Beyond the Tour de France: How Girona became a cyclist’s paradise
Girona quietly welcomes the world’s best cyclists – and the Tour de France. Damien Gabet rides through Spain’s bucolic countryside
D’you remember the Festina scandal in 1998? The whole cycling team was caught bang to rights for doping. And because parts of it fell under French criminal law, les flics got involved and the soigneur was arrested.
Story goes, this put the fear of god into whoever else on the pro circuit was riding dirty and reinforced a drift that had already begun: riders moving out of France and basing themselves in places with less scrutiny. Girona, say.
Lance Armstrong, Tyler Hamilton and David Millar moved there. Road cycling being a conformist sort of sport, the peloton followed suit. Next thing you know, you have yourself a bone fide cycling destination.
The Tour de France, with good food
In fairness, it wasn’t just lax policing that saw Girona fledge. Landscapes, roads, food, weather, people, politics, prices – just about every metric you can think of ranks. What we can confidently say is that Girona’s gentrification arrived on two wheels, and its surrounding countryside is now widely regarded as one of earth’s great theatres of the pedal.
To get to the very best of the cycling, though, requires a schlep from the city centre. It’s much easier if you do as I did and stay at a new retreat called Off Grid.
Gerard Greene, the hotelier who gave the world Yotel, has gone native and bought an old masia (literally “fortified farmhouse estate”) at the bottom of a very big, oak-cloaked hill, on the edge of La Garrotxa Volcanic Zone Natural Park.
From our first chat together, I read this opening as less a retirement plan and more a get-the-f**k-out-of-London-and-make-a-nice-place-for-burnt-out-Londoners plan. And it holds up. Cycling, yoga, hiking, good food – “All the stuff we do because our raving days are behind us,” he said.
Not luxury, but tasteful
The best bit, though, is the plot itself. Too small to be a hotel, too big to be a B&B, it has the feel of a bijou hamlet, with a series of honey-stone buildings, crowned by an adult-sized pool. “Rustic luxury, we call it,” said Gerard, as he showed me to my room.
Luxury, nah. Tasteful, yeah. One might imagine a low-ranking Spanish noblewoman rusticating here with her bit of country crumpet. Or the high-born characters in an Edwyn St Aubyn novel drinking vermouth in the shade of its fig trees.
What I mean is that in my almost spartan bedroom there was a marbled neoclassical vanity table, with an empty wine bottle atop it, springing baby’s breath and dianthus. Tiktok would call it ‘old-money pastoral’.
More importantly, Gerard, his team and his dog, Soli, are good people and quickly made me feel like I was an old pal over for the weekend. But I didn’t come here to befriend a labrador. This is a cycling story.
These Unesco-protected hills are where riders, both drugged and clean, come to get better, faster, stronger. You know this. But did you know it’s where the Tour de France will be passing through on its third stage this month? That was enough for me to agree to come take a mooch.
This ‘couch to 125k’ was going to sting
I snarfed local cheeses and cured flesh for breakfast while gawping, through old mullioned windows, at the pool’s ripples. An art-house-movie moment of calm before my cycling chaperone arrived to take me out for the day’s ride. I’d not been on a saddle in over six months – despite what the other cycle-geek guests said at dinner the night before – this ‘couch-to-125k’ was going to sting.
Alejandro Gonzalez used to take cycling very seriously. As a ‘sprinter’, he trained in Mexico, the States, Belgium, Denmark and Catalunya. The latter’s where he hung his hat because, as you now know, it has it all.
I was bikeless, but Off Grid will hire one so it’s waiting when you arrive. My carbon steed weighed about as much as breakfast and looked like a recently declassified weapon from a secret military programme. You know, stealthy.
The uphill sweat-a-thon began almost immediately with a 10km climb. This made simultaneously interviewing Alex challenging, but we got into a flow of sorts and dived into cycling lore. First the drugs stories, then fashion. “White shoes and white socks are part of the uniform,” he said, grinning. I was wearing a purple paisley shirt and black everything else.
A Tour de France champion
The route cut through greenery so green it makes you realise how brown the rest of Spain is. By the time we rolled into chocolate-box Beget, 50km away, I needed calories with some urgency.
The village bakery is famous among cyclists for its flaones – a medieval pastry that predates the sandwich – but was shut.
Mercifully the village’s smart-looking restaurant Can Jeroni wasn’t and produced a snacking menu. I went through more hard cheese and Coca-Cola than might be considered polite and sat sideways on the chair as my bones began making themselves known.
But things changed after that. Another monster climb didn’t sap me quite so aggressively – the emergency Haribo helped – and I was distracted by short-toed eagles riding thermals above us and Alex’s rather meditative soliloquy on the psychology of road cycling. “You have to be a bit autistic, I think…”
The trade-off for all the climbing, of course, was winding descents that went on and on. And on. That’s what one comes here for: ribbons of lovely, EU-money asphalt ushering you down the flanks of verdant volcanoes, where gravity shows its kinder side and flow states flourish.
This is probably the best riding I’ve ever done. And I’m rather pleased that I didn’t totally embarrass myself trying to keep up with a man whose thighs look like they should be air-dried and hung from a jamonería ceiling.
All things bucolic
With 125km complete, there’s just enough time to de-grime and meet the other Off Grid guests at the dinner table.
In keeping with all things bucolic, the food is organic, locally grown or killed, and served en familia on terracotta plates for all to scoop from. In fact, food in Girona in general is brilliant, the city boasting 18 Michelin stars amongst its restaurants.
I know communal dining sounds tiring, but actually it’s a rather nice reminder that not everyone is as awful as our black mirrors will have us believe. This is another reason Off Grid isn’t luxury. Conviviality never gets five stars.
Upon said earthen dishes is food that has that annoying quality of being achingly simple and implausibly tasty. Some people, in this case Natasha, Off Grid’s Puerto Rican head chef, can make a single white asparagus spear, blanched and blessed with anchovy, taste like being kissed while listening to classical music. It’s remarkable really. Everyone said it. She has the touch.
A restorative Coke
The next day it was just me and my stealth weapon, grinding up what Gerrard calls “our mountain”. The 1,123m-high El Mont, which Off Grid sits at the bottom of, is the highest peak in the local range and another charming scribble of bitumen through dense beech and holm oak.
At the top, which I made in around two hours, I saw a man sling himself off the edge, strapped into a hang glider. I had another restorative coke in the bar while breathing in a view that merits its sobriquet as the ‘Gate of the Pyrenees’.
The only thing missing, really, was a little company. I don’t have any cycling friends, so Gerrard suggested I return for Off Grid’s new In Motion weeks (23-27 July and 23-27 October). Ride all day, then reconvene for long-table suppers, sunset DJ sets and enough wine to persuade even the most committed mamils (middle aged men in lycra) to discuss something other than tyre pressure.
Who knows, maybe our raving days aren’t behind us just yet.
Book a Tour de France themed cycling holiday
Damien was a guest of Off Grid Girona in Catalonia’s Alta Garrotxa region. The property has 10 bedrooms, with doubles from €180 (£156), including breakfast. Nearest airport: Girona–Costa Brava (49km); nearest train station: Girona (40km); flights from London Stansted with Ryanair from £17 one way. Go to offgridgirona.com
The short series of stages that begin the Tour de France, the world’s biggest cycling race, begin in the UK in 2027. “The UK has always welcomed the Tour with passion and pride, and the route details we are revealing today reflect the beauty and diversity of Britain’s terrain,” said a spokesperson when the news was announced in January.