Beach-hopping by bike on Spain’s Costa de la Luz

On the seafront in Tarifa stands a tall, metallic weather vane fashioned into the shape of a fish. It indicates which of the winds that shape everything from conversation to mood in this singular corner of Andalusia is in the ascendancy.

In the midst of a stifling summer, locals might pray for a Poniente, the northwesterly that brings cooler air from the Atlantic. Given our intended direction of travel, and the scepticism about the enterprise from a certain member of my two-person party, it’s an easterly Levante tailwind that I’m hoping for.

My 12-year-old daughter and I have come to the Costa de la Luz (the Coast of Light) to test out a newly launched cycling tour connecting Tarifa and the ancient port city of Cádiz, roughly 100km up the coast. It’s off-road (using a combination of gravel cycle paths, 4×4 tracks, asphalt country lanes and forest trails), self-guided, implausibly picturesque — and not her bag at all. In a bid to convince her to join me, I confess that I may have subtly reframed a biking holiday with beaches as a beach holiday with bikes.

The glut of sand that we encounter almost immediately upon touching down in Gibraltar helps maintain the pretence: a broad, golden strip extending in an almost unbroken run all the way to the Portuguese border, and massed intermittently into forest-swallowing superdunes.

The tour has been devised by Dan Hirst, director of the Spanish wing of UK cycling operator Saddle Skedaddle. Hailing from the Pennines, the bearded 53-year-old has been in the country nearly 25 years and lives on a small holding in the hills above Tarifa. He has the calm, contented mien of someone who spends as little time as possible in an office.

Yet we find him ever so slightly on edge. Opening up what amounts to his backyard to touring cyclists is not something he’s taken lightly — and he’s eager that, as the first to test his painstakingly devised route, we don’t miss any of the highlights.

Hence an impromptu two-wheeled tour of the walled streets and seafront of his adopted home town, culminating at the diminutive Isla de Tarifa, dangling like a pocket watch off mainland Europe’s southernmost point. To the east of its blustery causeway is the Mediterranean; to the west, the barrelling surf of the Atlantic, broiling, as it does year-round, with kitesurfers and windsurfers.

Launch your rig here, judge the wind right and you could be in Africa for a mint tea and honey-sweetened Moroccan chebakia within the hour. This is truly a coastline at the crossroads of both continents and oceans — and the blood spilled over centuries in innumerable Phoenician, Roman, Moorish and Napoleonic conflicts is testament to its strategic significance.

Dan accompanies us as far as the Punta Paloma sand dune, bisected by a little road that’s defended from subsumption by the coastal equivalent of a snowplough. We leave our bikes at the roadside, clamber up to the serrated ridge of the dune and look back across the sweep of bay to Tarifa and the Strait of Gibraltar. Through the haze, close enough to pass for a curve of the coastline, is the spiny silhouette of Morocco’s Rif mountains, clustering around Tangier.

Dan gives our rental gravel bikes — mine a carbon-fibre Giant Revolt, my daughter’s a flat-handlebar Rove from Giant’s sister brand Liv — a final once over, and assists me in uploading the four days’ of route maps to the GPS app on my phone. Henceforth we’re to be guided not by Dan’s laid-back promptings but by the assertive commands of a voice my daughter inexplicably christens “Bob”.

Our destination for the first night is the seafront town of Zahara de los Atunes, around 20 surprisingly diverse kilometres up the coast. At times, we find ourselves skimming across the sand on purpose-built wooden cycleways that twist and dip like vintage fairground rollercoasters; at others, manoeuvring through tightly packed forests of umbrella pines.

Ascending a pebbly, wild flower-lined track, I spot a broad-winged griffon vulture riding the thermals with a languid menace. Further on, a hard-packed sandy trail gives way to a path through fields filled with mahogany-coloured Retinto cows. Prized for the tenderness and flavour of their meat, these lyre-horned creatures are climate-adapted paragons of inactivity, and seem to set the mood for a coastline that, for all the dense layers of martial history, remains deeply peaceful.

The sun is beginning to dip as we round the headland and enter Zahara. The town’s “de los Atunes” suffix is the first nod to what is to become a dominant motif of the trip. Atlantic bluefin tuna have been fished here for as long as humans have been scratching around these parts. An ancestral technique that built on the open boats and lines of the early hunter-gatherers and was refined by the Phoenicians and Romans miraculously endures to this day: the Almadraba.

It consists of an elaborate network of vertical nets, strung between boats and staked to the seabed with anchors. These are set up in spring to trap the tuna as they migrate to the Med to spawn. It’s pollution-free and selective rather than indiscriminate, with only a limited number of adult-sized tuna ensnared.

The tradition, and its quarry, infuse seemingly every part of life on this coastline; a cultural identity as much as a lifeblood industry. They’re celebrated in azulejo decorative tiles on the exterior of churches and in artwork in galleries. I even encounter a shop selling sculptures made from the rust of the discarded anchors that underpin the process.

By chance, the restaurant of our first hotel, the Antonio Zahara, is one of the Costa de la Luz’s best for sampling the fruits of the Almadraba. It sits, like a chiringuito (beach bar), with its toes in the sand but has the elegance, menu — and prices — of an a la moda Madrileño restaurant, with a ryokan-style aesthetic big on blond wood and softly lit alcoves.

We feast on velvety grilled tuna loin and tuna belly delicately spiced with wakame seaweed, then retreat to our room — with me insisting that it’s definitely supermarket-plundered picnics from hereon in.

One of the great luxuries of the multi-day cycling tour is the daily luggage transfer. But having enjoyed a lazy morning at the hotel awaiting the passing of a rather spirited squall, we almost miss the 11am pick-up and I have to sprint down to the lobby, apologising profusely to the driver. 

We’ll next see our bags in the hilltop town of Vejer de la Frontera, half a day’s ride both inland and upwards. Like a bored diva, the wind clears the skies of its dark clouds with a nonchalant swipe and it’s beneath an unblemished canvas of blue that we set off.

Beginning in the mid-1990s, a series of long-distance cycle paths began to spring up across Europe. It’s one of these — the 10-country-spanning EuroVelo 8, which links Cádiz to Athens — that we find ourselves following for much of the morning. The smooth asphalt partially compensates for the headwind, but it’s a relief to trade the blustery seafront for the birdsong-filled calm of La Breña y Marismas del Barbate Natural Park and gradually ascend through the Aleppo pine and juniper forest to Vejer.

There are some who insist this pueblo blanco looks down on others not just in topography. Two sweaty tourists pushing bikes through narrow streets and asking in pidgin Spanish about the whereabouts of their hotel (Bob seems as perplexed as we are) is a decent test of latent snootiness. Yet we encounter nothing but cordiality, and even get a little round of applause from one elderly señora, ignorant of the fact that we’d walked most of the climb.

La Casa del Califa is eventually located in Plaza de España, the principal (but, confusingly, not the loftiest) of the town’s squares. Statuesque date palms and orange trees alive with chattering Eurasian tree sparrows cluster around the plaza’s decoratively tiled central fountain, and there are glimpses through the encircling buildings of the wind-scoured plain far below.

Echoing the configuration of the town in which it sits, the hotel is a warren of courtyards, terraces and intimate, centuries-old buildings bursting with colour and fragrance. It’s a homage to all things Moorish, with wall-mounted tapestries and a restaurant serving baba ganoush and richly flavoursome lamb tagines. Lurking somewhere in the vicinity is an indulgent hammam, though, in truth, we’re too weary to search it out.

But we awake with fresh legs and a renewed sense of vigour. Gravity is on our side, the wind is at our back and some of Andalusia’s most magnificent beaches lie between us and our final destination.

Freewheeling back down to sea level, we risk the wrath of Bob to take a minor detour to the Faro de Trafalgar. The lighthouse rises from the windblown beachgrass of this sandy cape, a graceful white beacon built little more than half a century after Lord Nelson was outwitting the combined French and Spanish fleet a few miles offshore — and taking a fatal shot from a French musketeer for his troubles.

Much of the poignancy of the spot, it’s fair to say, is lost on my daughter, whose eagerness for her first swim of the trip is by now all-consuming. We find the ideal place a few kilometres short of the riverside town of Conil de la Frontera, our penultimate overnight spot. This is the popular Spanish surf resort of Playa del Palmar, a lone strip of driftwood cafés, bijou surf schools and flip-flopped serenity. We tie up our bikes and charge, shrieking theatrically, into the surf. As we’re drying off, a group of riders canters past, their pony’s hooves kicking up sand.

There’s a faint Yellow Brick Road vibe to the final run-in to Cádiz. Rounding the estuarine expanse of Parque Natural Bahía de Cádiz, with its once-thriving salt pans and marshland dotted with solitary egrets, the city suddenly appears on the horizon, gleaming at the end of a ruler-strait isthmus of golden sand.

With my creaking, middle-age joints, I’m a decent fit for the Tin Man, while Dorothy zips on ahead through the flower-festooned dunes, energised by the proximity to the finish. Our target is the Old Town at the far tip of a sea-encircled city that for much of its 3,000-year history was an island. Somewhere amid the elegant jumble of towers and terracotta domes lies our hotel, La Casa de las Cuatro Torres.

The four eponymous towers rise from each corner of the imposing neoclassical property, which was constructed during Cádiz’s 18th-century heyday, when the city grew wealthy from trade with the Americas. The forest of ornate torres that sprouted from the grand merchants’ houses were both status signifiers and — through a complex system of coloured flags used to communicate and trade with approaching ships — income multipliers.

I’m fascinated by this mercantile history, and eager to explore a city that survived Barbary raids and conflagrations, that launched two of Columbus’s great voyages, was raided by Drake and changed hands from Phoenicians to Carthaginians, Romans to Visigoths and Moors.

My daughter . . . less so. “Two words,” she says, putting her foot down both literally and metaphorically. “Beach holiday!” 

So I save my exploration for the following morning, and over several happy, sunlit hours we work our way along Cádiz’s dazzlingly lit western shore, playing in the surf, eating ice creams alongside tinto de verano-quaffing Gaditanos in chic chiringuitos and generally just feeling rather smug about the not-inconsiderable distances we’ve coaxed out of our legs over the week.

When our transfer back to Gibraltar airport arrives the following afternoon, I’m not surprised to find Dan driving. He’s desperate to hear how it’s all gone. No explanation is necessary, however; the broad smile of the sceptic in my party is all the feedback he needs.

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