We are heading for Portugal and Southern Spain in ten days, and are still trying to nail down our route. Generally we will follow Eurovelo 1 and 8, starting at Porto and going loosely counterclockwise. A complication comes because these routes are not fully developed, and also seem to include lots of dirt tracks. Also, we will start and end from Porto, and so may be looking for different routes out and back.

At least five Cycleblazers have generally covered this territory in the past few years, and we can follow their trips and likely grab their tracks page by page from the blogs.  But do any of the five, or any others, have ready to go tracks that they can send us? We will be plotting it all on one map, to help in deciding who to follow in which sections. It's a compilation that could help others in future as well!

If you have tracks or suggestions, you could post here, and send files to shadybrook at shaw dot ca.

You’re biking from Porto to Barcelona and back in 75 days?  Wow, that’s ambitious.

The only tracks we have that might be relevant are in our rides from Faro to Granada in 2013, and from Santiago to Valencia in 2019.  The tracks we followed are all in the individual posts.

Another place to look is on RideWithGPS. They have tracks all over the place that you can use.

Yes, I was looking at your RWGPS "persona" SP Iberia 2019 (I don't understand RWGPS rides, routes, and accounts very well). There are maybe 60 "routes" there, with what I take to be your naming convention, like SPE7 Faro.  It seems that to track you through all of Portugal and then Spain to Valencia one would have to individually download a pile of these. If that is the same for most of the others, that would mean my project of mapping all seven recent Portugal/Spain bloggers is an impossibly big job.  There may yet be hope, if some have their whole trip in a single file.  I think we have received this now from Fenwicks, and Huw Thomas's books are one file each. 

Are you sure you have no one overview gpx? We definitely see this in your recent Primavera post.

Hey. I just found the RWGPS "Show all on map" button! This does not allow one rider's route to be shown directly in comparison with another's on one map, but it handles 90%of what I was trying to do!

No, I don’t have composite files for either of these tours.  The ‘overview’ map isn’t actually an overview - it’s a composite built by aggregating all of the individual detail routes.

I could develop them by assembling the individual ones into composite events for you, but it takes some time and effort and I doubt that it would really be very useful to you anyway.  For one thing, unless you open them up individually, you can’t see enough detail in these higher level composites to see what the actual roads are.  For another, I doubt that most of the individual routes are anywhere near where you’re planning to go.  Don’t you have a rough idea of where you’re planning to go?

Although we in principle could follow any routing guide or person (lacking the courage to just strike off on our own) we have always gone with Eurovelo and/or Bikeline.  So in this case it would be EV 1 followed by EV 8. Our concern is just that more than one writer has expressed a need to deviate from EV, and we have seen that some "official" routes can have horrible bits - like NCN 2 in England.

Our original plan was to go Porto to Barcelona, and to fly from Barcelona.  But concern over having bike boxes (folding the bikes into plastic bags dramatically failed from Mexico) has us wanting to return to Porto where we can have the boxes we flew in with stashed.  That puts us sort of cycling half way to Barcelona and turning around - maybe following a different way back, or cycling all the way and using the train to get back, or some combo. This all accounts for the apparent uncertainty in our routing, and desire to look at non EV ways to go.

If any of my routes might be helpful, I think I still have a number of the gpx files. This would be ev1 from Porto to Lisbon, and Faro to Lisbon, then a route from Madrid to Lisbon via Evora. If any look promising, let me know and I can email them to you.

For Porto-Lisbon-Faro did you stick to the actual EV1,or can you show any deviations? I think we do have the "official" EV1.  Let us know. Thanks Brent!

The only variation was from Portimao. I went north to Monchique then NW to the coast from there. I should have stuck to the coast to Sagres then northwards.