About
We’re building the gravel guide we wished existed.
Gravel cycling in Catalonia is having its moment. La Traka pulls thousands of international riders to Girona every spring; new races appear on the calendar each season; the riding itself is some of the best in Europe — volcanic plateaus, coastal sierras, Pyrenean foothills, all within a day’s drive of Barcelona.
But the information about it is everywhere and nowhere. Routes scattered across Strava, Komoot, and personal blogs. Events buried in race-organiser sites. Conditions traded in WhatsApp groups. Quality varies wildly. Safety details — water points, bailouts, surface conditions — are usually missing entirely.
Gritline is a guide. Each route here is one we’ve ridden and photographed ourselves, written up with the metadata you actually need before committing to a long day. Each event is verified against the organiser’s site. We say what’s good and what to avoid. We name the local cafés. We tell you when not to go.
We’re not a route-tracking app. We’re not a directory. We’re a curator with a strong opinion and a slow publishing schedule.
Strava and Komoot remain the references for recording and routing — they do that work better than we ever will. Gritline points you at the routes worth riding, gives you the editorial and the video you can’t get anywhere else, and then sends you to those apps to ride them.
How we choose
What gets a route on Gritline.
Every route on the site has cleared four bars:
- It’s worth a day off. We don’t list rides we’re lukewarm on. If we wouldn’t recommend it to a friend visiting from abroad, it doesn’t belong here.
- It’s been ridden recently. Catalan terrain changes — fire roads close, surfaces wash out, tracks get gated. Every Gritline route has been verified on the ground within the last twelve months.
- The safety detail is real. Water points, bailout options, conditions to avoid: we report what we observed, not what we found on a forum.
- It’s ours to publish. Every route is original (designed by us), licensed from a creator with their permission, or drawn from a public-sector or open-licence source. We never republish private tracks without asking.
How we work.
01
Curated, not crawled.
Every route is ridden by us before it goes up, and every event is verified against the organiser's site. Nothing is auto-imported.
02
Safety as editorial.
Surface mix, water points, bailout options, and conditions to avoid sit on every route page — not as an afterthought, but as part of the writing.
03
Local first, English-friendly.
Written for the rider in Barcelona who knows the local names, and the visitor flying in for La Traka who needs the local context.
The editor
Robin Spano.
Robin Spano is French-American. He has a background in sustainability and lives in Barcelona, where he discovered gravel cycling as a way of settling in. The pleasure, for him, is in venturing out of the city — the crunch of tyres on dirt, the long climbs, the people he’s met along the way. Photography is the other thing. Gritline is the project where they meet.
Get involved.
Event organisers
If you run a Catalan gravel event, we'd love to cover it properly. Get in touch and we'll set up partnered coverage with photography, course writeups, and pre-event editorial.
Hotels and bike-friendly accommodation
Riders coming for La Traka, La Garba and Sea Otter need places to stay. We feature partner accommodations on relevant route pages.
Photographers
The Featured Photographer programme is invite-only. If you shoot gravel cycling in Catalonia and want a profile on the site, send us your portfolio.
Riders
Tell us about a route we should cover, a condition report we should publish, or an event we’ve missed. Reader-driven coverage is the long game.