Day 2: 12th July 2026: Guernica to Deba
I thought day two was going to be a breeze, quite frankly. The weather was cooler than the tremendous heat of the previous day, slightly cloudy, and much lower temperatures. I cycled up to Lekeitio on the coast, which is a wonderfully lively port and holiday centre with superb beaches and an old town centred around what looked to me like an ancient cathedral, but it was probably just a church.
A longboat rowing race had just finished which is a serious sport around here, and there was much celebration going on with the winning team. Even the other teams were very buoyant and joining in the atmosphere. Cafes were full. Tapas bars were very tempting. I stopped for a coffee and met a really interesting guy, Sigur, (a Basque name) who had doubts about whether or not Ukraine should be supported. Clearly, he didn’t know a lot about the situation, and I recommended he watch things like France 24 and Al Jazeera as opposed to maybe more biased channels. He asked a lot of questions, and I hope I succeeded in convincing him to look at it more closely. We couldn’t speak for long, as his wife wanted to get on with her shopping, which is a pity, but there we are.
I was tempted to go and jump in the water, but it was still morning, about 11:00, so I thought I’d better get going, because I had quite a few climbs to make on the way to Deba. So I cycled on, and there were great views of the sea from the cliffs, and the coastal road wound its way around headlands and through hilltop peaks.
However, as the day wore on, the heat increased, and we were back to almost the temperatures of the first day, 33 degrees. My Garmin had plotted a course where the ascent was 660 meters, but when I paused to take a break, I found that the whole thing was going to take me over 900 meters of ascent. Although the distance is nothing to speak of very much, there were hill after hill. Although the views were great, I’m afraid I couldn’t get beyond the centre of Deba and had to check into a hotel there, which is where I met up with my cycling friends Greg and Joy.
It’s quite clear that the hills along this Basque Coast are really something to be wary of. I was absolutely exhausted when I got to Deba and couldn’t go on to the hotel, which I’d booked up over the hill into the next valley. That would be another 250 meters of ascent, and there’s no way I could do that. However, the compensation was the beautiful hotel, which my friends were staying in, and I enjoyed the swimming pool, seawater swimming pool in the hotel, and I enjoyed the air-conditioned room.
Most of the route was along a main road. Not a motorway, not a trunk road, but a main road. Probably the original road that connected places along this coast, but now there’s a motorway inland and there’s less traffic, but there’s still a fair amount of traffic. There were just one short cycle path of 4 km. One of the problems of cycling in the Basque Country is there’s so little information about routes, and the maps are inadequate for cyclists. However, it was a Sunday, and there were lots of people out cycling, like the previous day. I never had any trouble with any of the motorists or lorry drivers. They all respected my position on the road, and they also respected the fact that going uphill, I was going to be rather slow.
Despite all of this, it was worthwhile cycling along this coast because there are some beautiful little villages and inlets. You could spend a whole month visiting the different sandy beaches and enjoying the landscape and the scenery. If you don’t want to do the cycling and if you don’t want to take a car, there’s also a narrow gauge railway which runs along this coast and will enable you to visit some of the places like Deba, and also get you onward to San Sebastian and into France.
