Imagine you live in a small Spanish village and you have been waiting all your life for the railway to arrive. The tracks are laid, a station is built, but still the trains never come. The Civil War comes and goes, the tracks fall apart, the station is in ruins. Then one day you look up to where the railway should have been and see not a train but a group of cyclists heading towards you, finally putting your village on the map.
This is what has happened to the people of Olvera, a typical Andalucian pueblo blanco (white town) topped by a twelfth-century Nasrid castle. Olvera was to have been a stop on the Jerez to Malaga line, but the line was never completed and the village went back to its business of producing olive oil. Eventually, new roads removed the need for a railway; now the railway has been given a new lease of life as one of the first Vias Verdes, or greenways, in Spain.
There are more than 7,500 kilometres of abandoned railway lines in Spain, including 1,000km that were never used. So far, around 1,000km of these have been turned into Vias Verdes by the Spanish Railways Foundation. By their nature, railways tend to avoid steep gradients, with the result that these greenways are mostly on level, traffic-free paths, ideal for cycling. Many of them pass through areas of great natural beauty; even the tunnels, bridges and viaducts which once disfigured the landscape now add a surprising post-industrial appeal of their own.
Last autumn, I cycled two of these greenways in Andalucia. The Via Verde de la Sierra runs for 36km between the villages of Puerto Serrano and Olvera. In an interesting tourism experiment, the stations at both ends of the route have been converted into simple hotels, so you can leave your car at one end and cycle both ways over one or two days.
From Puerto Serrano (gateway to the mountains), the track follows the course of the Guadalete river, known as the Rio de los Muertos (river of death) from its days on the front line between Islamic and Christian Spain. High above the river, the route passes through long, cool tunnels, lit by solar power with sensors which turn the lights on whenever a bicycle enters. The rippling arcs of light receding through the tunnels reminded me of the horseshoe arches in the great Mezquita at nearby Cordoba.
At Coripe, I spread out my picnic lunch in the shade of a 300-year-old holm oak, surrounded by walnut plantations. Shortly afterwards, I entered the Peñon de Aframagon nature reserve, where Andalucia's largest colony of griffon vultures circled menacingly above a massive rock outcrop.
'They live here because they can feed on the dead cattle and sheep,' a passing cyclist said as we gazed through our binoculars. As if to drive home the point that this was livestock country, a notice warned of toros bravos (fighting bulls) and a goatherd drove his flock along a quiet lane as I approached the station at Olvera. The next day, I travelled east to the Via Verde del Aceite, the 55km 'olive oil greenway' in the province of Jaen, where most of Andalucia's olives are grown. Wooden bridges and metal viaducts, designed by Gustave Eiffel when the railway was built in the 1880s, intruded here and there on to an endless landscape of olive groves, their silvery-green leaves and golden-green fruit stretching to the sierra on the horizon.
Even the stations here have yet to be rebuilt, and I passed barely a sign of life all day, apart from some American cyclists and an English couple who were walking across Spain from the north coast to the Mediterranean. I stopped to pick ripe figs near the village of Alcaudete, then freewheeled downhill to the Guadajoz river, passing marshes and a lagoon on my way to the 200m iron bridge which marked the end of the route.
The Vias Verdes are breathing new life into the economy of rural Spain. In Andalucia, unemployed young people are being paid to create signposts out of old railway sleepers. Derelict stations are being reborn as restaurants and bike-hire shops. In Catalunya, a pair of greenways links Gerona with the Costa Brava resorts; already, they are drawing tourists away from the beach into the country, if only for a day.
It is harder to see how you could create an entire holiday around the Vias Verdes - they are simply too far apart. Hotels and bike-hire facilities will certainly help, but tourists would still need a car to travel the distances between routes. All that may change, as the Spanish parliament has recently approved a law to convert the entire network of disused railway lines into greenways.
Until then, another option is to join the Magic Tour, a two-week whirlwind circuit of Spain by bus, train and bike which takes place twice a year (the next one is in October). With two hours in Barcelona and a single morning to see Granada, the tour has a bit of an 'if it's Sunday, this must be Seville' feel to it, but you do get to see all of the main cities as well as cycling more than 400km of greenways and as an introduction to Spain it certainly beats a coach tour.
And it takes you to out-of-the-way places like Olvera, where you can climb up to the castle and look down over steep streets of whitewashed houses before sipping an ice-cold sherry in one of the village bars. Go on, you've earned it. You've cycled 36km to get there.
Factfile
Vías Verdes (00 34 911 511065; Email viasverdes@ffe.es) runs two-week tours in May and October each year (but not in May 2002). The October tour runs from 4-18 October and costs £1,274 (€2,200). Accommodation, all meals, bike hire and transfers are included.
Iberia Airlines (0845 601 2854) has flights from Heathrow to Seville in October from £140 return, including taxes.
The Estacion Puerto Serrano (00 34 955 898190; double room 36 euros/£22) and the Estacion de Olvera (00 34 956 130802; double room €48/£30) hotels are stationed at each end of the railway line.