The Girona Gravel 100 — Empordà and the Gavarres

Girona ends and the gravel begins almost simultaneously. A short paved climb out of the old city — the kind of ramp that clears the last apartment buildings and delivers you onto open hillside before you've had time to think about it — and then the road dissolves into loose earth and the descent begins toward the Ter.

The river is the first thing the landscape offers. Wide, slow, fringed by willows and reeds, cutting east through agricultural land before it reaches the sea. You follow it briefly before the route swings northeast and the Empordà opens up.

This is farming country, and it looks like it. Wide gravel tracks between wheat fields and olive groves. Stone farmhouses set back from the road with no affectation — no renovation signs, no agritourism panels, just walls and shutters and the smell of turned earth. The occasional village announces itself from a distance by a Romanesque bell tower, which is usually the tallest thing in the landscape because nothing has been built taller since. The comparison to Tuscany is made by everyone who rides here and it is not wrong: the same rolling agricultural light, the same economy of ornament.

The Empordà section is fast. The tracks are hard-packed, the gradient almost absent, and the temptation to ride it like a criterium is real. The second half of the route will clarify whether that was a good idea.

South of Cassà de la Selva, the terrain changes register. The Gavarres are a compact mountain range between the Empordà plain and the coast — nothing dramatic in terms of altitude, but specific in character: cork oak and pine on slopes of loose limestone, old stone paths that have been used long enough to know where they're going, viewpoints that appear without warning above the forest canopy. The climbs are short and punchy rather than long and grinding. The descents are technical enough to require attention — loose surface, tight corners, the kind of exit that doesn't forgive a late line.

From the top of the Gavarres, on a clear day, you can see the whole territory at once: the Empordà plain rolling east to the Mediterranean, the Montgri massif rising above the coastal wetlands, and to the north the first ridges of the Pyrenees, grey and unhurried on the horizon.

The return to Girona follows the Ter valley back into the city, the medieval walls of the old town appearing ahead as the greenway flattens out. The loop closes at the river, which is where it began.

A hundred kilometres of gravel that covers three distinct landscapes in a single day: river corridor, agricultural plain, forested hills. None of them extraordinary in isolation. Together, and in this order, they make a very good ride.

Route

100 km · +1,350 m · Gravel

Route follows the same itinerary used by the Traka 100, Girona's annual gravel event held each May.