The Vuelta joins the Telefónica Centenary with the celebration of a final stage that will decide the general classification and that will take place between Distrito Telefónica and Madrid’s Gran Vía, an artery that will host the finish line in front of the historic Telefónica Building.
A 22-kilometre individual time trial will take place on 8 September 2024, the 21st stage of this edition of the Spanish round, which will run through the streets of eight of the 21 districts of the capital.
Who will succeed the American Sepp Kuss as the winner of the prestigious cycling round will be decided in this “Telefónica Stage”, which will be the culmination of a competition that will have started three weeks earlier in Lisbon.
Specifically, this 79th edition of the Spanish round will be held between 17 August and the aforementioned 8 September 2024, the day that will host the final stage between the Telefónica District and the centre of Madrid.
The presentation of this final and definitive day of the third grand tour of the 2024 season took place on 1 July at the Madrid City Hall in the presence of the Chairman of Telefónica, José María Álvarez-Pallete; the Mayor of the Spanish capital, José Luis Martínez-Almeida; and the General Director of La Vuelta, Javier Guillén.
Telefónica’s Centenary: from Gran Vía to Telefónica District
The last stage of La Vuelta 2024 will take the opposite route to that of the company, which has moved from the iconic Gran Vía building to the Telefónica District complex.
The company was founded in 1924 and in the 1920s, specifically in 1929, the Gran Vía 28 building opened its doors.
A part of Madrid’s architecture and urban panorama, at 90 metres high it was the tallest building in Europe when it was inaugurated and for 25 years the tallest in the Spanish capital, an architectural jewel that brought about a revolutionary change: for the first time in Spain a metal structure was used and a wrought iron internal structure was used for the first time.
Several decades later, exactly in the 2000s, Telefónica moved its corporate headquarters to Distrito C, a 168,000 m2 site comprising a group of 15 buildings with glass façades and large green areas that was later renamed Distrito Telefónica.
Inaugurated in 2008, at the time it was the largest covered solar park in Europe and one of the largest in the world: 16,000 photovoltaic solar panels that generate a tenth of the complex’s annual consumption.
