TRANSGRANCANARIA: THE RACE THAT CROSSES AN ENTIRE ISLAND
There is a moment, somewhere around the 20th hour of the Transgrancanaria, when the sun comes up over Gran Canaria and the runners still moving through the mountains realize something. They started on a beach in the dark. They have climbed through volcanic desert, pine forest, and cloud. They have crossed the geographic heart of an island that sits closer to the Sahara than to Madrid. And they still have a long way to go.
That moment, more than any finish line photo or race result, is what the Transgrancanaria is really about.
Gran Canaria is not a large island. You can drive across it in about an hour. But the terrain packed into those miles is almost absurdly varied: arid southern dunes, ancient pine ridgelines, mist-wrapped summits, dramatic volcanic calderas, crashing Atlantic coastline. People who have spent time there call it a continent in miniature, and they are not wrong.
In 2003, a small group of trail runners had a simple and audacious idea: what if you crossed the whole island in a single push? What emerged from that experiment was the Transgrancanaria, Spain's first ultramarathon, one of Europe's most beloved trail races, and today a marquee event on the World Trail Majors calendar. This is its story.
65 Runners and a Guess
The first edition of the Transgrancanaria took place in October 2003 and it was, by modern standards, a backyard experiment. Sixty-five runners showed up. The organizers from Arista, the race's founding body, were genuinely unsure how long it would take people to finish. They had contingency plans in place in case runners needed to spend the night on the mountain.
The course markings were basic. The concept of an ultramarathon was almost completely foreign in Spain at the time. Sergio Espinosa and Elena Marrero crossed the finish line as the inaugural champions, their names now sitting at the top of a roll call that would eventually include some of the greatest trail runners the sport has ever seen.
What those early organizers had figured out, maybe instinctively, was that the island itself was the draw. Gran Canaria did not need an elaborate race course. It just needed someone willing to point runners at it and say go. The terrain did the rest. Word got out. People started coming back.
The Race Finds Its Footing
Through the mid-2000s the Transgrancanaria grew steadily, mostly within Spain. It built a reputation as one of the country's most demanding mountain races, the kind of event that serious trail runners had on their list. But it was still largely unknown outside Spanish borders.
That changed in 2008, when Marco Olmo showed up.
Olmo was already a legend. The Italian had won the UTMB twice, including once at age 58, and his name carried enormous weight in the ultra world. When he crossed the Transgrancanaria finish line as champion, the international trail community took notice. If Olmo was racing in Gran Canaria, there was something worth paying attention to.
The podiums in the years that followed told the story. Sébastien Chaigneau, the French ultra star, won back to back in 2012 and 2013. Ryan Sandes, then one of the best trail runners on earth, won in 2014. Lizzy Hawker came, the Swiss-British runner who had won the UTMB five times. So did Fernanda Maciel, Nuria Picas, and Caroline Chaverot, who arrived in 2016 at what might have been the peak of her career, holding the Ultra-Trail World Tour title and multiple Skyrunning world championships simultaneously.
The race was also growing in other ways. Shorter distances were added alongside the flagship Classic. An Advanced race, a Marathon, a Starter. The event week became a full festival, drawing thousands of runners at every level from dozens of countries. The experiment that started with 65 people had become something much bigger.
Pau Capell Owns the Mountain
At some point between 2017 and 2020, Pau Capell stopped being a promising Catalan runner and became the Transgrancanaria.
He arrived at the 2017 edition as an emerging talent and ran from the front like he owned the place. His victory that year was commanding enough to make people wonder if anyone was going to stop him. Nobody did. He won in 2018. He won in 2019, this time in 12:42:40, a course record that would hold for six years. He won in 2020 in the most unusual way possible.
That 2020 finish is worth telling properly. Capell and Pablo Villa had been trading blows for 12 hours and more than 128 kilometers. Neither could shake the other. Somewhere in the final kilometers, they made a decision that said everything about what ultrarunning can be at its best. They crossed the finish line together, side by side, co-champions. Capell later said it would have felt wrong any other way.
Four straight wins. By the time his run was over, Capell had become the measuring stick for every men's champion that followed. When an injury kept him out in 2021 and Aurélien Dunand-Pallaz won in his absence, people still talked about it in terms of whether Capell would have won.
He raced with a quality that went beyond statistics. He knew that island. He ran it with a precision that looked almost like it came easy, which anyone who has spent time on those trails will tell you is one of the harder tricks in trail running.
The Course Itself
The race is difficult to fully describe to someone who has never run it. You really do have to experience the terrain to understand what the Transgrancanaria is asking of people.
The Classic stretches roughly 125 to 126 kilometers, depending on the edition, from Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in the north to Maspalomas on the southern coast. Runners start on Las Canteras Beach at midnight, which means the first several hours happen in the dark, navigating through the city and up into the volcanic interior with nothing but headlamps and course markings to go on.
By around kilometer 33, near the village of Tunte, the climbing gets serious. The course works its way up toward Roque Nublo, an 80-meter basalt monolith that rises from the central plateau at 1,813 meters above sea level. On a clear day you can see all the way to Tenerife from up there. On most race days, the weather is doing something interesting, which is part of the point.
Cruz de Tejeda sits at the geographic heart of the island, surrounded by the kind of volcanic landscape that reminds you this whole place was pushed up from the ocean floor by forces that did not particularly care about being picturesque. Then comes Tamadaba Natural Park, where ancient Canary pine forests close over the trail and the rock underfoot becomes genuinely technical. This is where races unravel. Runners who have been pushing pace for eight or ten hours suddenly find themselves picking their way through slick stone in low visibility, and the legs that felt fine an hour ago start to make their feelings known.
The finish is a long, relentless descent to Maspalomas. After 20-plus hours on the trail and somewhere near 7,000 meters of elevation gain, the final drop to sea level feels like a punishment specifically designed for people who thought they were almost done.
There is a 30-hour cutoff. The temperature can swing from freezing overnight to 25 degrees Celsius in the afternoon. The people who finish are not just fast. They are prepared for everything.
Courtney Dauwalter Rewrites the Record Books
If Pau Capell defined the men's race, Courtney Dauwalter showed up to the women's race in 2023 and did something the sport had not quite seen before at this event.
She demolished the course record, finishing in 14:40:39. Not improved it. Demolished it. The time still stands today as the fastest women's finish in the race's history. She came back in 2024 and won again, this time in 15:14:54, making her a two-time champion and cementing what most people in the sport already believed: she is the benchmark for women's ultra running right now, full stop.
The women's race had been excellent before Dauwalter arrived. Lizzy Hawker won twice. Nuria Picas won twice. Azara García won twice across non-consecutive years. Magdalena Laczak took back-to-back titles in 2018 and 2019. Caroline Chaverot's 2016 win came when she was arguably the best in the world. The Transgrancanaria has always attracted the best women in the sport. Dauwalter just reset what best looks like.
2025: A New Era Begins
The 2025 edition arrived with a question nobody could quite answer heading in: was anyone going to run close to Capell's record, let alone break it?
Caleb Olson answered that question in the most emphatic way possible. The American was relatively new to the sport at the top level, known mostly for an impressive Western States debut, and he showed up in Gran Canaria and ran a race that made experienced observers do a double take. He was controlled and precise and simply did not slow down when every previous front runner in the race's history eventually had to.
His final time of 12:17:25 beat Capell's six-year-old record by more than 25 minutes. That is not a marginal improvement. That is a statement about where the sport is right now.
Jonathan Albon pushed him the whole way and finished just eight minutes back. Josh Wade was third, also under 13 hours. For a race this long and this hard, having three men finish that close together at that level of performance was genuinely remarkable.
On the women's side, Henriette Albon of Norway was running her first ever race beyond 100 kilometers. She did not run it like someone uncertain of herself. She tracked Claudia Tremps through the early miles, took over in the second half, and finished in 15:02:50, more than an hour ahead of second place. First 100k-plus race. It is that kind of sport.
More Than a Race
Twenty-plus years after 65 people tried to cross an island on foot, the Transgrancanaria has become something the founders probably could not have imagined standing at that first start line.
According to World Trail Majors, the event now reaches over 1.5 million viewers through live broadcasts and streaming. It sits alongside events like the Hong Kong 100, Black Canyon Ultras, Mt. FUJI 100, MIUT, and South Downs Way 100 as part of the World Trail Majors circuit, one of the most respected collections of trail races in the world. Elite runners treat a win here as genuine currency. Amateurs book trips a year in advance.
But the thing that holds all of it together, from 2003 to now, is still the island. Gran Canaria has not changed. The barrancos are still there. The pine forests are still there. Roque Nublo is still standing at 1,813 meters, waiting for runners in the dark. The terrain still demands the same thing from everyone who attempts it: complete respect, and a willingness to suffer for a long time without knowing exactly how it is going to end.
The 65 runners who showed up in 2003 and the thousands who show up today are united by the same essential challenge: can you cross the island on foot?
The 2026 Edition
Race week is already underway. The Vertical Kilometer opened things on March 4, and the Classic goes off Friday, March 6 at 11:59 PM. The 2026 course is listed at 125 kilometers on the official race page, with 6,764 meters of climbing and a 30-hour cutoff. Notably, the route returns through Roque Nublo this year after environmental restrictions kept it off course in 2025.
Caleb Olson's 12:17:25 and Courtney Dauwalter's 14:40:39 are the numbers everyone is chasing. Whether they fall, whether they hold, whether someone completely new writes their name into this race's history, it will happen out there in the dark on a volcanic island in the Atlantic, the way it always has.
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