Madrid to Mongolia, and every trail in between.
The road aheadRome. Byzantium. Persia. The Timurids. The Mongol Horde. Draw a line between the places they left behind and you don't get a list. You get a road.
It starts at the Kilómetro Cero in Madrid, three streets from my door, and ends on the steppe where the last and largest of them began.
Discover the route
A chain of empires, ridden in the order they fell.
A course on my own bike, then every ancient site within reach.
A 1992 Honda single. Fixable in any village.
Every episode owes you a story older than the road.
It's the start.
Six rides between here and there: a course, a Bronze Age well, a gorge, the oldest stones in Europe, and a fossil bed. Each one teaches the thing the next one needs.
BRG 41° · 8.056 KM The full routeMost schools hand you a light, forgiving machine. I'm learning on the 1992 Dominator I'll actually ride, loaded and heavier than anything they'd lend me. Standing, braking on loose ground, and picking it up alone. The least glamorous episode, and the one everything after it rests on.
Two hundred kilometres south, a Bronze Age tower ten metres high standing over a well sunk sixteen metres to the water table. Built between 2200 and 1500 BC, during the drought that helped bring down the Akkadian empire and Egypt's Old Kingdom. The oldest groundwater system in Iberia, and nothing else in Europe is shaped like it.
A hundred and seventy-four thousand hectares of canyon between Guadalajara and Cuenca. It is the deepest river gorge system in Spain, cut by the Tagus, the same river that runs on through Toledo to the Atlantic. Forty villages inside its boundary, two hours from my door.
Menga is the only dolmen in continental Europe built to face a mountain shaped like a sleeping man, and its neighbour El Romeral turns west to El Torcal instead. Then east to Los Millares: a walled town of a thousand people with three rings of defences and eighty tombs, standing before the pyramids at Giza. Ends in the Almería desert.
A twenty-one metre engraved gallery under a mound in Huelva. A Tartessian sanctuary in Extremadura, from a civilisation that vanished. And across the border near Évora, the Almendres Cromlech: ninety-five standing stones raised in three phases from the sixth millennium BC, roughly two thousand years before Stonehenge, and nobody knows what for.
North to Burgos and a different order of time altogether. Not centuries or millennia but hundreds of thousands of years, and the fossils that rewrote where Europeans came from.
The Balkans, Türkiye, the Caucasus, the Caspian, Samarkand, the Pamir Highway, and the steppe where the empire that once held all of it began. Everything before this is the apprenticeship. This is where the road actually starts.
Sound off by default. It is meant to sit there and run while you read.
Loading Everyone expects the big adventure bike, and a dealer network that ends somewhere around Tbilisi.
I ride a 1992 Honda NX650 Dominator. One cylinder, air-cooled, a carburettor, and not a single line of software anywhere on it. That isn't nostalgia, it's arithmetic.
About the bike
644 cc single, air-cooled, carburetted. No ride modes to fail.
Light enough to pick up alone. That matters more than power.
Shared with a generation of Honda singles. Findable almost anywhere.
Every failure is a repair, not a recovery truck.
Everything I need for a week lives on the back of one air-cooled single. That is what you can carry over a pass and still lift out of a rut on your own.
Season One is filming now, in Spain.
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