Gritliner Spotlight Series Issue 01 - Robin Spano

Gritline is the guide I wished existed when I moved to Barcelona. Catalonia has some of the best gravel riding in Europe, from volcanic plateaus of La Garrotxa to the Maresme’s ridges and Garraf’s summits - but it’s difficult to know where to start. In parallel, the gravel community is lacking a platform to track events, see who else is going and coordinate logistics, accommodation and meet-ups around those.

Gritline is the attempt to solve this. We ride before we publish. We track events that we verify with the organisers and build a community around all of this. The Gritliner Spotlight is the human counterpart to the route and events guide: every other week, a rider from this community, told through their riding. From Issue 02 onward, I will write about them. This one, I have to write about myself.

Where I ride out of

I live in Barcelona. I grew up in France, where my father, also a cyclist, first put me on a road bike, and I spent the years after that living and working in the UK with a short chapter in Canada. One summer I took the bike with me to Cape Town and worked remotely from there. My day jobs have always been static: media and advertising, then a few sustainability software companies, and now all of my time goes to building Gritline. Gravel arrived late. Six years of road cycling came first and various other sports, from fencing to badminton and boxing.

My Catalonia

My home route is Garraf to Foix. 153 km, 2,823 metres of climbing, two parks south and west of Barcelona stitched together into a long ride. It is published on Gritline, and it is the loop I would point a friend at if they had a gravel bike and a free day. I like the terrain mix: shaded forest, exposed ridges and summits. There is a stretch I found the first time I rode it, a single track lined with tall grass and trees, lush when I came across it. It sits in the route video on the site if you want to see it.

The post-ride food stop is the harder question. Napoli Centrale in Poble Sec was the place for a long time: outdoor seating, easy for parking the bike, two blocks from my old flat. Then I moved to Les Corts, and the equation broke. So this is also a question for the community: if you have somewhere in Les Corts that takes bikes well after a big ride, send it.

When to come to Catalonia: May, June, September. Probably also October most years.

A ride that changed something

La Traka 200. The legs were good that day, which only made what happened more frustrating. Two flats inside the first sixty kilometres, and the sealant did not fix them - a hard lesson, in retrospect, about renewing the sealant more often than you think you need to. I was saved by strangers. A vehicle parked along the road, they had spare sealant in the back, and they got me going in no time.

What I carry from that day is the part of long-distance riding that does not show up in finishing times. The mental work of continuing to press after sixty kilometres of going wrong. The cooperation between riders and supporters over the course of a long day - turns at the front, a few words exchanged, the difference that makes over the remaining one hundred and forty kilometres to the finish.

I finished. What stayed afterwards comes in two parts: a mechanical lesson (renew the sealant), and a human one (strangers saving my day).

From a keyboard to rolling in the dust, what else?

What gravel gives me

I came to gravel from road, where its’ easy to anticipate your arrival time. I am a competitive person by nature - watts, average speed, an estimated finish, the internal stopwatch road cycling rewards. For me, gravel runs on a different clock. The noise of the surface, the occasional bunny hop, an unplanned skid, a terrain that resists being calculated against. I have come to like that the views and the terrain come first, and the watts second.

From a keyboard to rolling in the dust. The static office rhythm gets broken by a thing I cannot quite plan for.

What’s next

Building out Gritline, from going much deeper with the routes library to events coverage, brand partnerships and growing the community wrapped around all of that. You will meet other Gritliners: whether that’s a Girona-based long-timer who has ridden one loop fifty times, a first-season rider in Barcelona, a Pyrenees-based regular, a visitor who flew in for a race and came back outside the event. The point of all of it - the routes, the events, the Spotlights - is to make Catalan gravel legible to the next rider. The one who has not found their way here yet, or the one who’s curious about who else is out there.