Foldable Bikes Party: Vuelta's first major summit finish to provide early sort-out

Tuesday, 28 August 2018

Vuelta's first major summit finish to provide early sort-out – Preview

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After the cols of Andorra in 2017, and the gut-wrenchingly steep Mirador de Ezaro the year before that, the Vuelta a España organisers have once again decided to test the GC favourites' climbing legs early in the first week – this time with a first-time ascent to the Puerto de Alfacar in the sierras of Alfaguara, overlooking the city of Granada, on stage 4 on Tuesday.

Averaging a comparatively benign 5.4 per cent, as climbs go the Alfacar can be summed up in one word: odd. The 12km climb has three markedly different segments, starting out with a tricky series of switchbacks on an A road, then changing to some difficult, technically challenging 'ramps' through the streets of Alfacar and another neighbouring town, Fuente Grande. Part three of the climb is a more straightforward series of medium-difficulty hairpins on a rock-strewn mountainside, on a road that flattens out notably near the summit as it reaches some dense woodland.

While the town of Alfacar is well known in the region for its excellent bread, and Fuente Grande for its natural spring water, these sierras are arguably most famous for a much bleaker reason: this was an area near Granada where hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Republican prisoners were summarily executed by General Franco's death squads during the 1936-39 Civil War.

The Vuelta's route comes within a few kilometres of the main area of mass graves where the bodies of those executed there in August 1936 are buried, including that of Spain's most famous poet, Federico García Lorca. It's just one area of unmarked Civil War graves of the some 120,000 murdered Republicans that remain throughout Spain.

On a more cheerful note, the Vuelta's ascent to Alfacar comes at the end of what is unquestionably the second hardest stage of the Vuelta's first week, with more than 3,300 metres of vertical climbing, prior to stage 9's ascent of the Covatilla, which has just over 4,000 metres of uphill.

The first challenge of the stage 4 is the category 1 ascent of La Cabra, which brings the riders inland from the Mediterranean coastline and which – technically – is 17 kilometres of steady uphill. The full ascent, on a narrow but not excessively steep mountain road, however, is much longer: 39 kilometres in total, from the coastal town of Almuñécar, 42 kilometres into the 161.4km-long stage, rising to 1,330 metres above sea level after 81 kilometres covered.