Bikepacking Europe - Spain - Part 3 (Córdoba to Cazorla)

In this video, we continue our ride through Southern Spain leaving Córdoba and making our way Cazorla. We find ourselves the most amazing wild camp spot so far in our trip. Then hop on the Via Verde Del Aceite, a beautiful rail trail in the Andalusian olive country which takes us from Baena to Jaen. From Jaen, we follow the European Divide trail to Cazorla.

Link to route:
Córdoba to Jaen: https://ridewithgps.com/routes/49716902
Jaen to Cazorla: https://ridewithgps.com/routes/49733985

#bikepacking #bicycletouring #europe #spain #europeandividetrail #viaverde
#andalucia #edt

good morning welcome back to another video this morning we are leaving Cordoba we are going to a little town called Ayen which is about 140 ks away so it’ll take us 2 days to get there today we haven’t booked any accommodation cuz we’re hoping to find a place to camp i think that’s all the info we have to share right now stay tuned well keep watching the video hopefully it’ll be a good one hola so we’re at lunch right now this is our little tapest that they gave us yeah we came with this little bar in a extremely small town called Castro Delio it’s about 40 km from Cordova now we made a sandwich for lunch but sometimes if if a like a warm lunch presents itself at the right time we’ll have that and then have our sandwich for dinner which works quite well cuz by the end of the day we’re really cooking is a can of be a high effort activity they served us this little tapas thing which is like a he said it’s like a chicken in sauce it’s really good it’s like a stewed chicken and we ordered a couple of other local dishes so we’ll show you when they arrive all right guys we are car loading for lunch we kind of accidentally ordered heaps of Yeah we forgot we ordered I mean I didn’t realize we ordered chibies but we have another dish coming what we want to show you is this dish it’s called gambas the ali ali which is basically like garlic bronze it’s sizzling garlic bronze i am happy to be here how’s it in the with the bread is it really garlicky yeah it’s so good nice really salty really we just did our shopping for breakfast at the little in Baya which is like a another Aldi basically um and then right next to the little is this Ve that we’re going to take to Hyen Ve del A i will have to check my pronunciation basically it means olives yeah olive oil root we’ve already been seeing lots of olive trees apparently this is going to be even more and then there’s some more and then there’s some more it’s currently 5:50 the time sun goes down around what 7 7 yeah yeah so we have about an hour before the sun goes down and now we are looking for a place to camp tonight lil’s found like a like some a historic landmark which is an old set of bunkers and it just looks like a stony kind of outcrop with no olive trees around which is what So we’re going to check that out which is in 10ks all right guys sun is going down we are so close to checking out this camp spot that Lily’s picked it’s this bunker that’s up on this hill right there we just had some um locals walk by us on a close by like um dirt road and they were like “Where are you going?” And we were like “Oh just to check out the bunker.” And then they were like “Are you trying to sleep there?” And we were like “Yeah.” And then they said “Yeah yeah it’s good it’s safe just try and find a flat bit to sleep on otherwise it’s all good and no one would disturb us.” So yeah we got locals approval all right there’s no way our loaded bikes are going up this steep bit bit of a scramble but there’s this perfect flat ground for our tent and we have a insanely stunning view w Look at this this is amazing look at this view so come and look at this bunker to get in you go there’s like because there’s like a little tunnel down there but you must go over to this big one so let’s go have a look at that and just a side note is that they’ve lit up the castle it’s hard to see but wow i will remember this forever and I’m glad I have a camera to record it film it so that I can revisit whenever I want and be like “Wow I camped there.” All right let’s go have check out this spot i don’t want to go inside cuz it’s dark and so there’s stairs and you could very easily go down and sleep in there if you really want this is insane that is freaky they’re bunny okay yeah well some down if you had a baby you could sleep in here nice what a cool spot and we can see the lights of the tree good morning and we’ve just woken up from a really nice sleep and what a view to wake up to there’s a castle there it’s just so cool that there’s a castle how did you sleep today then i slept really well i think my sleeping bag’s better than yours what oh it’s a damaged one mine my sleeping bag oh your sleeping bag sorry so yeah this is breakfast a high protein shake we’ve gone for an easy breakfast because the cleanup is less and we’re getting and there’s a coffee shop yeah so close i’m just so amazed by this view so beautiful good morning we just had a terrible coffee actually it was after like having the most amazing campsite and and me being so excited that there was a coffee shop 1 km down the road the coffee was really bad today we’re riding 65 km to Hyen on the Verde Ait yes look at this beautiful olive trees around me hola so the V this Verde is really well reviewed and it has apparently the the maximum gradient we’re going to do is about 3° which is like it’s so good compared to what we’ve had yesterday yesterday was like I don’t I don’t know we did over,000 m of climbing and I’m I’m going to say 700 of that was in the first like 30 40k it was really rough um so yeah really excited and then tonight we have a bed and a shower that was extremely cheap so yeah follow us along i think we’ll have hopefully a pretty uneventful beautiful day i almost forgot to uh mentioned this we’re actually celebrating something today we’re very close to hitting a total of 1,000 kilometers on the bike oh my god i did that onehanded and that was not pleasant 97 98 9 1,000 kilometers completed let me wow what an accomplishment yeah sure you could drive that in one day you could drop you could ride your bike for 3 weeks and at 1000k mark this is what I see along with this um rail station maybe old rail Guys look at the mountains in the backdrop amazing we think we have made it at least close to our accommodation it’s like a labyrinth trying to find the place good morning we are currently leaving Hyen the city we stayed at that’s it right behind me we came on a Sunday night so a lot of things were closed but it’s really a pretty big city actually yeah it’s a lot bigger than we thought it would be but sadly we didn’t stay for too long so today we’ve got an unknown amount of kilometers we have in the next two days we’ve got 100 km to ride we’re going to a town called Coola which is yeah 100ks away but we have about 1,700 m of elevation which is a lot which is a bit more than what we have done previously over 100k period and the next 5ks is downhill for us which we love that means we have to go up and then yeah there’s so much more climbing afterwards so we’re loosely following the European Divide Trail today and the only real changes we’ve made is like when it takes off-road fire trails type of things but like it starts and connects to the same main road so you’re just like adding pointless caves on gravel so when we’ve seen sections like that we’ve just changed the route so that we’re just riding on the road uh just to shorten the distance a bit oh my god look at the mountains go go go go go go wow this is stunning we’re on the hiker bikes I suspect we’ll be doing this a lot today have about 15 ks of riding uphill and currently this is 11% gradient road which is not much on a road bike but um on a loaded touring bike it’s cooked so as I said we are following parts of the European Divide Trail today and currently this section it took us through a gated private property which is this farm like olive tree farm and we are on this for like 5 and 1/2ks just rolling up and down hills but mostly just climbing but the risk going into gated sections is like what if at the end of this there’s another gate and that gate is shut you know how are we going to get out so fingers crossed one we don’t get into trouble riding through here and two there’s no closed gate on the other side if we had known this section existed we would have planned our route around it but we just didn’t know i try to like use Google street maps as much as I can and the last point along here I street mapped was actually on a proper road with houses next to either side so I just assumed rest of the way would be like that but it’s not and um we just bit the bullet and decided we’ll um ride through this gate where GPS is pointing to it all right on the electrolytes yeah do you have some sort of Cuz I’m a sweaty boy and you’re so sweaty right now glistening i don’t know if I should put it on the video about how salty my t-shirt gets i might drop a photo on the screen to show you how much salt my sweat releases it’s ridiculous you could farm me for salt success it’s an open gate but even if that was closed you could very easily go around as far as I can see olive trees literally like all the way to the horizon it’s olive trees hello so we’ve just been riding quite hard today and we just finished setting up camp we’re in this beautiful Ollie Grove the sun is setting or it’s already set and um we’re up on a hill but um tucked away in this corner how was today for you Lil it was good it was lots of climbing probably the most that we’ve done is that right no we’ve done in Lisbon we did a day but it was like 1,300 I think all right okay well I’ll have to check yeah but we did about 960 almost almost 970 m of elevation total elevation to it it was just some really brutal hiker bikes cuz we’re on the rail definitely the most we’ve hiker biked yeah on the rail trail it’s just like nice easy gradient but on on the European Divide it’s not so it was our first day on the European Divide mostly off-road yeah almost entirely off-road little tiny bits of single track and not smooth gravel I must say no pretty coarse big chunky gravel but um perfect for our bikes yeah perfect for our bikes and they are I think we did really well i’m Tomorrow is going to be tough but we have we’re staying in this really cute town at the bottom of the mountain range that we’re going into for two nights also today we got our first glimpse of the mountain range that we’re going into uh which is called Sierra de Kazula and we saw some really we’ve been really going through the mountains seeing beautiful mountains today but what has concerned us slightly is that there’s snow on some of them which we did not expect ice yeah so we will have to do some research yeah because if it’s if it’s like snowing in the park which it does do over winter we don’t have gear for snow yeah we do get cold at there’s been a couple of nights where it’s been a bit cold for us um and we’re like wearing all our layers and if it did get a bit colder we could get away by like putting some hot water in an algae and then putting it in our sleeping bag we haven’t had to do that yet but I think snow is a whole different game uh yeah I think we need to ask some locals what they would recommend cuz it would we have to go around the mountain range regardless so it’s whether we go like take a shorter lower altitude route or we go like across the top and like really bite the bullet and just do it we’ll find out keep watching okay shower time and there’s a tostada with olive oil and sugar olive orange honey is it me no it’s auka oh that’s sugar yeah mantia butter butter and marmalade tomato pate anyway uh it’s another day we successfully camped at that olive grove that was a success we left a bit early because we heard some Yeah we heard some uh chain saw noise i heard some crunching you heard some crunching okay on footprints crunch footsteps crunching and then we started hearing some like more activity around the farm and so we quickly And the activity starts around around 8:30 in the morning so next time we have to camp in an olive grove we know to leave there by 8:30 or like at least 8:00 i would have seen people come set up so we ordered the most expensive tostada on the menu oh was it how much was it no it was like it’s like 380 or something yeah it’s salmon and avocado and goats cheese and when I translated goat’s cheese on um Google translate it came up as goat hair roll and I was a bit dubious and the guy said queso queso so I was like a goat cheese that’s so yummy we’re in Kazola we just got to our apartment that we booked look at that look how Where is it am I look how close to the castle on the hill we are and just picture how much climbing we had to do to get to our apartment to be this close to a castle on the hill a lot a lot of climbing

Bikepacking Europe – Spain – Part 3 (Córdoba to Cazorla)

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