Four days out from one of the European trail circuit's most distinctive races, the 73-kilometre Transvulcania ultramarathon on La Palma is settling into final preparation, with a women's field built around 2025 runner-up Ekaterina Mityaeva and France's 2025 Diagonale des Fous champion Blandine L'Hirondel. The race rolls out of the Faro de Fuencaliente lighthouse at 06:00 on Saturday, 9 May, and traces the volcanic spine of the island northward, climbing 4,350 metres and dropping 4,405 metres before the celebrated finishing descent into Tazacorte. With the marathon and half-marathon distances both sold out earlier in the year, Saturday's ultra is again the headline act of a six-race festival that draws thousands of trail runners to the most northwestern of the Canary Islands.
Mityaeva, who races as a neutral athlete, is the top returning finisher from 2025. She crossed the line in 8:36 last spring, eighteen minutes behind eventual champion Maite Maiora, and arrives this week with a season already shaped by long days in the sierras. L'Hirondel's 2025 season ended with the Diagonale des Fous victory on Reunion Island and a fourth place at the CCC, both results that translate well to a course of Transvulcania's length and vertical profile. Behind that pair, the women's start list runs deep with skyrunning specialists drawn to a route that punishes patience as much as it punishes ambition: most of the field will be on course for nine hours or longer, much of it above 1,500 metres of elevation.
The men's race is harder to call. Course history favours runners who can hold a fast cadence on the long, runnable ridge that links the Roque de los Muchachos with the Pico de la Cruz, and the start list this year leans heavily on athletes with strong vertical kilometre credentials but less recent experience at this distance. Last year's title went to Sweden's Petter Engdahl in 7:11, a time that would have been competitive in the early Salomon-era editions; expect any winning time inside that mark to be the product of perfect weather, because La Palma's exposed central ridges punish overheating as cruelly as they punish anyone who has miscalculated their water carry on the final descent into Tazacorte.
Conditions are likely to be the great unknown for the field. The most recent forecasts available on Tuesday suggested a mostly cloud-free Saturday morning along the southern lighthouse coast, with the cloud line lifting around mid-morning to expose the ridge to direct sun. Temperatures at sea level are expected to top out near 22 degrees, but on the ridge the wind will be stronger and the contrast more brutal, particularly for athletes pushing hard for top-ten cash. Race organisers reopened the bib lottery briefly in March after a small number of cancellations, and the final start list contains roughly 1,400 ultra entrants drawn from more than forty countries, the broadest international representation in the event's nineteen-year history.
Transvulcania is the third stop of the 2026 Spartan Trail World Championships circuit and the first edition since the federation streamlined its scoring to weight major-distance events over short-format ones, which means a strong result in Tazacorte now carries more circuit value than at any time since the original Skyrunning era. For runners and crews already on the island, the next 96 hours will be spent rotating through the same volcanic ridges they will race on Saturday, dialling in fuelling on the long climbs above El Pilar and reminding themselves that Transvulcania is, ultimately, a race won and lost on the descent. The unique 17-kilometre drop from the Roque de los Muchachos to the Atlantic remains the section that decides the podium more often than any climb on the route.