The cobbled bergs of Flanders
15 on the map · 2 more worldwide ·
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Nothing here is long. The Paterberg is three hundred and seventy metres and the Koppenberg is the same again. You could ride either in under two minutes, and you will remember both for years.
What makes them famous is underfoot: squared granite blocks laid a century ago, greasy in the rain, with the crown of the road pitched away from you and a hedge close on either side. A ten per cent ramp on asphalt is a gear change. The same ramp on wet sett, with two hundred people deciding at once who gets the good line, is why people fly to Belgium in April.
Several of the climbs the guidebooks still call bergs have quietly been resurfaced. These are the ones that kept their stones.
The roads
PaterbergThe last climb of the Ronde since 2012, 360 metres at up to 20% taken minutes after the Oude Kwaremont, and in every edition since 1986, a run only the Kware…
KoppenbergThe Ronde's most notorious cobbles: 600 sunken metres at up to 22%, where in 1976 even Eddy Merckx walked.
Muur van GeraardsbergenFor a quarter century the place the Ronde was decided: penultimate climb from 1988 to 2011, ramps touching 20% on the way to the chapel on the Oudenberg, whe…
MolenbergFor years the first pivot point of the Ronde, with 39 appearances since 1983: a road so narrow that Peter Van Petegem reckoned missing the first ten onto the…
KattebergIn the Ronde since Karel Van Wijnendaele's 1956 redesign, and its opener from 2020 to 2022: the first cobbles of the day for both the men's and the women's r…
TaaienbergThe Boonenberg: Tom Boonen made the decisive move here in four of his five E3 wins and attacked it so often the name stuck, and since 2023 a bronze cast of h…
EikenbergIn the Tour of Flanders 48 times since 1956, and a protected monument since 1995, the heritage listing calling it one of the last surviving examples of this …
Oude KwaremontThe spine of the modern Ronde: the longest cobbled climb in Flanders, ridden three times since the 2012 redesign, the final passage working as the crux of th…
SteenbeekdriesA fixture of the Ronde's finale since 2002, the first climb after the Koppenberg, entered on the Mariaborrestraat's flat cobbles about 39 km from Oudenaarde.
StationsbergThe 1860s station road the classics ride in both directions: E3 climbs it, the Ronde descends it off the Steenbeekdries as the tail of the 2.4 km Mariaborres…
On the map
KemmelbergKemmelberg is the highest point in West Flanders at 154 metres, and its cobbled climb through the woods above Kemmel village has become the showpiece of Gent…
KoppenbergThis 600-metre cobbled climb averages 11.6 percent and hits 22 percent near the top, rising 64 metres through a narrow, grass-banked corridor.
Onze-Lieve-Vrouw van KerselarekapelThis brutalist concrete chapel crowning the Edelareberg near Oudenaarde marks a pilgrimage site dating to 1452, when a healing Marian statue was hung on a ch…
OudebergThe Oudenberg is a witness hill in the Flemish Ardennes, its western slope cut into a deep valley by the Dender river while the eastern side falls away more …
PaterbergThis 360-metre cobbled climb averages 13 percent, with pitches over 20 near the top, making it the shortest and steepest of the Tour of Flanders' bergs.
Not yet on the map
Verified members outside our covered regions — each joins the map when its region does.
- Kemmelberg West Flanders rather than the Flemish Ardennes, and the berg of Gent–Wevelgem rather than the Ronde: a short, brutal cobbled wall to a wooded summit, with a cobbled descent so feared it has been removed from the race route more than once.
- Bosberg The old finale's second half: for two decades the Ronde was decided between the Muur and the Bosberg, a shorter and shallower cobbled rise a few kilometres further on.