Velefique rises out of the Tabernas desert, the driest place in Europe and the backdrop to a few hundred westerns that were never filmed anywhere near Arizona. What Michael Blann came for is higher up: the hairpins stacked against the flank of the Sierra de los Filabres, one directly above the next, in a landscape with no trees to hide them.
Thirty kilometres and 1,358 metres sounds enormous, and the average is the most misleading figure in this collection. The first fifteen kilometres are a desert false flat at barely two per cent. The climb proper is the thirteen that follow, and those average close to seven and hold four consecutive kilometres above nine.
We list the full ascent from Tabernas because that is the road, and because the approach is part of why the top feels the way it does. But anyone planning it should know where the climbing actually starts, and that the gentle number at the top of this page belongs to the desert, not to the mountain.
Photography
Michael Blann
Rider
Every SWI is laid up for one rider — their weight, their power, the way they actually ride. One uninterrupted carbon shell, formed in a single mould, built for a body rather than a size chart. It is the whole reason the same mountain feels different underneath two frames.
Michael Blann
For the people who live beneath them the great European ranges are simply a way of life. For everyone else they are scenery. For a cyclist they are none of those things — they are an appointment with your own limits, and the reason a road that goes nowhere useful is worth riding at all.
Michael Blann has spent years photographing the climbs that made the sport: the Alps, the Dolomites, the Pyrenees, the Ardennes. The pictures are landscape photography of a very high order, but the book is really about what those places do to the people who ride them — an argument built from light, weather and altitude, with recollections from professional riders threaded through it.
If you have ever ridden one of these roads, or intend to, it is the closest thing to being back on it.
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