The Col du Tourmalet by motorcycle

What the climb is actually worth on a bike

The Tourmalet is famous because of bicycles, and it helps to know that before you build a trip around it. The road is wide, properly surfaced and has no technical difficulty worth the name: no chained hairpins, no single-track ledges, no broken tarmac. If you have ridden Alpine passes, the climb will feel straightforward, gentle even. What you get instead is altitude and a bare, wind-scoured landscape above Bareges and La Mongie.

Its real value is position. From the summit you are a short ride from the Col d'Aspin, the Col de Peyresourde and the Vallee d'Aure, which is to say the heart of the central Pyrenees. Riders who come for the name alone often leave slightly flat. Riders who use it as one link in a four-pass day tend to rate this range above the Alps for road quality per kilometre, mostly because there is a fraction of the traffic.

Cyclists, livestock and how to overtake

The Tourmalet carries more cyclists than any other pass in France, by a wide margin. In summer you can meet several hundred in a day, often in groups, frequently out of the saddle and drifting across the lane on the steeper ramps. Overtaking is a matter of patience and space: pull well out, pass wide, and do not open the throttle as you go by. Someone grinding uphill at 8 km/h has no idea you are behind them until you are alongside.

Then there is the livestock. Cattle, sheep and horses graze free on the upper slopes from roughly May to October and use the tarmac as readily as the grass. They are used to vehicles and will not move for you, so you slow for them. The working assumption on any blind bend above Bareges or La Mongie is that something is standing in your lane, and riding that way costs you nothing.

When to go up

The pass usually opens at the end of May and closes some time in October, with dates that move every year according to snow. Outside that window barriers shut the road above Bareges on the west side and above La Mongie on the east, and there is no way through: the detour runs all the way down the valleys and round. The Hautes-Pyrenees department publishes the opening each spring, so check before you commit a day to it.

The summit sits in cloud often, including in midsummer, and the temperature drop is steep. Twelve degrees at the col while the valley shows twenty-eight is normal rather than remarkable, and the wind makes it feel colder than that. Carry a layer even in July, and accept that the view will be a grey wall a fair share of the time. Mornings are clearer than afternoons more often than not.

Getting there, and riding in France

For a fly-and-ride, Tarbes-Lourdes-Pyrenees is the closest airport, under an hour from Luz-Saint-Sauveur, with Pau and Toulouse as the bigger and better connected options; Toulouse is about two hours out by motorway. Riding down from the UK it is roughly 950 km (590 mi) from Calais to Lourdes, which is two comfortable days or one long one on tolled motorways. The ferries from Portsmouth and Plymouth to Bilbao and Santander are the underrated route: from Bilbao you are around 300 km (185 mi) from the Hautes-Pyrenees and you come in through Spain.

The rules matter more here than the roads do. France rides on the right, and the residual priorite a droite still applies at unmarked junctions in villages, meaning traffic joining from your right has priority unless a sign says otherwise. Approved gloves are compulsory for rider and passenger, every rider must carry a hi-vis vest to put on if they stop at the roadside, and dipped headlights stay on at all times.

• Speed limits: 130 km/h on motorways (110 in rain), 80 or 90 km/h on rural two-lane roads depending on the department, 50 km/h in towns.
• Blood alcohol limit is 0.5 g/l, lower than England and Wales. On mountain roads it is simpler to stay at zero.
• Motorways towards the Pyrenees are tolled. The mountain roads themselves are free.
• Fill up in the valley: village pumps can be closed on Sundays, and not every unattended pump accepts every foreign card.
• UK and EU licences are accepted as they are. Riders on a licence from outside Europe should check whether an International Driving Permit is expected, and rental companies usually ask for one.

Linking it into a day that works

The Tourmalet on its own does not fill a day. The way it is normally ridden is inside the classic Hautes-Pyrenees loop: Tourmalet, Aspin, Peyresourde, then back along the valleys. That is around 180 km (110 mi) and four passes, and it is the best single day in the central Pyrenees. Plan on five or six hours of riding rather than the three the distance suggests.

That loop takes about five minutes to draw in the Waver planner on a big screen. Save it and its page gives you the elevation profile, which tells you what the kilometre count does not. It files into a folder, syncs to the phone for voice-guided navigation on Android, and can be shared with whoever is riding with you; on an iPhone, the planner and your saved routes work in the browser. GPX tracks you already have import straight in. The app is in free open beta; there is no offline mode yet, so sort the route out while you still have signal in the valley.