Port de TudonsCat 1
- 15.38 km
- Length
- 4.9%
- Average
- 750 m
- Elevation gain
- 8.6%
- Steepest 500 m
- 1,026 m(GPX)
- Summit
You climb Tudons from the Finestrat side, and it is long: fifteen kilometres from the lowlands up to 1,026 metres. The first half is gentle enough that you can lose respect for it — two of the kilometres are almost flat. The steep part is the last five, where the road goes above seven per cent and the hardest hundred metres reaches eleven. Fill your bottles in Finestrat. From there to Benasau is around 35 kilometres with nowhere to stop. At the pass a road turns off towards the military base on Aitana; it is closed.
How long will Port de Tudons take you?
A rider at 3.0 W/kg takes about 61 minutes to climb Port de Tudons.
Put in your weight and the average power you hold on the gradient. We add 9 kg for bike and kit. The model works the time out from physics, and it has been tested against real rides.
Riders
The road
Tudons is a through road, not a tourist road. It links the coast to the high country behind, and the traffic reflects that — there is little of it, but what there is moves.
The road is wide and even the whole way up. There are no tunnels and no stretches where you have to move into the gravel.
From the pass a road continues up to the military installation on Aitana. It is closed to ordinary traffic, and that is where the Vuelta has finished — not on the Tudons pass itself.
The climb
The climb comes in two halves, and they are nothing alike.
The first eight kilometres rise at four to five per cent, but with two kilometres that almost level out — the third and the eighth. They break the rhythm, and they are why the 4.9 per cent average gives a false impression of what is coming.
From the ninth kilometre the breaks stop. From there to the top it sits steadily between five and seven per cent, with nothing to recover on. The hardest are the twelfth and thirteenth kilometres, and the steepest hundred metres — above eleven per cent — comes at km 11.4.
The last three kilometres are not the steepest, but they come after everything else, and at 1,000 metres.