Saturday May 16th 2026 I ran the low-key Andorra Marathon in Andorra. Find below my full race coverage from this event and a few tourist impressions from the capital city Andorra la Vella.
Andorra la Vella
At 1,023 metres above sea level, Andorra la Vella is the highest capital city in Europe — a small town of some 22,000 people wedged into a narrow valley where two mountain rivers meet, with the Pyrenees rising steeply on every side. The whole country holds barely 90,000 inhabitants and sits squeezed between two very large neighbours, France and Spain; both countries’ cycling Grand Tours pass through here from time to time, and the road in from Barcelona takes about three hours by bus. There is no airport and no railway. You arrive the slow way, climbing.
Andorra is also a curiosity constitutionally: a co-principality, ruled jointly since 1278 by the President of France and the Bishop of Urgell in Spain. That history is very visible in the capital. In the old quarter, Barri Antic, the narrow stone lanes lead to the Església de Sant Esteve, a Romanesque church from the 11th–12th century, and to the statue of Justí Guitart i Vilardebó, Bishop of Urgell and Episcopal Co-Prince from 1920 until his death in 1940. A few minutes away, on Plaça de la Rotonda, stands Salvador Dalí’s “La Noblesse du Temps” — the famous melting, bent clock in bronze, time made organic and unreliable. Catalan is the official language; the shops are duty-free and the main street is mostly perfume, ski gear and watches.
For the runner, the capital is compact and green. Not a big city, not a dramatic one, but a genuinely strange and beautiful place to close out a chase for 100 marathon countries.
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Andorra Marathon 2026
This was a low-key marathon with a small group at start very early. The marathon was run as loops in and around Parc Central, the park along the Valira river five minutes’ walk from the hotel, crossing the Skeleton Bridge on every round. Cold, windy and grey for the first hours, then sunshine — and above the rooftops, ridges that look remarkably like the Norwegian mountains. I finished my marathon country no. 100 under the Marathon Globetrotters and my fellow runner Toshinori Watanabe of Japan also his no. 100 under the Country Club, big congratulations, Toshi.
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See or relive the Andorra Marathon 2026 below:
