Wolves from the Douro

Smart trainers may be all the rage right now, but that is an activity different from cycling. That’s just exercising with pedals. Cycling, as it’s meant to be, does not involve staying in place in front of a screen, breathing your own sweat and CO2 over and over again, locked up in the basement. It’s not a form of active sedentarism. Cycling is outside and it is an exploration. It is like the Wolf Ride.

The name of this tour comes from the setting – the mountainous region of northern Portugal. It’s one of the last territories of the Iberian wolf, a subspecies of grey wolf that lives in the north west of the Iberian Peninsula in Portugal and north-western Spain. This wolf has been isolated from other wolf populations for over a century and recent estimates indicate that there aren’t many more than 2000 left. This magnificent, misunderstood carnivore, the cheap villain of pop culture, the simplest thrill for the unimaginative, needs all the help it can get, and the Wolf Ride – a fundraising effort for conservation groups