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Tim Moore completes his epic (and ill-advised) trilogy of cycling's Grand Tours.

Julian Berrendero's victory in the 1941 Vuelta a Espana was an extraordinary exercise in sporting redemption: the Spanish cyclist had just spent 18 months in Franco's concentration camps, punishment for expressing Republican sympathies during the civil war. Seventy-nine years later, perennially over-ambitious cyclo-adventurer Tim Moore developed a fascination with Berrendero's story, and having borrowed an old road bike with the great man's name plastered all over it, set off to retrace the 4,409-km route of his 1941 triumph - in the midst of a global pandemic.

What follows is a tale of brutal heat and lonely roads, of glory, humiliation and then a bit more humiliation. Along the way, Tim recounts the civil war's still-vivid tragedies and finds the gregarious but impressively responsible locals torn between welcoming their nation's only foreign visitor and bundling him and his filthy bike into a vat of antiviral gel.