Day 10: San Sebastián to Mungia — Picos & Pyrenees May 2026

We left San Sebastián with full bellies and that particular kind of reluctance that only comes after a genuinely great night in a great city. The Basque capital had delivered exactly what it always promises — pintxos, good wine, laughter in the old town, and the kind of easy evening where nobody really wants it to end. But the road called.

Loading up and pulling out of San Sebastián — the Basque Country awaits.

Into the Heart of the Basque Country

What followed was some of the most quietly spectacular riding of the entire trip. The Basque Country doesn’t announce itself with dramatic altitude or famous pass names — it earns its reputation road by road, corner by corner. Tight tarmac winding through dense pine and oak forests, breaking occasionally into open hillsides with sweeping views across valleys that seem to have changed very little in a hundred years.

The architecture here is unmistakably Basque — white-rendered farmhouses with deep timber balconies and terracotta-tiled roofs, set against hillsides that stay green long into late May. Every village we passed through had that same unhurried quality. Locals going about their morning, a dog stretched out across a doorstep, the smell of woodsmoke and pine carried on the cool air.

A stone bridge stop in a quiet Basque village — and a well-earned coffee at a local taberna.

Coffee Stops and Village Squares

We pulled in at a small taberna in one of the Basque villages — the kind of place with plastic chairs outside, a medieval church directly across the square, and coffee that arrives in a tiny cup and genuinely needs no improvement. Five of us sat in a loose circle trading observations about the roads. Nobody was in a hurry. That’s the thing about this part of the tour — by Day 10 the group has found its rhythm entirely. The riding is relaxed, the stops are longer, the conversation flows easily.

The roads through the Basque interior are technically excellent — well-maintained, mostly traffic-free mid-week, and routed through terrain that manages to feel remote even though you’re rarely more than twenty minutes from a decent-sized town. For riders who think Spain means Andalucía or the big open meseta roads, the Basque Country is always the surprise of the trip.

Climbing to Mungia

As the afternoon moved on, we climbed toward Mungia — a small Basque town perched in the hills north of Bilbao. The hotel sat in wide, manicured grounds with the feel of a converted manor or small parador: solid stone construction, a long driveway through trees, and a quiet that was a welcome contrast to the buzz of San Sebastián the night before.

The hotel at Mungia — a converted stone manor set in gardens above Bilbao.

From certain spots on the grounds you could pick out the distant shapes of hills that, in a day or so, we’d be riding back through on the way home. It’s always a strange feeling at this point in a long tour — the landscape starts to feel familiar again, the end is visible on the horizon, and there’s a mixture of satisfaction at everything ridden and quiet resistance to it all being nearly over.

A good dinner, a couple of cold beers, and an early night. Day 11 was going to bring us back into the Picos — and nobody was going to sleep through that.