the native language I'm trying to keep the experience positive enough that my wife is in a good mood to get the tour started.