The BasqueMTB Story

The basqueMTB Story or “how we ended up mountain biking in Spain every day!”

I guess BasqueMTB really started it’s journey when Doug met Amaia in a bar in Edinburgh. At that point Doug was working as a chemical engineer in a factory in Glasgow and Amaia was working in purchasing in Edinburgh. Then in 2007 Doug came to visit Amaia’s family in the Basque country and saw the lush green mountains and the wild Atlantic sea and fell in love all over again, this coincided with Amaia being offered a job in the Basque Country and one thing led to another. basqueMTB and mountain bike holidays in general was actually Amaia´s idea, she knew how much Doug wanted to do something around biking and told him that this was his chance. The next summer was spent visiting Spain and exploring the local mountains on bike with the help of some local friends and family. It quickly became clear that this was an area with a very special wild beauty and some fantastic mountain biking. Late in 2008 we both moved here and set up the business while developing our extensive trail network and in 2009 we started offering holidays.

It has been a wild journey since them. The first year was quiet and there was lots of time to find new trails and to build some as well. The second year we started to be busy and by the end of the third year it was clear that we needed help and we employed Dave, our first guide. Dave left Spain and we started to employ local guides, a policy we have stuck to ever since.

Each subsequent year we have grown but we have limited our growth to make sure we can maintain our quality. That has meant that we turn away potential guests each year and we are really sorry about that, and hope that they will return, but we feel that forcing slow growth is key for maintaining the quality of our holidays.

basqueMTB has grown to the point where in 2015 we will operate with two vans, two dedicated bike trailers, two drivers and two guides. To be honest we might not grow past this point, it feels like a nice size and means that everyone gets to ride their bikes enough.

BasqueMTB has been helped in its journey by some other people along the way. These are people who help us with guiding, trail finding and van driving. There are also a bunch of local guys who are building and maintaining trails, all unofficially, who we share our stuff with and help out with their projects when we can. Depending on when you come on holiday you might just meet some of them.

Doug is very proud of basqueMTB. It isn´t just a job, it´s something he´s created and loved. We hope that is apparent from our holidays. Amaia is often joking that if Doug won the lottery he would keep doing what he does just with a better bike but that´s not true… now we are sponsored by Orbea he doesn´t need a better bike!

Why not have a look at the full story of how we started and all the fun along the way. 10 Years of Mountain Bike Holidays