Sierra de Gredos cycling holidays

“Empty” Gredos

The year Sastre won the Tour, Sierra de Gredos didn’t have much to celebrate. It’s one of the three most depopulated provinces of the country, and is essentially still in post-war decline. Young people, and especially women, leave; there’s no industry for them here. Villages shrink every year. In 2019, one village lost four – or 20 percent – of its handful of remaining inhabitants.

The area is a prime example of what has been labelled 'La España Vacía' – ‘empty’ Spain, a national crisis of rural degeneration which has sparked a social movement, and waves of protest in Madrid. Madrid is, after all, just a couple of hours down the road from Gredos. Traditionally, the Sierra de Gredos was a weekend jaunt for Madrid hikers, but they mostly come in the summer holidays, leaving the area struggling out of season.

Aside from the broom, there aren’t many living things that can tough it out on the high slopes of the Sierra de Gredos year round. It’s bitter in winter, its cities characterised by forbidding walls, its slopes snowbound. “The barren plains, the rugged mountains of Castile,” says Marlene, who is on the board of directors for the region’s Chamber of Commerce. To the average Spaniard, this area is traditionally seen as “cold and hostile”. But it’s also “the real Spain, because this is where Castilian comes from”.

But in the last five or ten years, the perception has started to change. And it’s all thanks to Gredos’s yellow jersey – its gorgeous mountain bloom.

New hope

Change is slow to come, but Marlene, who visits the area frequently from her nearby home, often returns with anecdotes about new developments. There’s the hotel that, inspired by patronage from Go Cycle Tours, started creating special packages, and now finds its weekdays booked out with adventure travellers. Then there’s the woman in her 70s, living in the smallest village, who is convincing local shepherds to revive merino wool production. “She’s convinced a number of shepherds to put coats on their sheep to protect the wool... She’s a force of nature.” Young people are coming back “to make cheese”, and politicians are starting to sit up and take notice. “They signed a political pact in Gredos for repopulation, and a political commitment to repopulation in the area a couple of weeks ago,” Marlene says.

This year, Marlene’s preparing for the next Piorno Festival bike ride. “We call it the leg breaker,” she says – of course, it sounds better in Spanish: the ‘rompe piernas’ in the ‘piorno’; Carlos Sastre would be proud.