La Vuelta 2026 route set to be hardest in a decade

Run over 21 stages from 22 August to 13 September, the 81st edition is shaping up as one of the most demanding routes in the race’s 91 year history, according to AS. 

The tone is set immediately by the Grand Depart in the Principality. La Vuelta will visit Monaco for the first time, opening with a 9.6 kilometre individual time trial that threads past the city state’s most recognisable landmarks, rolling away from the Casino before a second stage that also starts in Monaco and heads into France.

This will be the third consecutive foreign start for La Vuelta, after Lisbon in 2024 and Piedmont in 2025, and just the seventh time in its history that the race begins outside Spain. From there, the peloton will cross four different countries. 

Three are essentially confirmed by what has already been hinted at publicly and by simple geography: Monaco, France and Spain. The fourth, as AS points out, almost certainly will be Andorra, which has become a familiar stop for the race.

Once La Vuelta hits Spanish soil, the route will be concentrated rather than scattered. Six autonomous communities are expected to appear on the map, fewer than last year but spread across a greater number of provinces. The design leans into the Mediterranean corridor and the south, with Andalusia and all eight of its provinces set to feature. 

AS reports that there will be around seven to nine summit finishes, with some stages piling up more than 4,000 metres of vertical gain. Only one of those uphill finales will be brand new, while the rest will be proven tests that every Vuelta fan will recognise, including climbs such as Aitana and La Pandera.

A second individual time trial is pencilled in for the south of Spain, with Jerez strongly tipped as the host city by local media. The finale will break with the usual script. For the third time this century, the race will not conclude in Madrid. At the request of the organisers, who approached Madrid city council for an exceptional one year change, the 2026 edition will finish in Granada, where the final stage and podium ceremony will be held.

That outcome follows a late plot twist. The organisers at Unipublic had to rework the closing week after a planned finale in the Canary Islands was abandoned when the Gran Canaria authorities withdrew their backing late in the process. That decision forced a quick redraw of the final part of the route, shuffling stages until a new closing block in Andalusia and a Granada finish could be locked in.

The full map will be revealed in Monaco in a week’s time. The next question will be who lines up to take on such a demanding route, but even before the official presentation many teams are expected to outline their Grand Tour programmes during media days around Spain.