Spain & Portugal: BMW Backcountry Explorer, Algarve Adventure

Seven nights of off-road backcountry from Malaga into Portugal and back, for experienced riders on big adventure bikes, with a support vehicle throughout.

Malaga is the base, with arrival, a group briefing and then a full training day before anything serious starts. The route then heads west through cork woods, which are a working landscape here rather than scenery: the bark is stripped by hand every nine years and Portugal and Spain between them supply most of the world’s cork.

Mountain backcountry trails carry the route across the border to the Algarve coast and Tavira, which gets two nights, a town of low white buildings on the Gilao with a Roman bridge and considerably better food than the resorts further west. A full off-road loop day runs from there.

The return crosses the border zone into the Rio Tinto mining region, and this is the distinctive part: the ground has been worked for copper and silver for thousands of years, the river runs deep red with dissolved iron and is acidic enough that scientists study it as an analogue for Mars, and the old mine trails make for riding unlike anywhere else in Europe. The route then works back to the Malaga base. The headline price is per rider on their own bike, with hire available at a higher rate and a separate price for two riders with two bikes. This one is explicitly for riders with off-road experience, and the terrain is more technical than on the operator’s coastal Andalusian trip.