Traversing northern Spain: Bilbao to Jaca
Our route begins with a traverse across northern Spain. This will be the most diverse part of the tour, I believe: in 12 days and about 400 miles we will visit parts of five different Spanish provinces with widely varying geography, culture and history. This is such a rich area to explore that we could just as easily have made a loop of it and kept the entire tour in this region. It was an area with a lot of painful choices, and I have some rueful feelings about the areas we're missing: in particular, I wish we could also include Estella, Pamplona and Olite; a loop through Urbasa y Andia Natural Park; and a longer look at the Rioja.
We'll see plenty though with the route we've chosen, and this should prove to be a fascinating stage of the tour. We begin in Bilbao, the city where our previous Pyrenean tour left off. We loved Bilbao and are excited to be seeing it again. We'll spend our first two nights here, hopefully overcoming the worst of the jet lag while we explore the city on foot, assemble our bicycles and ship our luggage forward to our final hotel in Sete.
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From Vitoria we'll bike south, continuing our north-south traverse of the Basque Lands. After crossing a pair of modest passes we'll cross the provincial border and drop into the Rioja, one of the most famous wine regions of Spain. The Rioja is a well known cycling region, with many commercial tours passing through it. We're choosing to just briefly cycle across it though, stopping at a few key spots along the way - maybe have lunch in the famous wine town of LaGuardia, and maybe stop for a look at the insane Geary-designed hotel in El Ciego. We'll spend the night in Najera, a stop on the pilgrimage route to Compostela.
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Leaving Najera, we'll climb out of the Rioja across ranges and plateaus that separate the Rioja from Castille and Leon, our third province of the tour. We'll spend the night in a mountain parador in Montenegro de Cameros, and then drop out of the mountains to spend the next night in Soria. From there we'll continue east, crossing a corner of Navarre and then into Aragon, and spend the next two days exploring Tarazona and Tudela with their rich heritage of Mudejar architecture.
This region and the following few days have been on my radar for over 20 years, dating back to when we began planning our first tour of Spain. For years I harbored a vision of biking from Madrid to France across northeast Spain and the Pyrenees.
East of Tudela we'll cross a corner of the Bardenas Reale, the largest desert in Europe and the filming location for many spaghetti westerns. After our recent tour of southern Utah, I was surprised by the resemblance between pictures of this desert and the weirdly eroded landscape east of Capitol Reef.
From here we'll continue north through arid Aragon, spending nights in both Sos del Rey Catolico and Uncastillo, two of the cluster of five historical towns (including Sabada, which we'll also pass through) that make up the Cinco Villas.
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Finally, we'll conclude this first phase of the tour by continuing east into Huesca province, spending a night in Murillo de Gallego and ending in Jaca, in the shadow of the Pyrenees. We're stopping over in Murillo because it is close to Mallos de Aguero, a spot that looks so astonishing in its photographs that I've longed to see it ever since I first knew it existed.
We'd better make it over to Aguero - it had a lot to do with shaping our final itinerary. Otherwise, we'd have probably routed through the Aragonese Pyrenees, visiting mountain villages like Isaba and Hecho and adding ten or twenty thousand more feet of climbing to the tour. 
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