La Vuelta Femenina

La Vuelta Femenina, run since 2023 as La Vuelta Femenina by Carrefour.es after its title sponsor, is Spain's main women's cycling stage race, held each May over seven or eight days. It grew out of the Madrid Challenge, first held in 2015, and in its current form it has become one of the Women's WorldTour's main early-season GC tests.

La Vuelta Femenina is the women’s Vuelta a España, a week-long stage race held in May. It began in 2015 as the Madrid Challenge, a one-day race on a city circuit, and added stages until it became a seven-day race in 2023. The 2026 edition finished on the Angliru.

The Madrid Challenge: a one-day race from 2015

The first Madrid Challenge by La Vuelta was held in 2015, and Shelley Olds won it. Jolien D’hoore won the next two editions, in 2016 and 2017, when the race was part of the Women’s WorldTour. It was a circuit race in central Madrid, around the Plaza de Cibeles, the Gran Vía and the Prado Museum.

In 2018 the organizer, Unipublic, added a team time trial the day before the circuit race and turned the event into a two-day stage race. Sunweb won the time trial at Boadilla del Monte by 18 seconds. Ellen van Dijk added bonus seconds in the circuit race and won the overall for Sunweb. Giorgia Bronzini won the circuit race from a 19-rider breakaway, in the last race of her career. The women used the finishing circuit of the men’s Vuelta a España, a few hours before the men arrived on it. Lisa Brennauer won the next two editions, and Annemiek van Vleuten won her first in 2021.

How the Ceratizit Challenge became La Vuelta Femenina

By 2022 the race was called the Ceratizit Challenge by La Vuelta and had five stages. It covered 479.4 kilometers from Marina de Cudeyo in Cantabria to the Madrid circuit, the longest edition up to then. Van Vleuten won it for the second year running, six weeks after the Tour de France Femmes. With the Giro Donne earlier that summer, she had won all three in one season.

Van Vleuten herself did not rank the Spanish race with the other two, and said so before the start. It had neither the stages nor the difficulty of a Grand Tour, she said: five days of racing, one of them the Madrid circuit. The organizer had already announced the answer. From 2023 the race would move to May and last a full week.

Nine seconds at Lagos de Covadonga in 2023

The first edition under the name La Vuelta Femenina had seven stages and finished at Lagos de Covadonga in Asturias. Van Vleuten started the last climb in the red jersey, with Demi Vollering close enough to take it. Vollering set the pace until only Van Vleuten and Gaia Realini were left with her, seven kilometers from the top. Realini then attacked 5.4 kilometers from the finish, and Van Vleuten could not follow.

Vollering dropped Realini in the last kilometer and won the stage. Van Vleuten finished third, 56 seconds behind, and kept the jersey by nine seconds. It was her third win in a row, and no rider has won the race more often.

Vollering’s two wins: Valdesquí and Cotobello

In 2024 the race added an eighth stage, started in Valencia and finished at the Valdesquí ski station in the mountains of the Madrid region. At La Laguna Negra, Évita Muzic was the only rider who could follow Vollering, and she beat her in the sprint. Two days later, on an 89.5-kilometer stage out of Madrid, Vollering attacked on the climb to Valdesquí and won the stage and the race alone. She went where the road turned and the wind came from behind, so that the riders chasing her would be in a headwind. Behind her, Riejanne Markus took second overall from Elisa Longo Borghini by 11 seconds.

The 2025 race went back to seven stages. Vollering, now with FDJ-Suez, won at Lagunas de Neila, the climb of the Vuelta a Burgos Féminas, and took the red jersey there. She won the last stage too, with an attack 800 meters from the top of the Alto de Cotobello in Asturias. Raced in cold and rain with 2,724 meters of climbing, it was the hardest stage the race had held up to then. Two former teammates, Marlen Reusser and Anna van der Breggen, finished second and third on the stage and in the race.

Paula Blasi takes the red jersey on the Angliru

The 2026 race ended with the first women’s stage on the Alto de l’Angliru: 12.4 kilometers at 9.7 percent, with ramps of 23 percent. The stage from Pola de Laviana had 3,266 meters of climbing over 132.9 kilometers. Van der Breggen started the day in the red jersey, 18 seconds ahead of Paula Blasi, a 23-year-old from Catalonia riding for UAE Team ADQ. Blasi’s teammate Mavi García thinned the group on the climb before the Angliru.

Marion Bunel attacked 4.5 kilometers from the top, Blasi used the move to go clear on the steepest part of the climb, and Van der Breggen began to lose ground. Petra Stiasny caught Blasi with two kilometers left and won the stage. Blasi finished 36 seconds ahead of Van der Breggen and took the race, with Van der Breggen second and Bunel third. She is the first Spanish rider to win La Vuelta Femenina.

This race belongs to climbers who can handle repeated vertical stress without the recovery time of a three-week Grand Tour. Held in early May when form is still sharpening, the Vuelta Femenina asks riders to peak early and sustain that effort across a week of Spanish terrain that rarely stays flat for long. It has become one of the Women's WorldTour's clearest climbing tests, where the strongest GC rider can impose herself quickly once the route turns uphill.