Spanish Equivalent of OS Maps.

I am planning a trip with a few friends next march and want to put together some routes in advance. Base will be family appartment on the costa blanca.

Can anyone point me in the direction of some good OS style maps of the area.

Thanks
Nick.

Get in touch with these guys they will have or have access to the widest selection of maps.
Secondly, DO NOT trust Spanish maps, they lie.

Have a look around here or Casa del Mapa, Casa del Mapa will has every type of map for Spain, but I don’t know if they’ll do international orders. You should be able to get the maps you want through tienda verde.
Military maps are considered the best.

high quality and free :
http://centrodedescargas.cnig.es/CentroDescargas/cambiarMenu.do?destino=catalogo

I use them on the gps but I´m sure the could be printed out with the right program.

I think you might struggle with the Costa Blanca area, the only ones I’ve found are Military maps and even Stanfords only stock a limited range. It’s no consolation but Cataluna’s ICC mapping is very good and totally available on line but too far North for you.

Are you after paper based or GPS/phone based ?

if the latter checkout using http://opencyclemap.org/
and as one resource for routes checkout http://www.gpsies.com/home.do#12_38.07593331549372_-0.9437942504882812_p

I wrote this up on how to get a large area of mapping on to your GPS enabled device. http://owtbutwork.blogspot.com/2011/07/creating-storing-maps-on-your-phone.html

Forgot to say, the best site for getting previously tried routes in Spain is wikiloc, I have downloaded many routes onto my Garmin and found them to be as advertised in terms of difficulty and quality. You may even be able to get some topo base mapping from misrutas.net which is transferrable onto a Garmin Oregon or Dakota via Google Earth.
And not forgetting the MTB Centres dotted around the area
This one’s near Alicante

Thanks for the links – the Alicante Centre is very close to where we will be.

My parents live about 20miles up the coast from Benidorm (about 1hr north from Alicante). We took bikes last September. The first day I spent walking/driving around trying to buy the equiv. to our OS 1:25K maps for the area. I gave up. The only thing I had was some useless tourist road/sightseeing map. We found a few cycling shops, one being MTB specific and excellent, none had local maps tho and none had any sort of printed route guidebooks. I’d probably suggest trying to sort out routes and maps beforehand as best you can. If you can find a local MTB specific shop, then you’re in with a fighting chance, but chances are they will only scribble some routes on the back of a fag packet for you (turn up with some map(s)and they might scribble routes on the maps for you) .

The other thing to be aware of is that when you see a trail or something that looks rideable, ride it, it’s unlikely that anyone is going to prevent you. Over ten years of riding around the mountains of Madrid and I wasn’t challenged once.

You might find something in these, just a bit further north, but worth a flick thru to see if there’s anything#
http://www.singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/mountainbiking-javeacosta-bravaalicante

http://www.singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/has-anyone-rentedriden-a-bike-in-javea

Re the Comminidad De Valencia mountainbike centres, don’t expect a trail centre a la Glentress, we rode at the one called Els Ports 3 weeks ago and it is purely waymarked natural trails and quite difficult ones as well. They have maps available from the centre or village where the trails coincide but getting them can be hit and miss if you plan to ride around the middle of the day as everything shuts.

I live & ride a bit further nth of this area. The maps are more for walking & I haven’t seen any bike specific ones, people just do their research & try the tracks out.

I am happy to provide more details, if time is short you can waste lots of time looking. I just do a few routes I’ve found myself over the years.

Good luck