The Tour of Spain is presented at the Palau de la Música in Barcelona as a symptom of normality and coexistence. The cycling race settles in Catalonia, as it returned to the Basque Country a decade ago, as the starting point for its 89th birthday next August 26.
On the way to the centenary, the Vuelta leans towards the mountain colossi, legendary ports, rather than by their habit of the last decades, the ramps of impossible slopes. A route that visits the Tourmalet and the Angliru and that concludes in the Sierra de Madrid with a never-before-seen stage, 10 third-category peaks in a 208-kilometre stage. One climb every 20 kilometres, at a classical pace.
Catalonia is not a community that is very prone to cycling competitions. Races disappeared, the fans turned to other sports and higher level cyclists did not emerge either (Marc Soler, the retired Purito Rodríguez).
But, according to the organizer of the race Javier Guillén, Barcelona meets all the requirements. «The past of tradition, with the Olympic Games. The leadership present as world capital. And the green future by bicycle as a means of transport.
La Vuelta 2023 will go up to Andorra for a first high end (Arinsal), it will go down the Mediterranean coast with an incursion into empty spainthe Teruel páramos where the Javalambre Observatory is located, which launched the Madrazo sparrow in 2019, and will continue along the coastal Burriana, Oliva before the first big slope, Xorret del Catí and its extreme 22 percent ramp where Alaphilippe won in 2017.
Tour of La Vuelta 2023
From August 26 to September 17
racecourse
the zarzuela
The phase
of the ten ports
Upper San Lorenzo
from El Escorial
stage 20
(September 16, 2023)
Height of Santa Maria de la Alameda
Height of Santa Maria de la Alameda
Beginning:
manzanares el real
tour of
The Return 2023
From August 26 to September 17
Zarzuela Racecourse
The stage of the ten ports
stage 20
(September 16, 2023)
Beginning:
manzanares
the real
In transfer to the plateau, there will be time trial in Valladolid (25 kilometers next to the Pisuerga). Pucela was the venue for the first stage of the round in 1935, starting from Madrid.
It then climbs to the Laguna Negra, with the cobbled streets of Vinuesa and the summit in the province of Soria. After passing through Zaragoza (48 times already), the peloton will go to Tourmalet, a mythical peak, a world reference port not only for cycling, but a symbol of so many things. You climb up Bareges, the least common, and another colossus awaits in the French Pyrenees, the Aubisque, 17 kilometers of mountain cut by a knife along a winding and famous road.
In the Navarrese Pyrenees, the cyclists of the Vuelta will tour a port with mysticism, the Larrau, scene of the final debacle of Miguel Induráin in the stage that ended in Pamplona, at the gates of his house as a tribute to the Tour that he lost to Bjarne Riis.
It is the Tour of the great ports. In the third week wait el Angliru, Category appointment, the first port of Spain in hardness with its 12 kilometers, its average slope of 10.6% and its pain in Cueña les Cabres (23%).
The Cross of Linares
The Vuelta does not want to lose the habit of discoveries and in 2023 there will be a new high end: the port of the Cross of Linaresin the center of Asturias along the Senda del Oso, 8.3 kilometers at 8.6%.
On the descent to Madrid the most exciting novelty of the round is announced. A stage through the El Escorial area, with 10 third category ports in 208 kilometers. In that chain, Santa María de la Alameda, Robledondo and Cruz Verde repeat, a peak every twenty kilometers, a classic level of the Liège or Tour of Flanders type that the organization intends to become a justice of the peace for the race in the style of what happened in 2021 with that stage in Galicia designed by Pereiro and which ended with the withdrawal of ‘Supermán’ López, a Movistar cyclist at the time.
“It is a Vuelta full of emblems on the mountain: some that have made history, others called to make it,” summarizes Guillén.
