Day 10 - Capmany, Spain to Sant-Cyprien Plage, France
June 30, 2026 - biked 68 km (42 mi) - biked 531 km (330 mi) total
We left our cute little "hostel" and began our final day in Spain with a climb. We had met a couple touring yesterday who were doing the PX loop trail around the Pyrenees, which the Eurovelo 8 follows the same path over the mountains to France. They were coming the opposite direction, and said the dirt road to the border on the Spanish side was incredibly difficult. It was very rough and rocky and said going up it would have required mountain bikes. So we decided to skip that section and instead take the local highway, which is paved and less elevation, but more cars. Hopefully not too many cars as there's a parallel expressway that probably most through traffic would take.
But even before we got to that skip, we continued on the EV8 on a dirt road into the hills towards La Jonquera and that already was really rough. Baby head rocks, sand, brush. We had to walk our bikes up one section. Then we bombed down into the town to meet the local highway and got our first flat! There is some sort of thorny plant I rode over and found three punctures in my tube, and probably five more thorns in my tires. Sarah did a check of her tires too and found some but none had broken through. Good thing we had Sarah’s tweezers and an extra hour.
We were in a rush to get to France so we didn't eat breakfast, so we rolled down the rest of the hill into the suburban outskirts of town to a grocery to get a snack. But this grocery ended up being more of a huge liquor store. Sarah went in and got some wrapped sandwiches, and I discovered my tire went flat again. So we drank pasteurized orange juice from a box and I found one more hole in my tube. Good thing I had another patch kit and an extra hour.
The climb into France was gentle and not too bad, but pretty hot and exposed. The border is actually a funny shape. There's a diagonal line through the highway right after a now-disused checkpoint, and then it runs along the road for a kilometer in this border town. The parking on one side of the street you have to go to a Spanish machine, and on the other side, French. El Portùs / La Perthus is a town that feels like a duty free shop, but I don't really know if there's much border arbitrage to be had anymore.
We then bombed down the highway shoulder for the shortest 15 km of my life and it was great, then joined the route back towards the coast. France really kicked up the infrastructure on the Eurovelo. All the paths through the rolling hills were concrete paved and had consistent signage and labeled arrows on the ground. It was easy. France had way different vibes immediately: more suburban, more infrastructure, more people, more agriculture. France definitely feels like a richer country, but there are some things we immediately missed about Spain, like water being a human right and fountains in every park. More about these differences in later posts.
Once we made it to the coast, we started biking north looking for camping again. The coast here is just as fancy as north of Barcelona, so it was all four and five star "campsites" which were just resorts and many didn't take tents. We cooked dinner in a city park, onion, tomato, pasta, potato, tuna. A delight. Then as the sun was setting I did some scouting for guerrilla campsites. Everything around us was so suburban, though, and no options felt private enough to be appropriate. Bivouac camping is legal in France (sundown to sunup with just a tent) but we didn't want to attract attention. The best I could find was a dirt road that ended in the landscape shed for a golf course. And even though we've gotten buff and can climb a short mountain pass, we love a shower at the end of each day. Sarah ended up finding an apartment for rent online for a night for so cheap, surprise literally across from the park where we cooked dinner. So my extra riding was not for today, and we lugged our panniers up an unlit staircase in an abandoned apartment building to sleep on a pull-out couch. Worth it.
