The Beginning...
...of a publication blending my experiences of cycling in Central Spain, and perhaps some wider reflections as an anthropologist living in Madrid.
So, where to start? At the beginning, of course.
Around half a year ago I relocated to Madrid. I did so as part of a PhD in Anthropology to conduct long-term ethnographic fieldwork amongst a community in the city. I’m still here now, and being in the midst of fieldwork is perhaps what drives my desire to start a new project. A necessary outlet for a stream of words. Mi arroyo de palabras.
I came here for my research. I never intended to move to Madrid for cycling, landscapes, or even the culture. What I’ve ended up borderline obsessed with here, however, is cycling, the landscape, and to some extent the culture. Culture is a slippery term, and I think there are huge merits to the Spanish ways of life, but I also still feel like enough of an outsider that I have not yet fully formed my opinion, nor perhaps do I deserve one. Maybe this will shift with time.
I fell in love with cycling here pretty intensely and early on. I bought my first bike less than a month after moving, and the very same day I ventured into one of my favourite spots in Madrid, the expansive park Casa de Campo. It’s something I’ve spent a lot of time doing here, along with building the bikes necessary to do so, planning routes, and now gearing up towards my first multi-day camping tours. I feel like everyone in my life has had to put up with me banging on about it. So, if you’re one of those people reading - sorry… and also thank you! I believe there is enough of you with some interest in my little escapades that there is merit to building a space to share them. Maybe in doing so I won’t feel the need to verbalise so much and talk your ear off.
Primarily this publication, and whatever it evolves into, will be used to share some details about the various cycling trips I’ve been on, plan to go on, and some reflections about them. Since I moved to Madrid, I have been on several journeys into the dramatic landscapes which surround the city. Today I received the final parts I needed to build my bikepacking rig, and I’m now planning several multi-day adventures that I imagine will yield similar stories.
I started this journey with a new friend, Tom. I met Tom through a mutual friend as he arrived in Madrid at pretty much the same time as me. Tom too was interested in cycling, and in a similar way. Well, my niche is retro 90s mountain bikes (MTBs) turned into all terrain bikes (ATBs), whereas his niche is vintage road bikes, particularly pretty steel ones from France. We both cycled regularly around the cities we had previously called home - this was London for me, and Mexico City for Tom. I think especially since we both expected to have a limited time living in Madrid, we both wanted to make the most of this by getting out of the city and exploring the more rural locales surrounding Madrid.
I feel like our take on cycling is one I’ve not really seen in Spain. People take their bikes very seriously here, with most people riding either high-end gravel bikes, MTBs, or road bikes as fast as they possibly can. Either with or without battery assistance. Both within and outside the city, when it comes to leisure, people want to go fast and then go home. For commuting, most people don’t own their own bike in Madrid. Madrid is a pretty hilly city and so people rely upon electric city bikes (shoutout BiciMad) for getting around and experiencing the urban environment. I don’t know if I’m just more obsessed with private property than the madrileños, but I really like having my own bike no matter how cheap and convenient the city bikes may be.
Then there are delivery riders, who again tend to ride electric MTBs. Unfortunately, you never see them outside of the city on leisure, or even within the city for that matter. I know you probably wonder, ‘but how would you know?’ Well, you rarely see electric mountain bikes in the city without the big insulated bright yellow Glovo or bright green UberEats bags, and there’s some telltale signs that a bike is used for deliveries. Namely the fact that the battery is usually cling-filmed and taped to the frame in a way to stop it being stolen and to protect it from the elements, the tyres are worn, and the bike might be dusty. You never see these bikes without the bags. This is a topic I hope to explore a bit further in my thesis, but can maybe share a little here too in the future. It’s all possible.
So I digress. Tom and I seemed to have a compatible interest in exploring the landscapes around Madrid, on bikes we both share a middling obsession with. Tom on his 90s French road bike with the skinniest tyres I’ve ever seen, and me on heavier old steel MTBs with modern components that are pretty capable on the trail and on the road, but not really specialised towards either. We weren’t going anywhere so fast, but we still wanted to make a decent pace, see some of the neighbouring landscapes, small towns, and as it happened reservoirs (or presas) made a pretty good focal point. Once we took our first ride to the north of the city and to a small town and presa called El Pardo, we were hooked.
This route involved following the Río Manzanares northwards out of the city, and I believe we followed that river from close to its mountainous source all the way to where it converges and is replaced (at least in name) by the Río Jarama. Maybe I’ll follow that river in the future too. For the tail end of Summer, all of Autumn, and even a bit of Winter 2024 we went out on these old bikes pretty much every weekend. We tended to cover 50-80 kilometers, sometimes cycling directly out of the city and other times getting a cheap short-distance train (shout out Cercanías) outside of the city and into nearby towns and villages.
The landscapes surrounding Madrid were ones I’d never really come across before. They vary drastically between short distances and between seasons, blending forests, rivers, grass plains, farmland, ranches, rocky dry deserts, mountains, sharp cliffs, and rolling hills. They don’t seem to have much recognition by anyone outside of Madrid either. When you think of ‘picturesque Spain’ maybe your mind goes to Galicia, Catalonia or the Basque Country. The interior feels a little overlooked, but without good reason. The land here is stunning, and I hope I can demonstrate that through subsequent entries.
And so, this post is just one to establish space. A space that may only serve as a writing exercise for myself, a necessary outlet aside from anthropology, ethnographic reflections, and the construction of a thesis. Or perhaps people will like my natural charm and wit and find themselves returning for future entries! I’ll keep some hope, but I’ll keep it managed. I’m also a photographer and not to make this sound like too much of a theme, but I’m a photographer without an outlet. Currently my photos from these trips, some of which I think are truly beautiful, are languishing on a hard drive with nobody to look at them. It seems a shame. With recent algorithmic pushes on Instagram away from photos of things and instead solely towards people and shortform video, along with the associated political woes of relying upon Meta services, I feel like there isn’t really a place to share the kinds of photos I like to create. So I’ll try to make my own space, maybe here or maybe elsewhere. I’ll try to avoid just sharing photos of landscapes, but also share some of the more … detail focused and artistic shots I take whilst on the trail.
Moving forward, I’m hoping to construct entries about the trips I’ve done over the latter half of 2024 with Tom, sharing routes, photos, some reflections on the happenings of the days, and perhaps some of the wider socio-historical context of some of the places we’ve passed through. We’ve seen monuments to the civil war, huge construction projects built by Franco, which continue to remain polemic to this day, irrevocably changing the Spanish landscape. But we also saw cool birds - herons and vultures making nests in metal pylons and golf club floodlights. All is interconnected, and I’ll try to explore some of these natural, cultural, and historical connections too. Hopefully this won’t only be interesting if you’re into bikes, but also if you just want to learn a bit more about Spain and the experience of passing through it slowly.
Despite that, I’ll talk about my bikes, obviously. I’ve built these from the frame up to suit my needs, making plenty of mistakes and wasting a ton of parts along the way. I’ll try to share some recommendations should you want to undertake similar routes, or where to get started if you want to try a similar form of I guess what I’d call ‘cross-country’ or ‘explorative’ cycling. Somewhere between riding a smashed up ol
d beater in the city, and a carbon fiber feat of engineering which costs more than you could ever afford to replace.
So, if you’re interested, please sign up to the mailing list by clicking below, check back to this site every so often, or maybe I’ll even post links to new entries over on my Instagram.
