In 1936, the Vuelta a España prepared for only its second edition. With the gathering storm of the Spanish Civil War looming, it would be five long years before the race returned.
Much about that race feels foreign today. Riders competed primarily on gravel roads. The leader wore an orange jersey. Many fueled themselves with brandy. Yet nine decades later, certain stories from that edition still resonate, carrying a relevance that transcends their time.
This is the account of one of the most remarkable and emotionally charged Grand Tours in cycling history.
“If you compare the 1936 Vuelta to the other Grand Tours, it is probably equivalent to the Tour de France of 1904,” explains Juanfran de la Cruz, an author and historian of Spanish cycling. “Why? Because we are at the very beginning of the story. The second Vuelta was for adventurers, for pioneers.”
“Imagine roads without pavement, the equivalent of Strade Bianche every single day. And of course, apart from the major cities in the north of the country, the rest of Spain tied to agriculture was desperately poor. Spain at that time was a country plagued by problems, especially political ones. And ahead of that Vuelta, the atmosphere was… let us say, agitated. Every day brought a new crisis. It was horrible.”
That February, the left-wing Popular Front narrowly won the general election, sending the army-aligned right wing into a fury. In the months that followed, this faction, known as the Nationalists and led by General Francisco Franco, launched a military coup. That uprising ignited a brutal three-year civil war that Franco would ultimately win, claiming roughly half a million lives.
The 1936 Vuelta was scheduled for May, just two months before the coup was launched, though the stirrings of violence were already evident. Riots erupted in Barcelona the day before the race was set to begin, but interior minister Santiago Casares Quiroga, a key government official, publicly urged that the race proceed as a symbol of national unity.
“It was a way to say: ‘We are Spaniards,’ to create a collective Spanish identity,” De la Cruz explains.
The vast majority of Spanish riders supported the government side, known as the Republicans. However, race organiser Juan Pujol, an openly pro-Nazi journalist who had established the race on behalf of his Informaciones newspaper, would become Franco’s head of propaganda and press that July.
The previous year’s inaugural champion, Belgian Gustaaf Deloor, returned to the Vuelta alongside his brother Alfons. Yet the true excitement surrounded the presence of Mariano Cañardo, the Spanish star who had finished second in 1935 and was expected to claim the top step of the podium.
Known as the Catalan of Olite, having moved to Barcelona from his native Navarre as a teenager to escape a grueling life as a shepherd, Cañardo took up carpentry in order to save for his first racing bicycle, which cost approximately 300 pesetas (around $40 under pre-WW2 exchange rates), before joining FC Barcelona’s cycling team. A seven-time winner of his home race, the Volta a Catalunya, he enjoyed enormous popularity.
Alfons Deloor (right) helped his brother Gustaaf retain his Vuelta title at the 1936 race (AFP via Getty Images)
“But it was a disaster,” De la Cruz states. “Crashes, mechanicals, everything went wrong. And Deloor proved to be the stronger rider.”
On stage one, a punishing 210km route from Madrid to Salamanca, Cañardo crashed and suffered serious injuries, particularly to his legs and head. Belgian Joseph Huts won the stage, marking the only day Deloor would not wear the leader’s orange jersey.
The following day, violent thunderstorms battered the race as it wound toward Cáceres, near the Portuguese border. Early in the stage, a stray dog darted into the road, triggering a massive crash in the peloton. Cañardo went down hard, while Deloor stayed upright to win the stage, gaining nearly 16 minutes on his Catalan rival. Cañardo’s challenge appeared to be finished.
Instead, it was another Spaniard, this one from Madrid rather than Barcelona, who rose as the nation’s great hope. Julian Berrendero was a 24-year-old climber who had won his first major race at the Tour of Galicia the previous year. With riders competing in national teams, Berrendero was assigned to support Cañardo.
With only a handful of stages remaining, Berrendero felt he had never once been allowed to ride for himself. He broke away alongside compatriot Fermín Trueba, nicknamed El Mini for his small stature.
“We declared war on those around us,” Berrendero recalled in his autobiography years later, translated by British writer Tim Moore in his book Vuelta Skelter. “What a furore. This was a real coup d’état, a revolution!”
Trueba won the stage, but Berrendero surged from eighth to fourth overall. Enraged, Cañardo repeatedly attacked his own teammate over the final days, to no avail. The rift deepened further when Berrendero refused to share his prize money with the rest of the Spanish team.
“Fermín and I had earned more money in those final two stages than the rest of the team combined had won up to that point; they expected us to split this income, but I had no intention of serving cash on a plate to those who didn’t deserve it,” Berrendero wrote.
“Things degenerated. Cañardo and I exchanged blows, and because of that I had to leave the room, escorted by guards.”
The Spanish team’s internal psychodrama drew attention away from Deloor’s achievement, as he finished nearly 12 minutes ahead of his brother to claim the overall victory.
There was only one moment, on stage 11, when his triumph appeared in jeopardy. Deloor crashed at the exact moment his Belgian teammates attacked, but thanks to his brother Alfons waiting for him, Deloor was paced back to the group after a grueling 50km chase.
“It showed how high the level of Belgian cycling was,” says De la Cruz. “They also avoided so many mechanicals because of the superior quality of materials they could access compared to the Spanish riders. It meant they simply leaped ahead of their rivals.”
Conditions for racers in the 1930s were invariably tough (AFP via Getty Images)
Gustaaf Deloor, for his part, told newspapers that the Spanish riders were poor descenders and fueled themselves mid-stage with alcoholic drinks, while the Flandrian preferred goat’s milk.
Deloor lived an extraordinary life after his racing career ended. Three years after the 1936 Vuelta, he was serving in the Belgian Army as the country fell under Nazi occupation. He was sent to Stalag II-B, a prisoner of war camp, for much of the conflict. Emigrating to the United States in 1949, he found work designing rockets for the Marquardt Corporation, contributing to the development of the engine used by NASA in the Apollo 11 Saturn V rocket that first landed humans on the moon.
Back in Spain, however, another conflict was drawing even closer. As the Nationalists launched their violent military coup, Cañardo and Berrendero traveled to compete in the Tour de France. Berrendero won the King of the Mountains classification, dissolving into tears at the conclusion of the race.
“These tears came from something more profound than simple excitement, or even the absence of my loved ones: a deep nostalgia for my homeland, which was suffering the most cruel and tragic of all evils,” he wrote.
Despite their rivalry, Berrendero and Cañardo stood united politically. During that Tour, Cañardo expressed the team’s solidarity with “the children of the Spanish Republic,” as a personal friend of Catalan president Lluís Companys, who was executed by the Nationalists in 1940 and after whom Barcelona’s Olympic Stadium would be renamed ahead of the 1992 Games.
With the 1937 Vuelta cancelled amid fierce fighting, Berrendero and his teammates kept a low profile until that year’s Tour. The Spaniard opened a bike shop in the Pyrenean city of Pau as a Spanish exile. In those very mountains that July, Berrendero claimed his first Tour stage victory, winning stage 15 after a brutal day of climbing that included the legendary Col du Tourmalet, Col d’Aspin, and Col de Peyresourde.
Julian Berrendero alone on the Col du Tourmalet during the 1937 Tour de France (AFP via Getty Images)
His triumph continued to antagonise the Nationalist leadership, which was gaining ascendancy. The Spanish team swore solidarity with the Republican cause and pledged to donate half their winnings to war orphans. Berrendero, meanwhile, gave a fiery interview atop the Tourmalet lambasting the political situation.
Just as Iranian women’s footballers endured during this year’s Asian Cup, the world was watching every pronouncement from the Spanish riders. Berrendero believed he was safe when, in 1939, he slipped back across the border in the Basque town of Irun to see his family.
Instead, he was arrested and immediately sent to a Nationalist concentration camp. At least 10,000 people died in those prisons over the course of the civil war, many through executions, though most historians believe the true death toll was far higher.
Berrendero was sent to a camp near Cadiz, where this autumn’s Vuelta will visit for the key stage 18 time trial. There, he was assigned to hard labor laying pavements. According to Berrendero’s own account, he was saved from a worse fate by the camp’s captain, a former amateur cyclist who recognized the champion. By offering the rider his breakfast, this officer gave Berrendero his first proper meal in a year.
In March 1941, Berrendero was released and immediately set about rebuilding his racing career. Organised by the Francoist cultural department Educación y Descanso (Education and Recreation), the 1941 Vuelta, held in June, featured only riders from Spain and neutral Switzerland due to the ongoing Second World War.
At 4,409km (compared to 3,275km in 2026), the 1941 edition stands as the longest Vuelta in history. Taking victory on stage one in Salamanca, Berrendero established a dominance he would never relinquish. After 168 hours of racing, he became the first Spanish winner of the Vuelta.
The victory of such a vocal regime critic, following 18 months of imprisonment, proved deeply embarrassing for Franco’s government.
Berrendero’s triumph in 1942 was even more commanding, winning by nearly nine minutes and wearing the leader’s jersey from start to finish. Only two other riders in Vuelta history (Freddy Maertens in 1977 and Tony Rominger in 1994) have matched that feat.
Despite his success, the oppressive environment forced Berrendero to suppress his political views.
“His ideas stayed in his mind,” says De la Cruz. “Day by day, he had to survive.”
Following a second overall finish at the 1945 Vuelta, Berrendero’s career began to fade. Franco’s regime took a final revenge by revoking his racing license after the 1949 Tour, citing that the Spanish team had disgraced the nation by withdrawing en masse due to mechanical issues and the superior prize money offered at the Volta a Portugal.
Berrendero faded into near oblivion, running a modest bike shop in the Madrid suburbs. Meanwhile, the Vuelta, bolstered by the right-wing government’s desire to use the race as a mid-20th century form of sportswashing, went from strength to strength, cementing its place as the third Grand Tour.
“From the politicians’ perspective, after 15 years of being a closed country, Spain began to open,” De la Cruz explains. “It entered the United Nations, started receiving tourists, and the country began to improve. The Vuelta was a tool to showcase that transformation.”
“Perhaps Berrendero’s obscurity stems both from the Civil War and from the fact that, compared to the Giro and Tour, which both had home winners early on, the Vuelta’s first champion was a Belgian. That’s why Berrendero isn’t as well remembered.”
Ninety years after Berrendero’s emergence, and twelve years on from Alberto Contador’s most recent victory, a Spaniard in Enric Mas stands on the verge of winning the Vuelta once again. As last year’s race demonstrated, the Vuelta has always carried political weight.
