Montjuïc: stories from the magic mountain of the Tour de France, which will return to the scene in 2026

Before it was the Olympic mountain, the Montjuïc mass, cemetery, castle and stadium, was the mountain of cycling, and it will be so again on the first weekend of July 2026 when, for several days, the city of Barcelona will organise the first two stages of the Tour de France , both around Montjuïc, its centre, as it was in the three previous arrivals of the Tour to the capital of Catalonia, in 1957, 1965 and 2009, as it was also in the two world championships held in Barcelona, ​​​​that of Gimondi against Merckx and Ocaña in 1973 and that of Criquielion in 1984. And Montjuïc is where the Volta ends almost every year and there, until recently, the Escalada was held, the race that closed the world calendar in October.

The Montjuïc totem , an unusual way to pay homage to the mountain and, also, to erase the bad memory of the stormy and dark team time trial that opened the 2023 Vuelta in the Eixample on the last Saturday of August. The second stage of the Tour, more classic, will start on Sunday the 5th from Tarragona and will also finish on the slope of the Olympic Stadium. Of the third, all that is known is that it will start on Monday the 6th from Granollers heading to the south of France, probably to finish in Perpignan.

The 15th stage of the 1957 Tour, the first to finish in Montjuïc, started from the capital of Northern Catalonia. The fans were very angry with the Spanish team for the inexplicable withdrawal of the idol Bahamontes five days earlier and Bernardo Ruiz, the cyclist who has just turned 100, still remembers his entry into the Catalan capital, as he was part of a group of four who arrived in the lead (he finished fourth, the Frenchman René Privat won). In the presidential tribune, the then mayor, José María de Porcioles, and to his right, his deputy mayor and sports representative with his blue Falange shirt, Juan Antonio Samaranch. “It was unfortunate that after working for eight days for Bahamontes, he, without further ado, abandoned,” lamented the rider from Orihuela. “He says that his arm hurt from the calcium injections that Luis Puig, our director, gave him. Yes, they hurt a little, but it's not time to give up." There was a double dose of Montjuïc in 1957. In the afternoon, an individual time trial gave Jacques Anquetil, the Norman debutant who would end up winning the first of his five Tours, a few days later, a show.

In 1965, the second time the Tour came to Barcelona, ​​a lone man arrived ahead of everyone else: José Pérez Francés, a young man from Cantabria who lived in Poble Sec, where his wife, mother and brother-in-law ran a bar, and who had escaped just as the stage began, in Ax les Thermes, 223 kilometres earlier. “I was so exhausted and so focused on the cobblestones and the tram tracks on Paral lel that I didn’t even see my mother,” admitted Pérez Francés, one of the great figures of Spanish cycling in the decade. From the stands next to the Estadi, he was applauded by José Elola Olaso, the National Delegate for Sports, and to his right, Juan Antonio Samaranch, his delegate in Catalonia. The following day, Saturday, the Tour de l’Avenir also finished at the same finish line, won by the Madrid native Mariano Díaz. And on Sunday, as a great celebration for all cyclists, a mass was held in French, Spanish, Italian and German in the Passatge Rivadeneyra, next to Plaça de Catalunya. Catalan was prohibited.

In 2009, the last Tour finish at Montjuïc had a speaker in Catalan, but his voice was barely heard at the end of the stage, marked by a huge storm and numerous crashes by riders in the Eixample district before the climb. The Norwegian Thor Hushovd won.