The Bicycle Adventure Club - Come Ride With Us!

Canary Islands 2018 - Volcanos, Beaches and Mountains

June 1st to June 16th

Ride Coordinator: Nelson Diaz
Report by: Bill Scanlon

Palm trees in the morning, cacti at noon, volcanoes or lush forests in the afternoon —  the BAC 2018 Canary Islands tour will be remembered for the astonishing range of ecosystems pedaled through every day of this two-week tour.

Thighs burning, eyes agog, we pedaled to the top of hundreds of craggy skyward-pointing false summits. More often than not, we were rewarded with astonishing scenery, flowers growing out of cliffsides, tiny villages in white or pastels, pine forests when you least expected them, unfamiliar variations of succulents and mosses.

Busy cyclists who don’t have time to visit, say, Hawaii, Utah, Tuscany, and Sicily, can get all their scenery needs met in a trip to four islands of the Canaries.  “The first island was windy, the second island was dry, then Gran Canaria had all the pine forests,” said Pat.

We visited Lanzarote, Fuerteventura, Gran Canaria and Tenerife in the Canary Islands, which is a seven-island Atlantic Ocean archipelago 800 miles south of Spain and 100 miles west of Morocco.

The trade winds can be cruel when they’re in your face at 16 miles per hour, but more often than not we used them to our advantage — pedaling primarily from northeast to southwest as we island-hopped from east to west.

The cycling was challenging — 60,000 vertical feet if all the long routes were chosen. “There certainly was a lot of up,” Bob said. “More than 100 or 200 feet per mile is challenging. Every ride was that, or more.” But there were choices of shorter routes on several days, and the toughest day — 7,000 feet to the base of a volcano — was voluntary.

Ride coordinator Nelson Diaz collaborated with Simon Proffitt, owner of Iberocycle to plot a challenging, creative route through the islands.  When Nelson had to bow out unexpectedly due to a family illness, Aaron Rosenthal and his wife Janet Oliver took over the leadership seamlessly.

During happy hours, which featured local beer, wine and tapas, Simon showed slides and talked about the history and culture of the Canaries, including the mysterious original inhabitants, the Gaunches, who were either from north Africa, Scandinavia or, perhaps, a distant galaxy.  “I have been on bike trips all over the world,” said Brian, one of four tour members from Great Britain. “I have never seen one with this level of detail — the amount of information on history, festivals, and route changes.”

Lanzarote had the worst winds, but that is where we climbed through a volcanic tube to an underground lake and where we visited the home of celebrated artist-architect Cesar Manrique, who lived, magnificently, in a volcanic bubble. Our routes also took us by several wafting wind structures, also designed by the prolific Manrique. An optional bus tour drove us through the barren beauty of lava fields.

Fuerteventura literally means “Strong Winds.” At the winery we visited there, each grape vine had its own little stone fort to protect it from the trade winds, and a hallowed-out bottom to give it a chance to capture water and reach nutrients amidst the lava.

The most daunting — and therefore most memorable and exhilarating — ride was from our idyllic mountain inn in Tejeda on Gran Canaria to the port at Agaete where our ferry to Tenerife was going to leave at 4 pm, with us or without us. The ride began in rainfall, and after 10 uphill miles, fingers were chilled to the marrow and fog shrouded the landscape.  Don’t let the latitude fool you. The Canaries are too far south for the Gulf Stream to warm them. Typical days had highs in the 70s and lows, well ... let’s just say that many of us were unprepared. We soldiered on, and then there was that moment when the sun came out, the fingers warmed, and a brilliant vista burst out of the fog and the canopy of clouds. The view was worth every tight curve around every jutting hill, every 12 or 16 percent pitch. There were effusions of yellow and purple flowers, cacti, palm trees, then more cacti and more palm trees as we rolled through idyllic countryside where clusters of houses were mushed into the cliff. We skirted around rock slides, using every precaution, and were rewarded with 15 miles of coastline viewed from above — way above. Once, we descended so close to the coast that we could read the lettering on our ferry.  Alas, it was back up another ridge, down again tantalizingly close to the port, and up another ridge.  For the record, we all made the 4 pm ferry.  Our final island, Tenerife, is so mountainous and sweeping that professional cycling teams often use it for springtime training, as evidenced by “Team Sky” written on the refrigerator in the bike storage room of the Parador. The trip up to the volcano had some frightful numbers, but by then a ride that would have scared us back home seemed like just another chance to prove how tough we were becoming. We climbed 5,300 feet, had lunch at a cafe with magnificent views of the volcano, then climbed another 1,700 to the base of Teide — at more than 12,000 feet, the highest mountain in Spain (the Canaries are a semi-autonomous region of Spain). The next morning, we hopped a gondola up toward the volcano’s summit, then, in sandals and sneakers, scrambled the last 1,000 feet to the summit.

A spectacular adventure overall, punctuated by the breathtaking changes in landscape. “The scenery changed so much, in a matter of meters,” said Aaron, “from volcanic lava, to pine forests to wildflowers.”  This is a trip for those who truly enjoy the challenges of climbing and the thrills of descending, especially when the rewards of incredible scenic beauty and diversity abound with virtually every pedal stroke.

 Unforgettable.