Singletrack/MTB
Gravel/All-road
Dirt-road Touring
Fat-bike
Solo Bikepacking Spanish Lapland (Video)
In April, Tristan Bogaard pedaled a weeklong loop around Spain’s empty interior, and he created this understated video documenting his solo experience in the captivating region. Watch his 23-minute video and read some backstory here…
Words, photos, and video by Tristan Bogaard
Spanish Lapland is an area in Spain that’s twice the size of Belgium but only has around seven inhabitants per square kilometer. It’s so sparsely populated that every town feels a little deserted, even though a large group of people might still live there permanently or throughout the summers. Each town tends to have a single bar where locals gather each day. A strong community feeling of looking out for one another embodies the entire region.
The Montañas Vacías route, created by Ernesto Pastor from Teruel, circles around a large part of this “Lapland” area. I’ve been wanting to ride it for years now, but I somehow couldn’t time it right. Finally, I was able to give it a try in the first week of April 2024 and use the route as a blueprint to see the parts I was most interested in. In the end, I rode about two-thirds of the original route, completing a weeklong solo bikepacking experience that I’ll always remember fondly.
Even though I’ve never been to the Finnish Lapland, I can now imagine what it feels like to ride there. Every day, this relatively unknown and quiet side of Spain kept surprising me with its silence. It’s a silence that doesn’t signify death but rather amplifies life. One that exposes the sounds you miss around the cities, highways, and other human infrastructure that occupies so much of our world. My morning awakenings were soothed by bird song and my nights caught in soft gusts of wind caressing my tent.
To be away from all the distractions of daily life for a while, any of the routes in this large area serve wonderfully. Ernesto has designed a multitude of them, and they all tick the same boxes of quiet countryside, fantastic wild camping, and sleepy village bars with the tastiest coffee and Spanish bocadillos while offering different distances and elevation levels. If you ask me, Spanish Lapland is a bikepacking paradise!
Further Reading
Make sure to dig into these related articles for more info...
Please keep the conversation civil, constructive, and inclusive, or your comment will be removed.
We're independent
and member-supported.
Join the Bikepacking Collective to make our work possible:
