Remember the left turn that was hotly tipped in the introduction to stage 769? Well here it is. No sooner does stage 770 get its act together than the road bends left around the northern side of the hills that it spent much of the previous stage climbing up, then runs along the bottom of the ridge before hanging a tad right to avoid the next lot of trouble. You’ll be pleased to know that this stage is a descender, and not any old descender: almost nineteen hundred feet come off the elevation profile by the time the stage rolls into the flatter lands north of Valverde de Agreda at the finish.
As the rollout slides down the valley from the top of the climb that dominated stage 769, it curves left, hugging the bottom of the hill, and for four miles heads north west to Olvega. While there’s plenty of ascent on the left, there are plenty of streams on the right, but none of them are big enough to warrant names. That all changes when the road slides past Olvega on its eastern side: the first prominent bunch of water is the Arroyo de la Vega which flows under the road not once but twice either side of four miles. The river continues to follow the road (or vice versa) once the CL-101 swings right (and north east) north of the town, then multiple streams flow right to left under the road into the Vega. The most prominent of these is the Barranco de Moranas at six miles.
The road snakes right/left/right after seven miles to avoid a ridge that’s protruding from the left, and it’s at that point that the Barranco Canada del Pozuelo arrives on the scene, flowing right to left into the Vega which crosses under the road left to right to meet it. Approaching Agrada at nine miles, the road splits left and right: left takes the CL-101 onto the A-15 autoroute while the ATW route takes the right fork onto the N-122 and into town.
The descent is interrupted slightly either side of Agreda as a couple of tiny short ascents punctuate the downward progress. The most prominent dip, and it is both small and short lived, is between eleven and twelve miles where a stream flows left to right into the Rio de la Casa O Val which is meandering its way east on the right hand side of the road. After that the descent resumes and there’s more of the same gentle gradient all the way to a big roundabout at twelve miles where the N-122 crosses over the A-16 Autovia de Navarra.
Beyond the roundabout, the route carries on descending as it snakes its way left and right onto ever flatter terrain and the finish of the stage is in the middle of nowhere, two miles after the junction left to Valverde de Agreda, hard up against the administrative district border between Castile and Leon, which the route is in, and Aragon, which is just a few meters away on the right.
Distance: 21 miles / 34 kilometres
Ascent: 341 feet / 104 metres
RGT Magic Road: x8MZ1GAVmOyK
Max elevation: 3945 ft
Min elevation: 2317 ft
Total climbing: 339 ft
Total descent: -1901 ft
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